Ultimately, the aim of a critical theory of education is to identify sources of social domination, oppression, and injustice and to promote the kind of individual and collective reflective practices necessary for human emancipation (Kemmis et al., 1983: 9–10; Giroux, 1983: 28–33). However, the sources of even obvious economic and material disadvantage and inequality are not exclusively economic. Rather, shared theoretical perspective, sometimes in this context called ‘ideology’, plays a part.
Critical theory identifies the ubiquity (or better, hegemony) of a certain belief in science and its methods as an important factor in the maintenance and reproduction of injustice. By accepting, as valid, narrow positivist accounts of science, scientific practice is construed as manipulative, technicist, and concerned with the control of nature. Moreover, by an associated partitioning of issues into those concerning means and those concerning ends, the positivist’s sharp fact/value distinction ensures that scientific reasoning, concerned only with means, becomes detached from reflection on the values embedded in ends.
We thus have the picture of much scientific management, research, and pedagogy presenting as a value-free exercise in the manipulation of variables, to produce well-theorised means for achieving unscrutinised goals. The early work of Habermas provides a critical alternative to this picture. He claims that humans make knowledge claims with respect to three fundamental interests: ‘The approach of the empirical–analytic sciences incorporates a technical cognitive interest; that of the historical–hermeneutic sciences incorporates a practical one; and the approach of critically oriented sciences incorporates [an] emancipatory cognitive interest’ (Habermas, 1972: 308). Wilfred Carr (1983, 1989) is one philosopher of education to draw on this theory of knowledge to develop a critical educational science. Such a science would produce ‘educative self-knowledge’ that would reveal to practitioners their unquestioned assumptions and beliefs. It would employ ‘ethically-informed dialectical reasoning’ rather than the usual logically deductive reasoning. It would interpret education not as a natural phenomenon ‘but as a historically-located and culturally embedded social practice’ subject to ideological distortion and other constraints (Carr, 1989: 35).
Without going into the detail of this approach, notice that from the naturalist’s perspective it trades on a discredited theory of natural science. Thus, if positivism’s many claims about the nature of science are false, science and scientific reasoning may perhaps be better described by other theories – for example, postpositivist alternatives like naturalistic coherentism (which claims science can include values and human subjectivity). The possibility of alternatives signals a methodological hazard in trying to devise an epistemically defensible taxonomy for all knowledge. Either the taxonomy draws on the best knowledge under analysis, in which case that knowledge dominates the scene much as positivistically construed science did in the original problematic, or the taxonomy does not, in which case a less warranted theory of knowledge is being used to discount more warranted knowledge – such as science. The alleged middle path of quasi-transcendental deduction, or immanent critique (or, in analytic terms, the logic of presupposition), is indeed a rocky road, as Habermas now admits. (Young, 1990, contains an excellent discussion of this point. See also Evers and Lakomski, 1991: 13.)
A second strand of critical thinking (found, for example, in the work of R.E. Young, 1988, 1989, 1990) builds on Habermas’s theory of communication, to provide important detail with regard to ethics and the social relations of education. Habermas’s theory is complex, but the basic idea involves an analysis of what is presupposed for successful communication to be possible.
Since teaching, or better teaching/learning, occurs through communication, its implicit normative constraints will be relevant to any characterisation of an appropriate pedagogy. Young (1988) uses these constraints to draw a distinction between education and indoctrination. Roughly speaking, educative communication requires the teacher’s speech acts to be rationally criticisable by learners. The conditions for such rationality are the social relations which most approximate the ideal speech presupposed in all communication.
These social relations reflect the assumptions that speech acts be comprehensible, that they have true propositional content, that the speaker aims for truthfulness (rather than deception), and that the acts be appropriate or right in the light of the hearer’s norms (see McCarthy, 1978: 288). There is thus a premiun on the norms of equality of opportunity for making a contribution, and an absence of internal (e.g. psychological, ideological) and external (e.g. domination) constraints. For Young (1988: 59) ‘critical pedagogy is the form interaction takes on when participants in a learning situation are mutually concerned with the development of each others’ capacities to join in making validity judgments’. From a methodological perspective, notice that once again some feature of the logic of presupposition is doing heavy work.
But if we waive the option of exploiting conceptual analytic links between descriptions of the phenomena of communication and posited presuppositions, any extensionally equivalent set of antecedents will permit the derivation of appropriately described communicative practice. Since there is an infinite number of such sets, we winnow the field according to the usual coherence criteria of simplicity, comprehensiveness and, say, explanatory unity.
Here the naturalist would urge coherence with the relevant natural science, for example the Shannon/Weaver mathematical theory of communication, which underwrites much of today’s vast developments in information technology (see Dretske, 1981). This theory is able to provide rigorous accounts of the transmission, coding, and decoding of information on much weaker assumptions than those required for speech act theory. Thus, it does not assume the truth of communications, but merely the presence of statistical regularity; so systematic falsehood can convey as much information as systematic truth.
One response is to say that the above conclusion disqualifies information theory from giving an adequate account of human communication. But now we have a felicitous shift to substantive theoretical debate rather than to reflections on meaning and appeals to the commonsense assumptions embedded in ordinary language. For example, the information processing properties of the central nervous system, and the patternings of natural speech and its contexts, become issues of legitimate focus.
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