Critical Theory and Pedagogy

Foreword

For more than half a century Douglas Kellner has helped shape the critical consciousness of academics, students, media critics, and activists. His writings have called for critical engagement with media, information, and technology, what he has termed “critical media literacy” (CML). He asserts the need to redesign public education to include CML with critical analysis and production, taught through dialogical Freirean pedagogy that engages students as co-constructors in the learning process. In the same way that Kellner himself once occupied John Dewey’s desk while a graduate student at Columbia University in New York in the 1960s, he has always believed in the Deweyian notion of the democratic potential of education and the responsibility of the education system to serve the people as centers for civic engagement and social justice, and not ideological indoctrination that perpetuates inequality, injustice, and oppression.

After earning his PhD at Columbia, Kellner spent several years studying in Europe with many of the academic giants of the time, from Ernest Bloch to Jacques Derrida. In 1969, he met Herbert Marcuse, a moment that changed his life, leading him to write numerous articles and books about Marcuse and upon his death, Kellner became the executor of Marcuse’s archives. In the early 1970s Kellner began teaching at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) where he created one of the longest running public access TV shows called Alternative Views. With his co-host, Frank Morrow, they interviewed many of the leading ←vii | viii→intellectuals and progressives who were ignored by the commercial media. The popularity of this community television show made Kellner a celebrity of the left, as he was often recognized, even on the streets of New York.

For more than half a century, Douglas Kellner has continued to write about the importance of political economy and remind us that as technology changes, the need to understand and question the means of production in media, and now digital media, remains of utmost importance. Kellner’s writings invite us to connect our understanding of current media and technology to a public pedagogy and civic engagement that at its core equals and underpins participatory democracy. Critical Media Literacy is social justice. It is pedagogy as lived out and experienced by many and not just by few. It is a necessity for understanding our past and a fundamental requirement to our democratic future. Critical Media Literacy and the reconstruction of Education are an important part of Douglas Kellner’s legacy, and this collection of essays stands as a reminder for us all—that our struggle is far ←viii | ix→from over and we have the tools at our disposal to name the word and the world that surrounds us.

Chapter One

Toward a Critical Theory of Education

It is surely not difficult to see that our time is a time of birth and transition to a new period. The spirit has broken with what was hitherto the world of its existence and imagination and is about to submerge all this in the past; it is at work giving itself a new form. To be sure, the spirit is never at rest but always engaged in ever progressing motion …. the spirit that educates itself matures slowly and quietly toward the new form, dissolving one particle of the edifice of its previous world after the other, …. This gradual crumbling … is interrupted by the break of day that, like lightning, all at once reveals the edifice of the new world. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, (1965 [1807])

As the second decade of the second millennium unfolds, against the backdrop of COVID-19, the human species is undergoing one of the most dramatic technological revolutions in history, one that is changing everything from the ways that people work to the ways that they communicate with each other and spend their leisure time. The technological revolution centers on a removal of time and space as the precedents for education and bears witness to online, blended, hybrid, virtual, AI, and even gamified synchronous and asynchronous options for teaching and learning no longer occupying the periphery of education, but instead now holding steady as normalized educational options. This Great Transformation poses tremendous challenges to educators to rethink their basic tenets, to deploy the emergent technologies in creative and productive ways, and to restructure education to ←1 | 2→respond constructively and progressively to the technological and social changes now encompassing the globe.¹

At the same time technological revolution is underway, important demographic and socio-political changes are taking place throughout the world. COVID-19 has left no corner of the world untouched and has altered all forms of daily living on a global scale. The global explosion of COVID-19 provides a reminder of how earlier conceptualizations and critiques of globalization may not have gone far enough to note the true interconnectedness of all peoples on this globe. Early colonization by imperial European nations brought pandemic and death to large segments of the colonized world, as Europeans imported deadly diseases throughout the colonized world. Ironically, this time the pandemic came from a former colonized part of the globe, so that the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as revenge of the colonized world, just as the pandemic can be seen as the revenge of nature for slaughtering animals in monstrous conditions of mass production and mechanized killing to feed hungry humans.²

In this context, as Gennaro noted in 2010, our definition of globalization needs to be expanded to account for “the movement, interaction, sharing, co-option, and even imposition of economic goods and services, cultures, ideas, ideologies, people’s lives and lived experiences, food, plants, animals, labor, medicine, disease, learning, play, practices, and knowledge(s) across time and space(s) previously thought to be impossible or at the very least improbable.”³ Furthermore, the Black Lives Matter and other liberation movements brought into perspective the very real challenge of providing equitable access to people from diverse races, classes, and backgrounds to the tools and competencies to succeed and participate in an ever more complex and changing digital world despite institutions that have institutionalized and normalized their very oppression.⁴

In this chapter, I propose developing a critical theory of education for democratizing and reconstructing education to meet the challenges of a global and technological society. This involves articulating a metatheory for the philosophy of education and providing a historical genealogy and grounding of key themes of a democratic reconstruction of education which indicates what traditional aspects of education should be overcome and what alternative pedagogies and principles should reconstruct education in the present age. Education has always involved colonization of children, youth, the underclasses, immigrants, and members of the society at large into the values, behavior, labor skills, competitiveness, and submission to authority to serve the needs of white, patriarchal capitalism and to transmit the ideologies that Marx and Engels saw as the “ruling ideas of the ruling class” (1978), and which bell hooks (1994) reminds us also includes the ruling ideas of ←2 | 3→white men and colonization of the subjects of education into White, Patriarchal Capitalism.