Some Terms in Critical
Pedagogy
Code:
Standard meaning: something that
is used to keep some people in the know and some people out.
The critical theorists use it to refer to all the behaviors
and values and pieces of knowledge that divide the classes.
It is designed to keep the upper-classes in power and others
from taking away their power and privilege. An example is
classical music. One has to learn to appreciate classical
music. If you don’t learn it, you won’t understand
it. If you don’t understand it, you won’t like it.
If you don’t understand and like it, you identify yourself
as not being one of the privileged class.
The code is offered to everyone
who goes to public school, but it is offered in such a way
as to almost guarantee that the outsiders don’t adopt
it. For instance, if family, friends and teachers don’t
reinforce the values of the code, we won’t adopt it.
We also won’t learn enough about the basics to move on.
(Thus, when you hear working class people calling classical
music “long-hair, sissy music,” you are not getting
reinforcement to enjoy it; you are getting reinforcement to
avoid it.) For instance, by not calling on girls as often
as boys, we serve to keep girls from going on to higher education,
etc. By teaching “White” history and literature,
we serve to turn non-whites off to it.
Devaluing:
By teaching White European history and literature, we say,
in effect, that they are superior to other forms. This devalues
other ways of apprehending these things. It also causes holders
of other perspectives to devalue themselves. If White Male
English, for instance, is the language of institutions --
the “correct” language -- and if articulating your
ideas some other way gets red marks and/or low grades on your
papers, you learn to devalue your own language. If you devalue
the language that is native to you and your loved ones, you
come to devalue yourself and them. (See the Ebonics debate
and the English-only debate.)
Hegemony:
As the critical theorists use
the term, it means to have dominance over someone by illegitimate
means. It is associated with the kind of control one country
holds over a colonized country. It is imposing oneself on
another. The critical theorists speak of White Male Eurocentric
dominance, or hegemony. The ideas and values that dominate
our society are White Male European ideas and values.
Critical pedagogy:
Teaching that has as its primary
purpose the awakening of the individual to how his/her world
works to keep him/her subordinated to the dominant culture.
Of course, it has its roots in Marxist philosophy. Proponents
believe that the current educational system serves not to
liberate individuals so they can go beyond their beginnings,
but actually works to insure that they won’t.
Cultural reproduction:
The tendency of a culture to stack the cards in such a way
that it guarantees its own continuation. The school system
is involved in cultural reproduction to the extent that it
reproduces the values of the society -- good and bad.
Hidden Curriculum:
This is what schools really teach besides -- or instead of
-- what they say they are teaching.
1. For instance, schools teach that non-whites are inferior
to whites, that girls are inferior to boys, that the rich
deserve better education than the poor, that Christian is
superior to non-christian.
Race: minority
students are punished more severely than whites for the
same offenses. Low SES students are steered into “blue
collar” courses.
Gender: girls
are steered away from Math and Science, for instance, and
are called on less often than boys are. Too, boys are permitted
to speak out without permission and without repercussions
more often than girls.
Wealth: The nature
of school financing permits wealthy districts to offer their
students better facilities, smaller classes, more books
and materials, etc.
Religion: white,
christian holidays shape the school calendar.
2. Schools teach that obedience to authority
is more valuable than creative thinking. (Look at bell-driven
classes, requiring permission to speak, lunch period at 10:30
a. m., etc.)
3. Schools teach that putting in one’s time (i.e., studenting,
seat-time) is more important than real learning.
Empowerment:
Putting power in the right hands
-- so it can’t be misused. Generally, this refers to enabling
people to take power over their own lives and educations. Enabling
is the key word: one doesn’t “give” power to
another; rather one “enables” another to take the
power. In education, it has to do with creating a setting in
which students can learn (a) that they are oppressed and (b)
that they can do something about that oppression. (In this view,
teachers are “problem-poses,” not wells of infinite
knowledge.)
Cultural Capital:
Certain ideas, abilities, and objects are valued more highly
than others in any given culture. Those who have the most of
them are most advantaged in that culture. These include such
things as using the prestige language, knowing how to act at
particular social events, etc. These are socially inherited.
Symbolic violence:
When a person or group of people does or believes something
that is against his/her or its own best interest and thereby
serves the ends of the forces of oppression, the dominant culture
is engaging in “symbolic violence.” Thus, when a minority
group member accepts the dominant culture’s view of its
inferiority, the dominant group is using symbolic violence.
When a student from a subordinate culture refuses to obey school
rules and is as a result forced to leave school, that student
is refusing to accept the hegemony of the dominant culture and
is denied “the code,” which is what the dominant culture
desires. That student is being victimized by “symbolic
violence.” The dominant culture didn’t actively do
anything to him or her; it just stacked the cards in such a
way that it was almost inevitable that the student would refuse
to submit and therefore do violence to him or her self.
Resistance:
The act of opposing cultural reproduction is all its forms.
Unguided, this has the effect, often times, of serving cultural
reproduction.
Generally, it refers to not buying into the dominant culture’s
hegemony. It may involve physical activities, or it may involve
thoughts, or both. In the physical realm, resistance may range
the spectrum between, e. g., a workers’ strike and passive
resistance.
Discourse:
At its basic level, this refers to the “rules for conversation.”
As the Critical Pedagogues use it, it refers both to the language
and the thought processes that underlie the language of a cultural
group. The Critical Pedagogues often seem to perceive a discourse
as a closed, culture-bound way of apprehending reality that
is not accessible to outsiders and which, therefore, serves
as a barrier between the dominant and subordinate groups.
Critical Pedagogue:
A “pedagogue” is a teacher. Thus, a “critical
pedagogue” is one who sees the purpose of education to
be to help students develop the kind of critical consciousness
needed to improve their social/political world, and one who
teaches in accordance with that principle.
Dialectic:
The interaction of premise and conclusion in such a way that
the conclusion leads to a modification of the premise such that
it becomes almost a new premise, which leads to a new conclusion,
which leads to a new premise, etc.
.
Conscientization:
Paolo Freire’s notion that the first step toward liberating
oneself is to understand that one is in a subordinate position
relative to the dominant culture. As Freire says (Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, 1994, p.17, n.1), it is “learning
to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions,
and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality.”
(“If you would be free, first you must learn that you are
a slave.”)
The underlying premise of critical pedagogy is that the main
effect of the current educational system is to keep things the
way they have always been -- rich and poor, master and slave,
leader and follower. In other words, despite what we say or
think, there is virtually no social mobility. We can climb only
so far, then we hit the glass ceiling. Tokenism, more than anything
else, accounts for those, like Henry Cisneros and Clarence Thomas,
who make it way up the ladder: a few are permitted through the
glass ceiling so the rest of us will think it is really possible.
An important side effect, also intentional, is that we will
continue to believe that (a) it is possible, and (b) we didn’t
make it due to our own deficiencies.
The reasoning is this:
People who work hard make it.
I didn’t make it.
Therefore, I must not have worked hard enough. (It’s my
fault I didn’t, not the system’s fault.)
The critical theorists see the whole system of western culture
as working together to maintain the status quo -- which happens
to be western capitalism. For instance, Judeo-christian religions
teach us not to be greedy (“It’s easier for a camel
to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man
to enter Heaven") and to be obedient to our masters (“render
unto Caesar”). We are taught at mommie’s knee that
hard work is a good thing, etc. The schools teach us that the
main, perhaps only, purpose of education is to make us more
efficient at our jobs all the while they are teaching us the
kinds of job skills that ensure that our jobs are low-level
(unless we happen to go to Phillips Exeter, or somewhere like
that). Schools are funded unequally, further insuring this replication.
Another important tenet of critical theory is that we
are willing slaves. Teacher education students generally
will argue against this portrayal of the nature of schools because
they agree with the values of the master class. They will say,
for instance, that they plan to teach because money isn’t
that important to them. Whose interest is best
served by their believing that -- the interests of their students
or the interests of the master class (that is, those who run
the system and write the paychecks)?
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