College Quarterly - Spring 2006 Page 1of 54 College Quarterly Spring 2006 - Volume 9 Number 2 Home Critical Thinking vs. Critical Consciousness Contents by Howard A. Doughty Abstract This article explores four kinds of critical thinking. The first is found in Socratic dialogues, which employ critical thinking mainly to reveal logical fallacies in common opinions, thus cleansing superior minds of error and leaving philosophers free to contemplate universal verities. The second is critical interpretation (hermeneutics) which began as the attempt to reveal the hidden meanings of pagan oracles and the sacred texts of the Abrahamic religions, and evolved through sociology into contemporary literary criticism and semiotics. Third are the analytical techniques that comprise a set of instructions about “how to think” in accordance with the scientific method and technological rationality. Finally, there is radical criticism that interrogates every kind of inquiry and knowledge (including science) to reveal the human interests that they serve. Of the distinctively modern kinds of critical thinking, analytical techniques serve as the unofficial ideology of contemporary education. In the alternative, radical criticism – commonly but not inevitably associated with the Marxist tradition – questions that ideology, and produces a critical consciousness that dissents from the dominant pedagogy and politics of college life. All four – Socratic dialogues, hermeneutics, critical analysis and critical consciousness – are important precursors to, or examples of, critical thinking. “Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.” - Sir Karl Popper “Every real advance in the arts and sciences means a crisis.”- C. L. R. James The concept of critical thinking has its roots in ancient Greece, where intellectuals generally believed that immutable “truths” existed, and that it was the task of great minds to discover them. For Plato (427-347 BC) and his followers, truths were universal, eternal, remote from ordinary life and accessible only to philosophers. Falsehoods, on the other hand, were commonplace and could, when unmanaged, cause untold mischief, especially when generally believed by citizens in that worst of all political systems, democracy. It was not that Plato wanted ordinary people to learn the truth; like Nathan R. Jessep, the Jack Nicholson character in the 1992 film, “A Few Good Men” (SONY Pictures, 2001), he can be imagined sneering at the multitude and barking: “The truth? You can’t handle the truth!” More menacingly, Plato anticipated the Hitler-Goebbel’s tactic of the Big Lie, which he grandly called the Noble Lie (Bloom, 1968, p. 94 - The Republic, Book 3: 415a-b), and had Socrates (470-399 BC) present it as a useful method to persuade people to accept inequality and elite domination in what he construed to be their own and everyone else’s best interest. This describes totalitarianism. On the basis of a metallic metaphor that allocated people, on the basis of their innate qualities, to the categories of gold, silver, bronze and iron, Plato provided a template for dividing the inherently superior to whom decision-making authority was http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/2006-vol09-num02-spring/doughty.html 10/8/2008 College Quarterly - Spring 2006 Page 2of 54 granted, from the inherently inferior from whom uncritical obedience was demanded. A subtle shift from metallurgy to biology is all that is required to adapt Plato’s dream to the 20th-century pseudo-science of eugenics that was embraced by Fabian socialists like George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), liberal American jurists like Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935) and, of course, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). To protect this hierarchical and militarized social order, Plato imagined a state ruled by Philosopher-Kings and administered by Guardians, who might not fully understand the truth, but could be trusted to enforce it. Until such a dictatorship of the professoriat could be created, however, Plato had to make do with the wit and wisdom of Socrates, who spent his time bantering with a local audience including Philosophers-Fools. Socrates lost about as many arguments as Perry Mason, the fictional defence lawyer, lost criminal cases. He could be expected to undo the errors of his colleagues by the use of brisk “Socratic” cross-examination. By these lights, critical thinking meant the exposure of foolishness by someone wise enough to engage winningly in discussion with interlocutors gifted in such dazzling ripostes as “Yes, Socrates” and “Of course, Socrates.” If we are suspicious that Socrates’ debates were rigged, or at least slanted in the reports of his ardent admirer Plato, we cannot deny that there was a formal method in play. Plato’s belief in first principles, axioms and eternal and ethereal “forms” seldom boldly intruded into Socratic dialogues themselves. Socrates’ boast that he was the wisest of men because he claimed to know nothing (other than how to make his friends look silly) points to the fact that, in logic, his method has much in common with the criterion of falsification put forward by Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994). He happily displayed the capacity to reveal others’ mistakes while cheerfully finessing the need to prove any belief of his own. Thus, he avoided “the pitfalls that Aristotle encountered after he formulated the theory of deduction and faced the problem of first principles.” That both “Socrates and Popper are left in a certain condition of ignorance because the weeding process of falsification never leaves us with a final and absolute truth” was no problem for Plato (Ross, 2006). He employed the honourable hoplite Socrates to act as his sword against his adversaries, while leaving the matter of first principles to his faith that such things are non-inferentially justified and are self-evidently matters of pure mind. In contrast, for the admirers of Hermes (decked out in his winged sandals and cap, the multitasking Olympian god of, among other things, commerce, cowherds, orators, poets, travellers, weights and measures, and the cunning of liars and thieves) truth was likewise remote; but, it could nonetheless be discerned not by intense contemplation but by examining divine communications – whether prophesies of pagan soothsayers or sacred monotheistic texts – and by using spiritual knowledge to determine what the deity (or deities) had in mind when they spoke through the oracles at Delphi, from burning bushes, or in divinely inspired books like the Pentateuch or the Qur’an. For these hermeneuticists, critical thinking involved using their wits to ferret out hidden meanings in otherwise murky talk and text. Among both Socratics and hermeneuticists, a form of critical thinking was required to approach truths that were more than human inventions, conventions and legends. Critical thinking was a means of engaging with the supernatural either negatively by revealing and contradicting human error or positively by elevating human receptivity to divine messages, whether directly http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/2006-vol09-num02-spring/doughty.html 10/8/2008 College Quarterly - Spring 2006 Page 3of 54 or indirectly delivered. In both cases, critical thinking was indispensable if humanity was to learn and understand what was beyond normal human powers of knowledge and comprehension. In both cases, critical thinking involved an emerging relationship with universal truth, religion and the gods. Post-Renaissance Europe brought revolutionary change in all areas of philosophical inquiry from aesthetics and ethics to ontology and epistemology, and in science and technology as well. Despite the refusal of traditional religion to stand meekly aside, and notwithstanding the current atavistic reconstructions and distortions of fundamentalisms in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and other theological systems, modernity has forced most serious thinkers to stage at least a strategic withdrawal from asserting transcendental truths. This trend has been evident especially among those with primarily secular and humanistic concerns, but also in a number of mainstream religious traditions which now accept the idea that the allegedly revealed word of God amounts primarily to tales heavy in moral meaning but light in factual accuracy. Accordingly, critical thinking has largely disengaged from the struggle to partake of divine wisdom. This does not mean, of course, that there is a contemporary consensus about what critical thinking is and how to go about practicing it. Just as in ancient times, modern thinkers are also divided about the nature and purpose of critical thought. To some, critical thinking refers to a set of analytical techniques consistent with the views of the Enlightenment and with the technological preoccupations of late capitalism (cf. Jameson, 1991; Mandel, 1975). In this variation, it amounts to set of instructions about “how to think” in accordance with scientific method, technological rationality and value-free inquiry. Its aim is expeditiously, economically and efficaciously to solve problems. It insists that pragmatic inquiry be undertaken free of bias, prejudice and, above all, ideology. Though ideology admits of many meanings, for simplicity’s sake it will be defined here as a set of more of less coherent beliefs which, taken together, construct a conceptual lens through which individuals perceive reality and with which they explain and justify that reality; it is not used in the traditional Marxist sense of “false consciousness” as contrasted, for example, with Marxism which orthodox Marxists conceive to be “scientific” and therefore exempt from the category of ideology (cf. Minar (1961; Plamenatz, 1970; Mullins, 1971; Lipset, 1972; Hawkes, 2003). This is not to say that any particular ideology is in some sense true or somehow better than any other; it merely refers to something equivalent to a mindset or a way of thinking that may or may not have veracity in some particular place or time. For those critical thinkers who use the word as a term of opprobrium, it denotes not merely false but dangerous thought including fanatical commitments to Nazism or Stalinism, which seek to create a perfect society and are none too concerned about the means to achieve their goals. In this sense, ideological beliefs are often tantamount to totalitarianism. For those who equate critical thinking with careful analysis, clarity in conceptualization, rigor in application and honesty in execution are essential to its use. One convenient definition of critical thinking is “the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it” (Paul and Elder, 2006). This is no merely academic affair. Our civilization is confronted with many problems – most of our own making – and solving them would seem to be of the highest importance. Because we are facing ostensible ecological, cultural, social, economic, political and spiritual crises that threaten our way of life and, perhaps, the survival of our species, any scheme that promises to improve our thinking deserves investigation and may have much to recommend it. If nothing http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/2006-vol09-num02-spring/doughty.html 10/8/2008 College Quarterly - Spring 2006 Page 4of 54 else, it certainly seems to be a better tactic than Stephen Hawking’s impractical and irresponsible but much publicized suggestion that we hedge our bets by admitting that we have made a mess on Earth and set our minds to exporting our pathologies along with ourselves to other less convivial sites such as the Moon and Mars (Sherriff, 2006, 14 June). Some, however, are sceptical of a sort of critical thinking that is described as the analysis of thought undertaken for the purpose of improving it. Such detractors claim that thought cannot be usefully discussed in a social vacuum. Genuine criticism, they say, involves interrogating all forms of inquiry and knowledge to disclose how they contribute either to the oppression or to the emancipation of humanity. Following James, in his perceptive study of the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1819-1891), we can imagine that our society is like the whaling ship, the Pequod, and that our cultural crisis mimics the “crisis of Ahab [and] is that of a civilization which has recognized that it is on the way to complete mastery of the arts and sciences of civilization” (James, 1985, p. 14). Indeed, it can be argued that the Promethean desire to master human and non-human nature lies at the root of our problems and sums up our pathology (Cf. Bateson, 1972; Brand, 1974; Grant, 1966). If criticism is not restricted to winkling out logical fallacies and goes on to address material conditions, we may come to appreciate that the main threats to our civilization – environmental degradation, cultural illiteracy, social inequality, economic inequity, state tyranny, corporate corruption, technological hegemony and personal alienation in all its forms – are at least partly the result of our impulse toward mastery. This impulse leads to the ancient Greek sin of “hubris,” for which the gods invariably exacted severe punishment. From this hypercritical perspective, the idea of critical thinking as problem solving may have less to recommend it than we might originally have supposed and could, in fact, be part of a much larger predicament. Our future may not be decided by those who have the analytical capacity to think more clearly about how to solve problems, but by those who possess the political and economic power to determine what counts as a problem and in whose interest the search for a solution will be undertaken. Adding ethanol to gasoline may produce a superior fuel, but that may not impress people starving for want of corn. From this perspective as well, it can be demonstrated that every exercise in critical thinking is knowingly or unknowingly infused with commitments to particular human interests and that those who cry the loudest that they are unbiased, unprejudiced and, above all, non-ideological are the ones that must bear the closest critical scrutiny. They may or may not be liars or hypocrites; but, if they are sincere, they are quite possibly delusional and that may be more distressing still. Scrutiny, of course, is not easy to impose. A first step, however, would be to remind ourselves and to teach our students that knowledge is “a product of social relationships wherein exercise of power is a major factor. In this way,” Spring tells us, “students would not only argue with the material but would also investigate why particular types of knowledge exist and not other types” (1993, p. 99). This article, then, is a meditation on Socratic dialogue, hermeneutics, contemporary critical thinking, and critical consciousness. It seeks to isolate, describe and interrogate these four concepts of critical thinking, so that we may better understand what we are doing when we employ its language and its logic in our classrooms. It begins with a brief account of how our classrooms http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/2006-vol09-num02-spring/doughty.html 10/8/2008 College Quarterly - Spring 2006 Page 5of 54 came into being. Mass Education, Democracy and Social Control In literate, but otherwise pre-modern Western societies – prior, let us say, to the development of universal, public educational systems – schools were almost exclusively reserved for the ruling class or for those few individuals of humbler origins who sought to join or to serve intimately the ruling class on the basis of some extraordinary intellectual acumen. Generally speaking, training in the classics dominated the curriculum of pupils who were destined for careers in the church, in the law and in statecraft. Elitist in the selection of students and in the development of subject matter, medieval, Renaissance and early modern universities disdained vernacular languages and mundane education. They resisted the teaching of the practical sciences. Knowledge of ancient Greek, Latin and the “trivium” of grammar, rhetoric and logic were essential. Likewise, the “quadrium” of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy (more accurately, perhaps, Ptolemaic cosmology) counted, whereas physical science, life science, mechanics and the yet to be imagined social sciences did not. Exceptions existed, of course. Rare polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and early empiricists like Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) won acclaim and have been set firmly in position in the secular museum of intellectual achievement. In England, the Royal Society indulged the diverse interests of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) in both alchemy and gravity and, a century later, Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) apocryphally urged that his one- way trip to the guillotine be briefly delayed so that he could complete a final experiment; but, even schools of medicine were somewhat disparaged (not least because of their reliance on grave robbers for research materials and classroom demonstrations). Most other useful sciences were either studiously avoided or actively suppressed in the better institutions. Even in the late- nineteenth century, English literature was mocked in the great Anglophone universities, while subjects from anthropology to zoology were studied chiefly by inspired amateurs, but dismissed by serious academics as mere hobbies aimed at satisfying that segment of the idle rich which chose to amuse itself by accumulating tales about “strange sects and curious cults” or by collecting beetles. Even I am old enough to remember my somewhat pedantic professor of medieval history deriding the discussion of anything that happened since the death of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) as mere “journalistic chattering about current events.” Since the creation of universal school systems, however, democracy of a sort has triumphed both by encouraging greater popular access to mass education and by moving applied arts and technological knowledge into the core pathways of the prevailing curriculum. Again, I am old enough to have studied Latin through four years of high school. No more. Instead, modern schools have concentrated on two publicly declared purposes. The first objective has been and remains the occupational training of workers in the skills needed to become productive employees, first in an industrial and now in a postindustrial economy. Once restricted to the education of clerics, lawyers and diplomats, postsecondary education is now open to people of both sexes who are intent on entering job categories that were once the exclusive domain of artisans, mechanics and clerks. This transformation was prompted mainly by industrialization which required that factory hands be able to read instructions and make simple calculations. It has http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/2006-vol09-num02-spring/doughty.html 10/8/2008 College Quarterly - Spring 2006 Page 6of 54 now been supplemented and accelerated by the “information society” which adds the necessity of “interfacing” with computer screens. In the initial phase, a measure of mental labour was integrated with traditional manual labour and had to be accommodated within the educational system. Hence, the “three Rs of reading, writing and ’rithmetic.” In the subsequent phase, that mental labour has come to be mediated through sophisticated electronic communications devices and untutored manual labourers are fast becoming obsolete in economically developed societies. The second objective was moral training, commonly provided by some ritual emphasis on the usable parts of the fourth and unspoken “R” which was religion. The importance of secular schooling in promoting moral values has frequently been understated. Instead, some of us labour under the mythology of an earlier, simpler and more innocent era of relative peace, harmony and security which has been disrupted by the materialism and moral decadence of modern life. This impression, useful as it may be to those seeking a return to purportedly traditional values, has been displaced by legal anthropologists and social historians who have amply demonstrated that, from the collapse of the remnants of feudalism to the imposition of capitalist work discipline, law enforcement was inconsistent, and violence of all sorts was endemic to society. In the transitional era, schools became important mechanisms in the struggle for order. In Britain, for example, from the time from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the passing of the Second Great Reform Act in 1867, structural changes in the political economy produced cultural alterations that transformed a society of suspicion, uncertainty and degraded brutality into the modern world of psychological repression and institutionally enforced social organization. This pattern was stimulated in large measure by urbanization and the desire of an emerging bourgeoisie to restrain “loose and disorderly people,” denizens of Hogarth’s etching, “Gin Lane” (1751) and members of “The Gangs of New York” (2002), who might otherwise gather together and threaten the lives and property of the prosperous. The actual disruption of feudal life (no pastoral idyll either) was repeated wherever and whenever agriculture gave way to commerce and industry, and resulted in various threats to social order including both criminal activities and occasional riots, protest movements and what sometimes amounted to protracted civil war (Hay et al., 1975; Hobsbawm, 1959, 1971; Hobsbawm and Rudé, 1975; Lower, 1973; Macfarlane, 1981; Rudé, 1973; Starr and Collier, 1989; Thompson, 1968, 1977, 1993). In time, and when conditions were right, school reform became inevitable. The utility of schools as instruments of social control is obvious in hindsight, but it was controversial in its time (mainly in the mid-nineteenth century). The “school promoters,” as Allison Prentice (2004) has famously called them, had fulsome opponents. For every Egerton Ryerson (1803-1882), the main advocate of compulsory education in Ontario, there was a John Strachan (1778-1867), cleric and educator, who feared what might befall if the lower orders were made literate but uninhibited in their reading habits. Moral and political chaos, he fretted, would surely follow. Eventually, of course, the battle for school reform was won and, to date, few workers, especially in North America, have taken to reading the compelling screeds of nihilists, anarcho-syndicalists, socialists and communists of various sorts as a prelude to transformative revolutionary praxis. In this, the so-called post-Marxist era, Wicca seems as likely to recruit proletarians as the doctrines of the First, Second, Third and Fourth International Workingmen’s Associations combined; instead, Wal-Mart provides as popular a program for economic http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/2006-vol09-num02-spring/doughty.html 10/8/2008 College Quarterly - Spring 2006 Page 7of 54 survival – cheap goods produced in foreign sweatshops – as most people can imagine. Moreover, neither in pioneering struggles when literacy workers from volunteer organizations such as Frontier College taught isolated miners and loggers nor in new industrial towns where Mechanics Institutes provided working class education to skilled and semi-skilled labourers did added learning stimulate adequate political ferment to pose the threat that the ruling elites had feared. Although self-help was a significant theme among working people who sought material improvement, intellectual stimulation and, on occasion, political knowledge and awareness in addition to the functional skills they needed, the fear of a robust class consciousness has only rarely been displayed and has been forcefully suppressed or cleverly co-opted when it has appeared. Instead, the ideological embourgoisement of the proletariat seems to have at least provisionally succeeded; moreover, on those occasions when workers did seem rebellious, the cause was seldom found in public school education. Although the field of adult education was once hotly contested (Welton, 2006), “the reality is” that “Reality” television, professional sports and other distractions have dulled the dream of a different social order, and blunted the “revolutionary consciousness” that was once considered a necessary prelude to serious social change. For the time being, even stagnant wages, rising living costs, employment insecurity and an increasingly obscene differential between rich and poor – domestically and globally – have not significantly altered the pattern of muted protest, but have instead driven alienated labour deeper into the self-regarding and self-obsessed idiocy of private experience where life is reduced to culturally barren, technologically mediated, politically apathetic and psychologically anxiety-ridden personal space. Education and Work under Capitalism To locate a kind of critical thinking that might inspire change, it is necessary to look elsewhere. In the first of his “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” Karl Marx (1818-1883) expressed the view that “positive, humanistic and naturalistic criticism begins with [Ludwig] Feuerbach [1804- 1872]” (Fromm, 1961, p. 91). It is equally fair to say that scientific and emancipatory criticism begins with Marx. Dissatisfied with previous materialisms (including Feuerbach’s), Marx sought a method that would permit scientific materialism to escape a static relationship with pure idealism by joining it to sensuous subjectivity thereby rescuing both class consciousness and political praxis from the sterile domain of abstract thought. Understanding the world philosophically was important but ultimately pointless in the absence of the will to change it. “The materialist doctrine concerning the change of circumstances and education,” Marx complained in his “Theses of Feuerbach” (1845), “forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated” (Easton and Gaudet, 1967, p. 401). His subsequent comments on alienation, written over a century-and-a-half ago remain pertinent, except insofar as they understate the technological innovations that have accelerated cultural, economic and political change. For example, electronic communications technology – both as mind-numbing entertainment and as an extension and an instrument of mental labour – has been added into the mix with extraordinary and often inhuman results. According to Marx (Fromm, p. 99), the structure of capitalism alienates workers from the products of their labour, from the process of labour and from themselves as labourers whose work is not free, spontaneous or even their own. As a result, “man (the worker) feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions – eating, drinking and procreating, or at most in his dwelling http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/2006-vol09-num02-spring/doughty.html 10/8/2008 College Quarterly - Spring 2006 Page 8of 54 and in personal adornment – while in his human functions he is reduced to an animal.” Indeed, human workers are less than animals in that they are increasingly deprived of even the erotics of physical work and engaged in routinized, reified simulations of work. They lose the sensations of their own bodies and become extensions of machines and of networks of machines. They are no longer living creatures but abstracted “human capital.” Aware of their new and reduced status, yet compelled to do their best to become appealing “resources” for employers, they are locked into a system, says David Noble, “in which the human parts of the industrial apparatus [are] fashioned to specification” (1977, p. 168). As a result, what Newson and Buchbinder once described as a “new stage of economic development [that] is hastening and intensifying the integration of [higher education] into the productive sector of Canadian society” has now placed “manpower planning” at the centre of academic decision making (1988, p. 79). The further consequences, as Michael Skolnik emphasized, are “deliberate efforts to relate enrollment numbers in various programs to anticipated labour market demands for workers with corresponding educational backgrounds” (1983, p. 84). This emphasis on vocational training may still have the power to shock and appall those scholars who remain most fully insulated from the realities of fiscal restraint and policy development as they sip sherry in the rarefied atmosphere of university faculty clubs, but such an agenda represents “business as usual” for the majority of colleges. Morality is something else. Fear of urban gang violence was once among the main motives for compulsory education in the 19th century. It has now returned as a focus for “law and order” politicians who are eager to “get tough on crime,” build privatized prisons, initiate “workfare” and impose restrictive immigration policies. This is, however, mainly a rhetorical gloss on underemployment, chiefly among the young. Real crime rates are declining, and rising levels of incarceration are mainly artificially induced by the criminalization of illicit drug use, a medical problem to the extent that it is any kind of problem at all. Besides, neither unfettered recreational drug use, the popularity of computer pornography (adequately covered under existing criminal law) nor other instances of moral degradation seem to have reduced the gross domestic product. In fact, although the methods for gathering data on such topics are problematic, it is widely believed that marijuana is the largest agricultural crop in British Columbia (Meissner, 2003, 27 April) and the fourth largest cash crop in the United States (MetaFilter, 2006, 17 February). As such, it is an important, if unrecognized, part of the world economy. In short, more rigid legal restraints on personal behaviour (including the criminalization of poverty in anti-panhandling laws) amount to little more than emotive rhetoric that builds on fear of youthful resentment (particularly when combined with racial, religious and other demographic factors) rather than authentic social distress, and is directed almost exclusively at the lowest links on the drug chain. Persistent persecution of the homeless, the abandoned and the socially marginalized – whether in school or recently withdrawn from the system – adds a malodorous cover to the already unacceptable levels of child poverty in some of the world’s most prosperous countries. Whatever unruly behaviour in the lower social orders might betoken for the human soul is perhaps an important topic, but it is not one that bothers the http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/2006-vol09-num02-spring/doughty.html 10/8/2008 College Quarterly - Spring 2006 Page 9of 54 ruling class excessively as long as rowdy young people can be kept in their “hoods,” drive-by shootings are mainly restricted to recognizable free fire zones, and the social costs of violence and addiction are borne principally by the poor, the dispossessed and the politically anomic – in short, the already marginalized and victimized. It would be churlish, of course, to insist that schools were simply designed for purposes of increasing profits and imposing social control on those who produced them. Few social institutions of any sort are unambiguously monolithic in ideology or practice. “Liberation theology,” for instance, is an enduring albeit a small and dwindling minority theme in the Catholic Church. Irshad Manji represents a minority opinion within Islam, but is certainly not the only liberal and openly lesbian critic of her faith. And, lest we forget, the great anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin was a prince. Never mind that princes in Tsarist Russia were almost as common as Colonels in Kentucky, he was definitely a scion of nobility and was attached to the imperial household. So, it should not astonish us that education has lived with a measure of internal tension between those (usually the majority) who would use it to indoctrinate and those (usually the minority) who sought to liberate their pupils. At least since Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), “progressive” education has been encouraged in the interest of fostering the healthy development of the whole person. The nobility of an agenda that would support holistic personal growth has regularly been articulated, though seldom seriously attempted on a large scale. Nonetheless, from Maria Montessori (1870-1952) to A. S. Neill (1883-1973), the fact that some pioneering initiatives were undertaken cannot be ignored, and support for the dissemination of a broad range of knowledge and the development of emotionally sound and socially responsible individuals cannot be gainsaid. Many progressive and sometimes courageous experiments have been begun in schools all the way from junior kindergarten to postgraduate studies. Nonetheless, such efforts (commonly denounced as “permissive” by those who endorsed getting rid of “frills,” going “back to the basics,” and measuring success through “standardized testing”) also resulted in a backlash including the stiff reassertion of narrow vocationalism in pedagogy and commensurate corporate domination in ideology (cf. O’Sullivan, 2000). In general, this reaction to reforms attempted in, for instance, the 1960s (Ontario, 1968) has tended to prevail. As Barlow and Robertson observed over a decade ago (1994), the media, myth factories such as the Fraser Institute and opportunistic right-wing politicians have successfully carried on an “assault” on Canadian schools that serves the interests of corporate profiteers and the religious right alike – all the while ensuring the success of what Linda McQuaig (1998) has famously called the “cult of impotence” among high school, college and university graduates (and drop- outs) alike. Sustaining this reaction has been a host of studies emphasizing the need for skills training in order to survive in an increasingly competitive global economy (Radwanski, 1987; U.S. National Commission, 1983) The concern with economic competitiveness and worries about how critical thinking about political economy have had some noteworthy consequences. Of special interest in Canada is the demise of Canadian Studies. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, partly in response to A. B. Hodgetts (1968) exposé of the sorry state of knowledge about Canada that was purveyed in schools, a ten-year enthusiasm for Canadian Studies erupted and then went bust, thanks mainly to managerial complaints about “ideology” once http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/2006-vol09-num02-spring/doughty.html 10/8/2008 College Quarterly - Spring 2006 Page 10of 54 again. Canadian “content” was fine (where necessary), but critical studies of Canadian society, and especially any that could be deemed “anti-American” were either eviscerated or obliterated. The rise and fall of Canadian Studies does not for a moment, however, reduce the need for Canadian Studies – more desperate now than ever. Plenty of help is available in defining what Canadian Studies should be. A good first step is Ken Osborne’s agenda for democratic citizenship (1988, pp. 53-75); little, however, is being done to promote such policies and practices at any level of education. Still, the dream endures of counter-acting what appears more and more likely – a new barbarism in an age wherein, as conservatives lament, we substitute synthetic understandings for facts and attitudes for moral principles (cf. Neatby, 1953, pp. 239-258). That such critics were dismayed by the “debased conception of man” that was put forward by progressives and materialists and saw no fault in capitalist social organization does not take away from their concern that education seemed eager only to help students “to satisfy their animal hungers.” A parallel to Marx’s thoughts about alienated labour is too stark to miss. A partial community of interest, then, is at least possible between those conservatives who criticize contemporary education for what it fails to do (educate) and those radicals who criticize it for what it does all too well (indoctrinate). While the progressive ethos is mainly in retreat, modern schools continue to have a hard time living up to even their narrow economic mandates. If we are no longer much interested in the humanities (everyone being familiar with the legion of successful PhD candidates in English or Sociology who currently drive taxicabs or serve transfats at fast food outlets), we are still worried about the supposed relationship between educational achievement and personal prosperity. Critics have been quick to point out that schools have not significantly improved individual social mobility but have, instead, obediently reproduced the existing social division of labour. The children of the plutocracy enjoy an intellectually rich (and often private) education. The children of the proletariat do what they can under the circumstances. None of this has gone unnoticed in the literature. For the past several decades, the place of colleges in maintaining social class divisions has been sociologically set and extensively discussed. Modest quasi-academic credentials are now awarded to those fated to occupy sub- professional, functionary and part-time positions in the work force. The pattern has been well documented for over thirty years (Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Gaskell, 1987; Karabel, 1972; Livingston, 2000; Luker, 1990). Complaints that secondary schools discriminate in their various “streaming” policies, that they treat socially unequal students unequally, and that they do not fulfill the promise of high rates of upward mobility should therefore not surprise, nor should the egregious performance of “inner city” schools that remain starved for cash and judged undesirable employers for many clean, callow, middle class teachers. Accordingly, while it may be true that a good education is normally a necessary condition for success, it is not sufficient and, despite much talk about the predominance of a competitive meritocracy, intergenerational economic mobility is more fiction than fact in contemporary capitalist societies. As Rossanda et al. (1970, p. 647) explained: “as a public institution for the masses, the modern educational system was born of the modern bourgeoisie and carries with it the imprint of the bourgeois state.” Nothing could be more obvious. The principal purpose of schools is to generate competent http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/2006-vol09-num02-spring/doughty.html 10/8/2008