Education.

Just the term itself – for those of us not in dire poverty, being sanctioned, bombed or in climate ravaged areas who had the privilege of at least having the choice to attend a school – will likely in many conjure up stale atmospheres. Static rooms, procedures and old smelly textbooks written by big corporations in far away offices. Students and teachers alike following rules, following the “program” setout by who knows who and where.  Discipline at the expense of inquiry and imagination. Boredom at the expense of enlightenment, problem-solving and exciting cooperative work. Reinforcement of doctrine at the expense of creativity and agency. 

One suspects this may have been the experience of many of us, likely most of us, as young people in schools and even in many cases, universities.

Of course none of this is uniform. At the same time, nearly all of us will have had some educator or educators who at some moment in our youth, or as adults, left their mark on us. They inspired us in some way, whatever they did in some way helped to guide us to see implications that there were more depths to be discovered, more plateaus to be reached, more perspectives to be gained, more insights garnered into existing thought and paradigms. 

While it may be controversial, it can be reasonably argued that despite these ongoing, profound deficits in education in institutions across the spectrum, particularly schools, indeed massive regression on some levels in those same schools in Europe and North America in recent years, there nevertheless has been some degree of progress over the last half century or more. This may be understandably difficult to see in the face of the unprecedented crises facing humanity in 2024, yet it is evident. While much of it amounted to lip-service – many of us will recall the term “critical thinking” popping up all over in coursework, but mostly without substance – nonetheless allusions to and even modest applications of forms of education centered on students’ inquiry and critique has notably increased over this period. Prior to this last half century one would have had a much harder time finding examples of a problem-solving, critique based education being applied. Its uptick has been observable in the language of individual educators as well as in curricula at all levels of schools and certainly at the university level.

All this said, can it be reasonably denied that institutional progress in education has been to this point woefully, and painfully, inadequate, to put it mildly?   If so, what opportunities and challenges does this present to the public at large and movements specifically at the current moment?

It may first be worth it to ask ourselves where this emphasis on critical thinking grew out of. Like nearly all social progress, it didn’t emanate from laws or political leaders. It didn’t emanate even from managers and coordinators in the institutions of education. It certainly didn’t emanate from adherence to doctrine or rules or othodoxical sense of accomplishment. A fair-minded assessment reveals it largely was a product of the thrust and gains of movements themselves, particularly beginning in the 1960s. Social, economic, political and educational struggles on the part of mostly poor and working class movements around day to day as well as historical injustices which brought forth in that period a new realization of the fundamental aims of education and what it could mean to be educated and educate at the same time. 

In poorer countries devastated by colonialism, engineered coups, fascism and severe economic exploitation on the part of the global north with plenty of local colluding upper classes, the struggles of these movements was then and has often been one of life and death. In more privileged countries, this characterization likewise applies, to a degree, to non-white populations, and was born out of the overall unwillingness of young people to accept social and cultural milieus and injustices that led to nascent movements previously non-existent in scale and in many cases, just plain non-existent. Movements for peace, “third-world” solidarity, women’s liberation, civil rights, environmental sanity, LBGTQ rights and all the ensuing movements of the last half century jolted society to have lasting, profound impact across the spectrum, not in the least on a bedrock area of any society – the forms its education takes both inside and outside of institutions. 

What’s being described here, as is well known in many popular movements, came to be known in formalized intellectual and academic terms as critical pedagogy. While it certainly calls for continual, creative and intellectual investigation and certainly has been inscribed in some university departments as academic – a good thing – can it be justly characterized as academic in its most fundamental sense? Or even intellectual in the institutional sense? Perhaps we could ask ourselves what lies at the heart of this approach. It seems to be a name – and a decent one at that – for a way of engaging above all with others for the purposes of stimulating inquiry and fostering a sense that everything is open to discussion and change. In short, for cultivating a sense of individual and collective agency. For continually suggesting that there are new horizons, that things are always unfinished. The approach itself suggests that its roots go back to the dawn of humanity and is endemic to all of us. We all recognize this in our interactions, one would dare to say, instinctually. Any person who is interested in engaging in open dialogue in order not to get over their views but to listen, understand, question, exchange, enlighten, be englightened and especially gain a sense of possibility and agency for all sides is engaging this approach. 

Gut reactions, impulse will tell us reflexively that not engaging with a similar approach is unproductive and adverse to enlightenment and progress for all participants of the dialogue.  

Almost necessarily this approach requires a radical – radical first in the purely definitional sense – questioning of doctrine, orthodoxy and paradigms, not solely for the purpose of critique but for the purposes of enlargening the possibilities of critical thinking and ultimately a sense of agency, engagement and commitment. 

While passing knowledge in itself is not the foundation of this approach, the questioning in essence should lead to new forms of knowledge deriving from the interactions in terms of how to more meaningfully dialogue. But it should also lead us, through our interrogation of each others’ attitudes and understanding of reality, to a reflection on doctrine and our relationship to it. If this doesn’t occur, how can we not only identify propaganda and doctrine – including our own – but understand how power, systems of oppression and hierarchies rely on these to legitimate and perpetuate themselves? Furthermore, how will we then be able not only to hold power to account but to question its very legitimacy and authority in the most radical sense? How could we then imagine new systems where power takes on a radically different, democratic and participatory meaning?  

With what we’re dealing with at the moment in terms of unprecedented crises, already understood to varying degrees by all, how can we not be undertaking projects to imagine these different presents and futures? How can we not be putting at the center of our critique, dialogue and organizing what living in an actual democracy might really mean, what our economic system – state-capitalism – ultimately means for those notions of democracy and any possibility of sustaining life on this planet, let alone prospering. What it would mean to have an actual healthcare system which is popularly managed and owned, equitable, able to come up with cures for cancer and other maladies, able to effectively react to or even prevent pandemics. To dismantle bureaucracies in favor of self-management and equitable decision making and balanced job complexes in workplaces and communities? To not have students go into lifelong debt for education? To not have our governments decidedly contributing to massacre and genocide around the globe, as in Palestine, not engaging in colossal annual offensive military expenditures at the expense of social needs and critically fomenting and participating in perpetuating other wars around the world at the expense of negotiation, such as in Ukraine? To have policies that reverse our current course to the brink of utter catastrophe for the species in the climate calamity and the threat of nuclear annihilation? To not having governmental policies that criminalize dissent around these issues?

To bring forth visions and strategies for going beyond all these, the marked – but scarcely considered – raised consciousness in societies owed to movement building has to be continually raised and expanded in many ways and over many arenas. The good news is this expansion of consciousness is ongoing, through movements, but isn’t by any stretch linear and assured. Nor is it any way sufficient, despite the gains. It depends on what we do now and what we do next. And how many of us are participating and in what ways. To that end, we should consider how important it may be to draw connections between life experiences – of those we’re in dialogue with and our own – as well as social, political, economic and cultural questions of power. The major deficit in this regard in schools as well as in media mirrors the lack of inherent connections drawn in those same arenas among the problems in various academic disciplines and why the separation of those same problems and disciplines benefits power systems. 

If dialogue based on participants’ social experience, attitudes, reflections and concerns is not something akin to our educational approach and interchange with others, then what are we actually engaged in? It may at this point in time seem silly to some to point out this approach’s antithesis – which by the way already illustrates our own instincts as human beings and the crucial effect movements have had on the influence of critical pedagogy in recent decades – but this antithesis should be seen as worthy, indeed critical, to discussion and organizing around these questions today. That is, the “banking” model of education, famously re-examined by Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This conception, perhaps first critiqued seriously in the Englightenment period and which we all know too well today from our own experiences, has unfortunately dominated for the most part in schooling over the centuries right up to present, with predictable effects on culture and peoples’ sense of critical intervention in society. The filling up of the student with knowledge without consideration of the student’s reflections and of doctrine itself. The student as an empty vessel. Remember that stale and deadening classroom environment? How the media speaks “to” us and what topics they choose to cover and how?  Knowledge in itself is crucial, it goes without saying, however we should consider how knowledge is developed and how it is shared. How infantilizing and arrogant would it be to seek to simply fill up the other with knowledge and without considering their concerns and interests? What happens to all participants’ sense of self, of each other, of the collective, of our own sense of agency if this is the dominant educational approach? What happens to our confidence? How unproductive, indeed how dicey, may it turn out to be in terms of our abilities to face the existential crises we’re facing today?

So, is dialogue, discussion on “banking” education’s staying power silly and irrelevant today? Have schools and other cultural apparatuses left this form of education behind? Crucially, what educational forms in movements are most common and ascendant, and on which are we placing most value and to what ends?  

For even if we do believe we’re engaging in genuine dialogue focused on reciprocal experience, reflection and our relationship to power, if it is mainly for the ends of coming up with better messaging or a better descriptive analysis of society’s questions, then what may ultimately happen to our objectives in terms of sowing stronger roots in broader society and winning change? We may rightly end up being seen as posturing at the expense of working through programs, strategies and visions for the purposes of stacking gains and expanding. It may be hard to imagine how we keep a footing and make those gains in broader society, especially among the working populations – as those of us in that class can attest to – as well as those most vulnerable, if the thrust of our organizing is predominately for analysis, even if the analysis may happen to be broad-based, non-doctrinal and non sectarian. 

By the same token, engaging in descriptive analysis at the expense of problem-solving dialogue can tend to essentially separate our own experiences and reflections on vital questions from those very questions themselves. We end up looking at each other, our movements and society from the outside in instead of from the inside out as active participants. Our sense of agency and meaningful, lasting participation is limited. 

After all, why should we be mirroring power structures such as colossal marketing corporations, mass media polling and governments themselves who are in fact terribly interested in public opinions and attitudes? But to what ends derives their interest? Ends of power, domination and restricting of agency and imagination by reinforcing doctrine and closing the individual and collective mind off to possibility, to inquiry. 

Again, not that the analysis in and of itself isn’t often necessary, it’s how we collectively engage in it and to what extent it takes up our time and energy. Paying better attention to the ways in which we draw out, consider and interact with each others’ reflections, attitudes and experiences can be decisive, since this will go a long way in determining the value of the knowledge we gain from these ongoing interchanges and what we do with it. Consequently, this may turn out to be critical in determining the possibilities of coming up together with strategies, visions and fostering commitment.

So we would like to advance new conceptions of a better world. We see, with various levels of meaning, that it is in our interest to lay bare and dismantle forms of power, doctrine and domination. But how can we better break through illusion, including our own illusions of acting? How can we begin to rid ourselves of the worst aspects of ambiguity, fear and mistrust? In what measure do we see the fragility of power? To what extent is there at play a fear of freedom in tension with an innate desire for freedom? How do we go beyond prevailing defensive positions in our movements? How can a sense of active participation in continual renewal be cultivated? 

We might consider how these questions and many others are interrelated. We might also consider, through dialogue on similar questions, how critical reflection is action in itself. That said, have we made the changes we need in society? Won the victories? Made the inroads? Advanced the visions? Considered in what ways our modes of decision-making and organizational structures affect the strength of our educational institutions and especially the impact of our movements? 

If we lived in a society of universal equity, health, peace and prosperity for all, wouldn’t questions around the forms our education take remain likewise central? One thinks that even in that future they would continue to crucially underpin all the previous questions noted here. In our current society of many pervasive crises – including ones we have no choice but to prevail over and soon, that of environmental catastrophe and eradicating nuclear weapons –  it seems hard to exaggerate the key underlying importance of considering what educational processes and interactions we are putting to use in order to make advancements on all these crises.  These same forms of education will have major influence in determining to what extent we view these crises as opportunities and to what degree we recognize our ability to overcome them. 

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