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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, including maintaining the class system and ensuring
that few people move out of the class they were born into. 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.
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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-posers,” 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, being of the dominant
gender and ethnicity, 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.”)
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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 Condaleeza Rice 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:
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People
who work hard make it.
I
didn't make it.
Therefore,
I must not have worked hard enough.
(It's
my fault, not the system's fault.)
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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 Philips 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, or those who work for the low wages)? |
