Excerpt: Theory and Resistance in Education—Towards a Pedagogy for the Opposition

First published in 1983, Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedagogy of the Oppressed has remained enormously influential on educational discourse for nearly four decades. Its author, the educator and scholar Henry Giroux, was largely responsible for introducing the then-nascent ideas and practices of radical pedagogy to the United States. At the time, a conservative turn in American educational policy had steered schools towards skill-based learning, standardized testing, and preparation for the job market. Theory and Resistance in Education instead put forth a “vision of schools as democratic social spheres,” as the sociologist Stanley Aronowitz wrote in a preface for its second edition, published in 2001, amounting to a “rousing retort to those who would vocationalize education for all children.”

Drawing upon ideas and methodologies fomented by the Frankfurt School and Paulo Freire, Giroux asked how schools can resist the churn of capitalist reproduction, and instead cultivate citizens who can think critically and dismantle ideologies of oppression. This past December, Bloomsbury Press published the third edition of Theory of Resistance, and the book arrives amidst yet another period of peril for public education and critical discourse in the United States and beyond. As Giroux asks in a new preface to the book: “What is the role of educators in a time of tyranny?” In the excerpts below, the scholar commences his approach to a question that proves evergreen.

Since the established universe of discourse is that of an unfree world, dialectical thought is necessarily destructive, and whatever liberation it may bring is liberation in thought, in theory. However, the divorce of thought from action, of theory from practice, is itself part of an unfree world. No thought and no theory can undo it; but theory may help to prepare the ground for their possible reunion, and the ability of thought to develop a logic and language of contradiction is a prerequisite for this task.

—Herbert Marcuse, 19601

In this brief paragraph, Marcus manages to capture both the spirit and the challenge that presently confront radical pedagogy. Its spirit is rooted in an aversion to all forms of domination, and its challenge centers around the need to develop modes of critique fashioned in a theoretical discourse that mediates the possibility for social action and emancipatory transformation. Such a task will not be easy, particularly at the present historical juncture, informed as it is by a long tradition of ideological discourse and social practices that promote modes of historical, political, and conceptual illiteracy.

The following section attempts to develop a theoretical discourse that seriously engages the challenge implicit in Marcuse’s statement. It does so by positing an argument for a theory of radical pedagogy that takes as its first task the development of a new language and set of critical concepts. In this case, it calls for a discourse that acknowledges as a central concern the categories of history, sociology, and depth psychology. At the same time, it attempts to fashion these categories into a mode of analysis that grounds human agency and structure within a context that reveals how the dynamics of domination and contestation mediate the specific forms they take under concrete historical circumstances. In essence, this section attempts to rescue the critical potential of radical educational discourse while simultaneously enlarging the concept of the political to include those historical and socio-cultural institutions and practices that constitute the realm of everyday life. In more specific terms, this means developing analyses of schooling that draw upon a critical theory and discourse that interrelate modes of inquiry drawn from a variety of social science disciplines. On the other hand, this section attempts to construct a theoretical foundation to extend the notion of critique into relations and dimensions of schooling and social activity often ignored by both traditional and radical educators.

The questions underlying the modes of analysis used in this section are important ones: how do we make education meaningful by making it critical, and how do we make it critical so as to make it emancipatory. The starting point for pursuing these questions is historical in nature and suggests a brief commentary on how the issue has been treated in traditional and radical analyses.

Educational traditionalists generally ignore the issue. In both conservative and liberal versions of schooling, theory has been firmly entrenched in the logic of technocratic rationality and has been anchored in a discourse that finds its quintessential expression in the attempt to find universal principles of education that are rooted in the ethos of instrumentalism or self-serving individualism. At the same time, these accounts have suppressed questions of the relations among power, knowledge, and ideology. In effect, traditional educational theory has ignored not only the latent principles that shape the deep grammar of the existing social order, but also those principles that underlie the development and nature of its own view of the world. Schools, in these perspectives, are seen merely as instructional sites. That they are also cultural and political sites is ignored, as is the notion that they represent arenas of contestation and struggle among differentially empowered cultural and economic groups.

Needless to say, various modes of radical educational theory and practice have emerged in the last few decades to challenge the traditionalist paradigm. We have witnessed structuralist accounts that focus on macro-issues concerning those social, economic, and political determinants of schooling that have aimed at capital accumulation and the reproduction of the labor force. Characteristic of these investigations are accounts of schools as part of an “ideological state apparatus,” the ultimate function of which is to constitute the ideological conditions for the maintenance and reproduction of capitalist relations of production, i.e., the creation of a labor force that will passively comply with the dictates of capital and its institutions. We have also seen the development of historical and sociological accounts of the way in which the structure of the workplace is replicated through daily routines and practices that shape classroom social relations, that is, the hidden curriculum of schooling. More recently, we have accounts of schooling that illuminate how cultural resources are selected, organized, and distributed in schools so as to secure existing power relations.

I shall argue in this section that all of these positions have failed to provide an adequate basis for developing a radical theory of pedagogy. The traditionalists have failed because they have refused to make problematic the relations among schools, the larger society, and issues of power, domination, and liberation. There is no room in their discourse for the fundamental categories of praxis: categories such as subjectivity, mediation, class, struggle, and emancipation. While radical educators do make the relations among schools, power, and society an object of critical analysis, they do so at the theoretical expense of falling into either a one-sided idealism or an equally one-sided structuralism. In other words, there are, on the one hand, radical educators who collapse human agency and struggle into a celebration of human will, cultural experience, or the construction of “happy” classroom social relations. On the other hand, there are radical views of pedagogy that cling to notions of structure and domination. Such views not only argue that history is made behind the backs of human beings, but also imply that within such a context of domination human agency virtually disappears. The notion that human beings produce history—including its constraints—is subsumed in a discourse that often portrays schools as prisons, factories, and administrative machines functioning smoothly to produce the interests of domination and inequality. The result has often been modes of analysis that collapse into an arid functionalism or equally disabling pessimism.

Annie B. Johnston, School Seat, c. 1938. Watercolor, colored pencil, and graphite on paper, 9 1/8 x 11 inches. National Gallery of Art Index of American Design.

It is at this juncture that the work of the Frankfurt School becomes important. Within the theoretical legacy of critical theorists such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse there is a sustained attempt to develop a theory and mode of critique that aims at both revealing and breaking with the existing structures of domination. Crucial to this perspective are an analysis and a call for the integration of the processes of emancipation and the struggle for self-emancipation. History, psychology, and social theory interface in an attempt to rescue the human subject from the logic of capitalist administration. Political education (not necessarily schooling) takes on a new dimension within the context of this work. As Marcuse points out:

It is precisely the preparatory character of [education] which gives it its historical significance: to develop, in the exploited, the consciousness (and the unconscious) which would loosen the hold of enslaving needs over their existence—the needs which perpetuate their dependence on the system of exploitation. Without this rupture, which can only be the result of political education in action, even the most elemental, the most immediate force of rebellion may be defeated, or become the mass basis of counterrevolution [Marcuse 1969].2

Central to the work of the Frankfurt School is an examination of the degree to which the logic of domination has been extended into the sphere of everyday life, the public sphere, and the mode of production itself. What critical theory provides for educational theorists is a mode of critique and a language of opposition that extends the concept of the political not only into mundane social relations but into the very sensibilities and needs that form the personality and psyche. The achievements of the critical theorists are their refusal to abandon the dialectic of agency and structure (i.e., the open- endedness of history) and their development of theoretical perspectives that treat seriously the claim that history can be changed, that the potential for radical transformation exists.

It is against this theoretical landscape that I shall examine the various analyses of the hidden curriculum and reproductive theories of schooling that have emerged in the last few decades in the United States and Europe.

Whereas the Frankfurt School provides a discourse that illuminates the social, political, and cultural totality in which schools develop, the various analyses of schooling provide a referent point from which to assess both the strengths and limitations of such work. Moreover, it is precisely in the interface of the work of the Frankfurt School and the various theories of schooling under analyses in this section that the theoretical elements for a radical theory of pedagogy begin to appear. It is to this task that I will now turn.

[…]

This chapter attempts to contribute to the search for a theoretical foundation upon which to develop a critical theory of education. Within the parameters of this task, the notion of critical theory has a two-fold meaning. First, critical theory refers to the legacy of theoretical work developed by certain members of what can be loosely described as “the Frankfurt School.” What this suggests is that critical theory was never a fully articulated philosophy shared unproblematically by all members of the Frankfurt School. But it must be stressed that while one cannot point to a single universally shared critical theory, one can point to the common attempt to assess the newly emerging forms of capitalism along with the changing forms of domination that accompanied them. Similarly, there was an attempt on the part of all the members of the Frankfurt School to rethink and radically reconstruct the meaning of human emancipation, a project that differed considerably from the theoretical baggage of orthodox Marxism. Specifically, I argue in this chapter for the importance of original critical theory and the insights it provides for developing a critical foundation for a theory of radical pedagogy. In doing so, I focus on the work of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. This seems to be an important concern, especially since so much of the work on the Frankfurt School being used by educators focuses almost exclusively on the work of Jurgen Habermas.

Second, the concept of critical theory refers to the nature of self-conscious critique and to the need to develop a discourse of social transformation and emancipation that does not cling dogmatically to its own doctrinal assumptions. In other words, critical theory refers to both a “school of thought” and a process of critique. It points to a body of thought that is, in my view, invaluable for educational theorists; it also exemplifies a body of work that both demonstrates and simultaneously calls for the necessity of ongoing critique, one in which the claims of any theory must be confronted with the distinction between the world it examines and portrays, and the world as it actually exists.

The Frankfurt School took as one of its central values a commitment to penetrate the world of objective appearances and to expose the underlying social relationships they often conceal. In other words, penetrating such appearances meant exposing through critical analysis social relationships that took on the status of things or objects. For instance, by examining notions such as money, consumption, distribution, and production, it becomes clear that none of these represents an objective thing or fact, but rather all are historically contingent contexts mediated by relationships of domination and subordination. In adopting such a perspective, the Frankfurt School not only broke with forms of rationality that wedded science and technology into new forms of domination, it also rejected all forms of rationality that subordinated human consciousness and action to the imperatives of universal laws. Whether it be the legacy of Victorian European positivist intellectual thought or the theoretical edifice developed by Engels, Kautsky, Stalin, and other heirs of Marxism, the Frankfurt School argued against the suppression of “subjectivity, consciousness, and culture in history” (Breines 1979–80). In so doing it articulated a notion of negativity or critique that opposed all theories that celebrated social harmony while leaving unproblematic the basic assumptions of the wider society. In more specific terms, the Frankfurt School stressed the importance of critical thinking by arguing that it is a constitutive feature of the struggle for self-emancipation and social change. Moreover, its members argued that it was in the contradictions of society that one could begin to develop forms of social inquiry that analyzed the distinction between what is and what should be. Finally, it strongly supported the assumption that the basis for thought and action should be grounded, as Marcuse argued just before his death, “in compassion, {and} in our sense of the sufferings of others” (Habermas 1980).

This is an extract from Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedagogy for the Opposition by Henry A. Giroux published by Bloomsbury December 2024.