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Title: Re-Visioning Education

Re-Visioning Education

Cultural Studies, Critical Media and Digital Literacies, and Democracy

by Douglas Kellner (Author)
©2024 Textbook VI, 178 Pages
Education
Series: Counterpoints, Volume 555

Summary

Douglas Kellner’s Re-Visioning Education: Cultural Studies, Critical Media and Digital Literacies, and Democracy provides a comprehensive account of his critical theory of education that combines his work in philosophy of education, cultural studies, and media and digital literacies aimed at a critical theory of education and radical pedagogy for the 21st Century. Kellner also engages the battle for Higher Education in the contemporary moment, taking on rightwing attacks on education, and defending progressive concepts of education and democracy advocated by John Dewey and his pragmatist cohort, Paulo Freire and his movement of critical pedagogy, and Herbert Marcuse who calls for a radical critique and transformation of education in the contemporary era. Clearly written and documented for teachers, students, and citizens Kellner provides discussion of key issues challenging education today and calls for transformation of education to provide more democratic, inclusive, equalitarian, and culturally relevant education for the future.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • book About the author(s)/editor(s)
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Table of Contents
  • Neoliberalism, Technology, and Radical Pedagogy for the Re-Construction of Education in the 21st Century
  • Multiple Critical Literacies and Radical Pedagogy in a Multicultural Society
  • Key Components of Critical Cultural Studies
  • School Shootings, Crises of Masculinities, and Challenges to Education
  • Douglas Kellner, “Dangerous New Dimension to Mass Shootings in America,” Interview with Joanie Harman
  • The Conflicts of Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and Democracy
  • Critical Reflections on Marcuse, Freire, and Radical Pedagogy
  • Concluding Thoughts on Multiple Critical Literacies and the Reconstruction of Education
  • Afterword

· 1 ·
Neoliberalism, Technology, and Radical Pedagogy for the Re-Construction of Education in the 21st Century

Steve Gennaro and Douglas Kellner

The matrix of technological revolution, globalization, and neoliberal capital has produced intense change, conflict, and upheaval in society, culture, politics, and education throughout the 21st century. The recent events of the global COVID-19 pandemic have only further increased the polarity between economic haves and have-nots while at the same time doubling down on education, and even more so public education, as a battleground for where neoliberalism and the extreme right must be confronted. In this article, we argue that radical pedagogy today must arm students and citizens with new skills to negotiate and participate in the present age’s global and techno-society and culture and that critical media and techno-literacies are becoming more crucial for the development of educated and critical individuals and citizens of a democratic society.

In particular, the centrality of globalization, technology, and neoliberalism in contemporary experience, and the need for adequate conceptualizations and responses, require critical theory and radical pedagogy to engage the conjuncture of technology and globalization in the context of neoliberalism to maintain their relevance in the present age. Critical educators need to comprehend the effects of globalization and technology on education over the last half-century, work to democratize education in the present moment, and develop pedagogies adequate to the challenges of an age of neoliberal capital and corporate models of education that we need to contest and offer alternatives.

In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented a challenge to the future of education at the same time as it has opened opportunities for contestation and transformation to make schooling serve the needs of students and teachers, as opposed to neoliberalism that wants to commodify education and make it subservient to global capital and the ruling elites. Specifically, the rapid move toward online education during the ongoing Covid pandemic of the 2020s has raised new questions about the sites, pedagogies, and education goals in the 21st century. In this context, Educators need to do a radical critique of online education and subject current online pedagogical practices to critical examination, which depicts its possible benefits while criticizing the problems it raises. Further, educators should develop radical pedagogies that will reconstruct education in the Deweyean and Freirean traditions of promoting democracy and enabling students and citizens to be active creators of their lives and societies rather than passive subjects of media spectacles, virtual worlds, and digital learning.

This requires revalorization of in-class teaching supplemented by digital education and the need for new critical media and digital literacies while at the same time producing in-class face-to-face educational practices that promote discussion, engagement, and participation in the educational project inspired by Dewey, Freire, Marcuse, and others who were aware of the impact of capitalism, technology, and schooling as preparation for labor and conformity to techno-capitalist societies and who called for the reconstruction of education to make students and citizens able to participate democratically in their social and political worlds – which today involves both our lived bodily experience in natural and social worlds, as well as our participation in virtual worlds.1

Globalization, Neoliberalism, and the Reconstruction of Education

In the face of expanding globalization and digital technologies of information and communication in the context of neoliberalism, critical educators continue to develop transformative educational strategies to understand and counter the oppressive forces and effects of neoliberal globalization in conjunction with possibilities for democratization to empower individuals to understand and act effectively in a globalized neoliberal world, and to struggle for social justice. At the same time, the 2020s have seen a fierce attack on education in the United States, with conservative groups and politicians attempting to ban the teaching of race, sexuality, and even history that takes a critical look at U.S. society. Conservatives are banning books, throwing out essential parts of school curricula, and firing teachers and administrators who teach books or ideas that offend students or their conservative parents and right-wing opposition groups who want to enforce a conservative agenda on schools. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – with his eyes on a 2024 U.S. Presidential run – has been leading the charge, banning books and the teaching of any critical race studies, gender or sexuality studies (“don’t say Gay”), forcing rightwing curriculum on schools, firing teachers that do not conform to his strictures and claiming that Florida in the place where “Woke dies here.”2.

Rightwing culture wars against education means that teaching books critical of U.S. society and history and addressing controversial issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and critical thinking must be defended against the conservative culture war on education; at the same time, we should focus on teaching the essential literacies of reading, writing, and thinking, supplemented by new critical media and digital literacies to address the current developments and issues of U.S. society.

The project of transforming education will take different forms in different contexts. For example, in post-industrial or “overdeveloped” countries, individuals need to be empowered to work and act in a high-tech information economy and thus should learn skills of critical media and digital literacies to survive in the novel social environment. Traditional crafts of knowledge and critique should also be fostered so that students can name the system, describe the changes occurring in the evolving neoliberal global order, and engage in critical and oppositional practice in the interests of democratization and progressive social and cultural transformation. This requires a vision of alternatives to the present order and the necessity of struggle and organization to realize progressive goals. The discourse of critique, hope, and praxis must thus supplement languages of competition, grading, and achievement in education to promote critical students and citizens working toward social justice, participatory democracy, a sustainable environment, and a better world for all.

Transforming education in Neo-liberal globalization requires addressing educational issues in response to an unprecedented climate crisis ravishing the earth, creating intense catastrophic weather events, and threatening all life on the planet, human and natural (Klein 2014). In a recent interview, Naomi Klein called for climate justice and global activism to address the climate crisis, arguing: “We live in a time of multiple overlapping crises: we have a health emergency; we have a housing emergency; we have an inequality emergency; we have a racial injustice emergency; and we have a climate emergency, so we’re not going to get anywhere if we try to address them one at a time. We need responses that are truly intersectional. So how about as we decarbonise and create a less polluted world, we also build a much fairer society on multiple fronts?” (Klein 2023).

Neoliberal capitalism puts profit over people and expands production over preserving natural resources and the environment. This is a global problem that requires a global solution. In an earlier stage of multinational capital, the United States and overdeveloped countries played a significant role in the climate crisis and continue to suffer growing climate disasters. The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) dramatizes the dangers and costs of the climate crisis, stating: “Since 1980, the United States has experienced 323 in climate and weather related disasters, which have cost more than $2.195 trillion in total. According to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), 2021 witnessed 20 climate-related disasters, each exceeding losses of $1 billion (NOAA 2023). In a significant statement, the United Nations warns:

Climate change is the defining crisis of our time and is happening even more quickly than we feared. But we are far from powerless in the face of this global threat. As Secretary-General António Guterres pointed out in September, ‘the climate emergency is a race we are losing, but it is a race we can win.’

Biographical notes

Douglas Kellner (Author)

DOUGLAS KELLNER received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1973 at Columbia University and then taught 25 years in the Philosophy Department at the University of Texas-Austin, followed by 25 years of teaching in the Department of Education and Information Studies at UCLA and guest professorships throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Kellner is author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture, including Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism; Kellner has edited six volumes of the collected papers of Herbert Marcuse, which have appeared with Routledge. Kellner’s Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombings to the Virginia Tech Massacre won the 2008 AESA award as the best book on education. With Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Kellner had co-edited Media and Cultural Studies. KeyWorks, Blackwell (second edition 2012); withwith Rhonda Hammer, Kellner has co-edited Media/ Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches (Peter Lang Publishing, 2009); and with Stephen Bronner has co-edited The Critical Theory Reader. His most recent books are Technology and Democracy: Toward A Critical Theory of Digital Technologies, Technopolitics, and Technocapitalism (Springer Publications, 2021) and Critical Theory and Pedagogy. Towards The Reconstruction of Education (Peter Lang, 2023).

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Title: Re-Visioning Education