Community Education for Social Change: Critical Education as a Social Movement Cassie Earl and Polina-Theopoula Chrysochou

Chrysochou, P. and Earl, C. (2015) 'Community Education for Social Change: Critical Education as a Social Movement.' In Castilla, T. (ed.) Planes y Programas para la Mejora de la Convivencia en Contextos Educativos y Sociales: Diseño, Desarrollo y Evaluación. Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands: Wolters Kluwer

Throughout the centuries, the meaning of the term ‘education’ has changed and has been defined and explained differently by various thinkers, philosophers and educationists, from diverse backgrounds and traditions, characterised by their own ideas, standpoints and ideals. On grounds such as these, education was and continues to be treated by the historians as a ‘‘complicated, mediating, moral and political human invention’’ (Ramsay, 2009, p. 284). But also, and most importantly for our purpose here, education, along with the course content, the whole organisation of the classroom experiences, the way of teaching, the educational administration and the relationships of the school community, far from neutral, are political activities.

In fact, that the whole process of producing, transmitting and justifying public knowledge, which takes place in schools, is broadly politically biased, was a widespread view even from the nineteenth century, when the free, compulsory, universal elementary education emerged (Matthews, 1980, pp. 186-187). Under the above schema, it can be argued that education has long been a tool of the state wherein the ideology of the day has manipulated and controlled the policy and curriculum of schooling (c.f. Dewey, 1997; Gatto, 2009; Giroux, 2001; Giroux, 2011; Leonardo, 2006; Macrine, 2009a; McLaren, 1995; McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2005; McLaren and Jaramillo, 2007; Earl, 2014), and the latter is explicitly noted by Richard Shaull in the foreword of the 30th anniversary edition of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed: ‘‘Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes "the practice of freedom," the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world’’

(2005, p. 35)

The situation today is such that many believe, education is more than ever before, globally, a matter of public concern, undergoing a redefinition and facing a profound transformation that seems more driven by fear rather than by possibility. At the very centre of its reshaping is neoliberalism’s attempt to overcome its own contemporary crisis as economic and social governance (Sotiris, 2013, p. 21), along with the crisis at the very structural heart of capitalism itself. In that sense, it could be argued that the educational debate and ‘‘the obsession with schools as the cause and the cure-all’’ (Mishel and Rothstein, 2007, p.44) is a dodge serving as a distraction from austerity, recession and unemployment and in some cases such an analysis is not too far from reality.

In fact, since the beginning of the twentieth first century, many scholars within the field of critical education policy studies, have elaborated the dialectic of crisis and recovery in education reform, mainly focusing in the neo-liberal era (c.f. Apple, 2004; De Lissovoy and McLaren 2003; Ball, 2003; 2009; Hursh, 2006; Saltman, 2007; De Lissovoy, 2008; Peters, 2011; Slater, 2015). This scholarship, in accordance both with authors such as Naomi Klein (2007), David Harvey (2010) and Andrew Gamble (2009) among others, and a radical line thought within ecosocialist literature, has suggested that neoliberalism is producing, precipitating, maximizing and taking advantage of an increasingly diverse array of crises and disasters, so as to facilitate its expansion by the enclosure of the global commons (Hardt and Negri, 2009) through the defunding and privatisation of health and educational systems, utilities, transportations, communications and natural resources (Klein, 2007; Saltman, 2007; Slater, 2015; De Lissovoy et al., 2015).

Within this milieu, it can be suggested that we currently inhabit locally, nationally and globally a historical moment in which we are surrounded by natural disasters and crises, including among others economic devastation, ecological destruction, wars, unprecedented poverty, manifestations of political oppression and repression, nationalism and religious fundamentalism (Greene, 2005). It is on grounds of these numerous tragedies, which have rendered the depth of ongoing challenges, ‘‘normally hidden’’ (Foster, 2006) in the past, difficult for more people to ignore, that many believe that a radical change is needed if we are ever to gain control over our own lives and social relations. This has led to a new movement where the pedagogical has become the essence of the movement, a turnaround from protest and demands to a new awakening of critical consciousness where knowledge has become the movements and education forms the basis of a new pedagogy where people are the project

rather than the resource of human experience and social production. This movement can inform resistance education at all levels.

In this chapter, we shall explore the ideas about community education and critical education within the framework of the social movements for social change, and how this thinking can inform and provide qualities to teachers, students, communities and those at grassroots level, hoping to re-engage with a system of schooling that is failing their children (Earl, 2014) and regaining control. Theories of critical pedagogy, including revolutionary working-class pedagogy that is framed within a Marxist problematic and takes first and foremost a side against prevailing conditions and towards anticapitalistic struggle (c.f. McLaren, 2000; McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2000; McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2001), are used to reflect upon the open social character of this form of education that is not limited to the formal structures of the capitalist state (Skordoulis and Hill, 2014). Additionally, the idea of emancipatory education, including the collective and individual responses and responsibilities that are needed to ensure the best for our children and to turn schools around will be explored. As it is beyond the scope of this chapter, individual models of schooling will not be covered (c.f. ), but will, however, suggest aims of education and where this matches with models, they will be indicated.

It is important, then, to understand what is meant by education as resistance outside the context of these solely political movements and into the classrooms and communities around the country, and indeed the world. In finding this explanation it is useful to turn to the theories of critical pedagogy and revolutionary working-class pedagogy to explore how these battles outside the classroom can be useful to those concerned with the conditions inside. Education and the reshaping of schools is a crucial site of contest in a broader struggle over the meaning of democracy and the creation of a democratic society, over capitalism itself and neoliberalism, which must be seen as the main material and ideological frame for education and for state, economic and social life restructuring in the present (De Lissovoy et al., 2015). As such, the struggle over education and schooling is not a ‘‘fight for an independent victory’’ (Harris, 1982, p. 145) and cannot be achieved without collective action, without being connected to broader efforts to bring about genuine social change. As Anyon (1995, p. 117) argues: ‘‘Education is an institution whose basic problems are caused by, and whose basic problems reveal, the other crises in cities: poverty, joblessness, and low-wages, and racial and class segregation.”

The first task, thus, is the articulation of a broader philosophical and political framework (De Lissovoy et al., 2015, p. 99) that will enable the questioning of the purpose and the politics of education. In order to begin a process of the reimagining of education as a form of resistance against the injustices and inequalities that exist in society and that education can reproduce and perpetuate (Gatto, 2009; Harber, 2004), the dispel of the myth of full employment on acquisition of GCSE’s or ‘A’ levels, or even higher education qualifications (Jones, 1992) is pivotal.

At a second level, what should be addressed is the policy of educational change itself as a practice (Locke et al., 2005) and its decontextualisation through the adoption of a historical perspective. Tyack and Cuban (1995, p. 8) maintain regarding the latter that school politics have never been carried out on a ‘‘level playing field’’, in the sense that it has been always policy elites, drawing members from stakeholders who controlled the economy, who had privileged access to media and who were leading institutions and organisations of many kinds, and not a multiplicity of groups, that were setting the dominant patterns of educational reform. The same elites that on the pretext of disengaging schools from politics, they have delegated educational decisions to ‘experts’, with whom they were sharing the same definitions of diagnosed problems and prescribed solutions, so as to ultimately end up exercising even more power over shaping the agenda and implementing the school reforms.

Such an undertaking, through emphasising the interrelationships between the reforms in the educational structure and the purpose and context of their development (Hargreaves, 1994, p. 8) may reveal interconnected patterns and components, and thus the set of the same ideological influences that has fuelled policies and changes in the first place (Webb et al., 2004; Slater, 2015). Central to this process is the reframing of educational reform from solely a technical issue, restricted at the school level, to a larger political issue in the sense that most attempts to at least change education in fundamental ways are ultimately political acts, ‘political responses’ to changes in the larger social environment, such as changes in family, in technology and in law, economic crises, child poverty, unemployment and attitudes toward authority (Bascia and Hargreaves, 2000; Hargreaves, 2005) and as such cannot be disengaged from the economic, political and ideological context of their occurrence.

Given that the success of neoliberalism and capitalism strongly depends on the foreclosure of alternatives (De Lissovoy, et al., 2015, p. 97), the understanding of the historical and political conditions that have produced the current situation in the first place is of great importance for the conceptualisation of people’s ability to resist (Apple, 2010). In order to make sense of

what we are witnessing we must possess the theoretical tools that will help us link our own experiences, along with the experiences of our students, to the social conditions that shape reality, conditions of living and the formation of relationships (Agostinone-Wilson, 2013, p. 70). For the theories of critical pedagogy and revolutionary working-class pedagogy, experience and contemporary social relations do not speak for themselves but must always be interpreted in terms of broader and interconnected social and material practices (McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2001; De Lissovoy, et al., 2015). It is through theory that we can find our voice, make sense of our own lives and identify with the lives of others, understand difference, inequality and hegemony, recognise what needs to be challenged and changed, realise the ‘‘asymmetrical relations of power linked to race, class, gender, and sexual economies of privilege’’ that constrain and enable success in a capitalist society (bell hooks, 1994; McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2001; Ollis, 2012), realise that there is an alternative vision of what the world would be like (Hill, 2012) and that the existing situation is not enduring but can be changed. It is only in that way that a new political vision can be created (Brenner, 2002).

So what should we resist in this time of massive local, national and transnational change, transition and upheaval? How should we resist the social, economic and political turmoil that we are witnessing and/or experiencing all over the planet? (Ollis, 2012). As the questions of how to proceed and what path to follow remain, hanging over our heads, many believe that time is playing against us to wait for responses within the limits of what is thought ‘‘normal, agreed-upon and unquestionably true’’ (Greene, 2005, p. 77; Agostinone-Wilson, 2013). And although we do not mean to be dismissive of educational research that looks at in-school solutions, nor to suggest that, for instance trying to close the ‘achievement gap’ with inschool influences, or understanding the institutional forms of racial, gender, homophobic, transphobic and ethnic inequalities in schools are not important goals in themselves, we argue that genuine and radical social change cannot come out of individual teachers and isolated schools. In fact, as Tyack and Cuban (1995, p. 3) have successfully stressed ‘‘the utopian tradition of social reform through schooling has often diverted attention from more costly, politically controversial and difficult societal reforms’’. And it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that nowhere is this seen more clearly at a global level than in the policy interventions designed in the context of the Global Education Reform in recent years. It is at moments like these, of crisis and disaster, that according to Halsey et al. (1980), education in general and schools in particular, become the ‘‘wastebasket’’ into which society’s perennial and insoluble problems

are abruptly deposited (Hargreaves, 1994, p. 5). The latter occurs within a framework of immense moral panic about how the generations of the future will be prepared (Bascia and Hargreaves, 2000) and is accompanied by large-scale criticism of the State School and an emphasis on the ‘‘apocalyptic consequences’’ of omissions, failures and imperfections in the educational systems (Levin, 1998, p.132). It is on grounds such as these that Cremin commented that: ‘‘to contend that problems of international competitiveness can be solved by educational reform … is not merely utopian and millennialist, it is at best foolish and at worst a crass effort to direct attention away from those truly responsible for doing something about competitiveness and to lay the burden instead on the schools’’ (1990, p. 103).

Now, it might appear as if all the above imply that nothing can be said apropos future visions, goals and aspirations or that there is no need of on-site activity. But this is not the case, as far as we recognise the ‘‘limit situations’’ in Freirean terms (1986), along with the economic, political, ideological and cultural constrains that we must confront, without letting during that process our hopes and our dreams control our proposals in educational theorising (Popper, 1962; Matthews, 1980; Harris, 1982). The latter point lead us inevitably to some pessimism about how revolutionary practice can be undertaken within the constraints of the very system that we seek to overthrow. But this pessimism and despair, along with hopelessness that follows the recognition of individual powerlessness arise partly through perceiving the situation in the context of the neoliberal mantra that ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA). And although the pessimism may not be completely surpassed it can at least be mitigated if different conceptualisation is adopted that reveals the ideological underpinning of such statements.

In that sense, our resistance needs to be a twofold resistance. On the one hand, a resistance to the violence of capitalist schooling (Harber, 2004) and to the forms of education which attempt to produce people who, whether it suits them or not, are required to ‘fit in’ to the social structures that reproduce, and often extend, the inequalities and social roles ‘expected’ of them (Earl, 2014). But at the same time, on the other hand, our resistance needs to be a resistance of the much larger issues, underlying the ‘‘systemic, contextual and political nature of public education’’ (Bascia and Hargreaves, 2000, p, 15). In other words, resistance to the brutality of the social and economic relations under which we live (Allman, 2001; Giroux,

2001; Holloway, 2005; Holloway, 2010; Macrine, 2009b; Earl, 2014). Neither of them can be successful without the other and this double focus of revolutionary activity is where the ray of hope does lie.

Because, hope is a powerful tool of resistance (de Ruyter, 2006; Freire, 1998; Freire, 2007) but to be so, it should not be mistaken for ‘‘quaint ideals or ideological confusions’’ (Harris, 1982, p. 144). On the contrary, its origins are to be found in the notion of what Giroux calls an ‘‘educated hope’’ (Giroux, 2001, p. 125), which should be a product of ongoing critique of the present and renewal (Mayo, 2009). If we want to ‘turn things around’, where things can refer to a wide range of phenomena, from the replacement of expectation for hope that youth are taught to do so within our system (Illich, 2011) to the direct challenging of the status quo in education, it is about time to overcome the constraints of the unpractical and depressing that often are levelled at the macro-analyses. Although criticisms against studies of social reproduction and correspondence theories, which flourished after the late 1970s, were not in every instance completely unfounded, the whole dismissal of contextual issues in favour of context-specific micro-analyses on the basis of providing a greater sense of efficacy in rectifying immediate and practical issues, unwittingly or deliberately closes off important questions. Despite the ‘crisis rhetoric’, schools are not autonomous arenas and at the end of the day they cannot save a society in which they are embedded, nor can they cure, at least alone, national social ‘ills’ (Cuban, 2003, p. 1) and solve problems of international competiveness. On grounds such as these, Anyon (2005) argues in her book Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and A New Social Movement, for the predictable failure of any kind of educational reform that is not driven or accompanied by a social movement that can address and challenge the lack of objective and existential economic opportunities that exist for students, even if we could succeed in providing a far more interdisciplinary and effective instruction or in improving their achievement levels (Anderson, 2005). Without an understanding of the systemic social inequalities and power imbalances that surround the school and its community (Fink and Stoll, 2005, p. 11), and a constant employ of reframing strategies that displace teachers, students and their parents, as well as the lack of competition and corporate oversight from blame and reposition regressive policies, economic hardship, poverty and the ‘‘systematic, contextual and political nature of public education’’ (Bascia and Hargreaves, 2000, p, 15 ) as the problem, teachers and their low expectations will continue to be an easy and ready target (Anyon, 2005; Anderson, 2005; De Lissovoy et al., 2015).

For a long time the Right, both Neoliberals and Neoconservatives, have understood the power of education, and it seems have been very successful in utilising it as a tool of subjugation and control (Apple, 2000; Giroux & McLaren, 1989; Heaney, 2000; McLaren, 1998). And although this success rarely goes unreported, there is an aspect that tends to be neglected: the skills and abilities they have developed, along with the strategies they implement in order to manufacture the consent of the governed. As educational policy scholars working within the recent research field that uses the theory of political spectacle to understand contemporary political processes document, there are many contemporary Canadian and American education policy processes that can be characterized as political spectacle (Smith et al., 2004; Wright, 2005, Winton; 2010; Winton and Evans, 2014). Meaning by the latter, political constructions of reality, in terms of its meaning, definition, significance, occurrence and conveying to the public, which although appear to serve the public good, they maintain inequities (Edelman, 1988; Anderson and Herr, 2007; Winton and Evans, 2014). In that sense, political spectacles that are brought to public by media and through using a variety of elements including symbolic language, metaphors, traditional values, manufactured crises, imaginary enemies, illusion of democratic participation, renaming and reframing of problems (Edelman, 1988; Anderson, 2005; Winton and Evans, 2014), reduce citizens to passive spectators of a privileged elite of decision-makers (Anderson, 2005; 2009; Smith, et al., 2004; Winton and Evans, 2014). In Edelman’s (1988, p. 35) words, ‘‘[political spectacle] encourages acceptance of the stable social structures and the inequalities that shape their experiences’’. It seems that the Left have not caught onto this until recently, this catching on however has not come from the institutions of mass education (with a few exceptions, c.f. Neary, 2012), but from small groups of people, collectives and grassroots organisations who are taking it upon themselves to become educated for themselves (c.f. Bigelow, 2011; Coté et al., 2007; Neary & Amsler, 2012; Neary & Winn, 2012) and to engage in education policy processes through policy dialogues. We have much to learn from them as education practitioners, theorists, communities of parents and concerned individuals, in all levels of educational provision including among others the learning dimensions of the organisations they embrace and those acquainted trough participation and mobilisation, issues concerning open resistance and direct action, development of critical consciousness, collective dimension of knowledge and learning, awareness raising, meaning of solidarity and their strategies and successes (English and Mayo, 2012; Winton and Evans, 2014). We also need to take their theoretical explorations, along with their novel responses and strategic plans (Skordoulis and Hill, 2014) and adapt them for the introduction of a new paradigm in schooling, the construction of alternative forms of knowledge and potentially the enhancement of democracy in education.

First we need to identify the damaging, or potentially damage discourses contained in our schooling system (Apple, 1979; Gatto, 2009; Harber, 2004), especially when those discourses are presented as promoting inclusion and ‘equality’. One of these discourses is that schooling asks the obviously unequal to fit into their ‘system of equality’ (Coleman, 2006; Schostak, 2011), can there be anything worse in education than trying to make the obviously unequal equal? Which is where, perhaps, our discourse should begin to move away from that of equality toward a discourse of educational justice, otherwise, the discourses in equality can become what Paulo Freire termed ‘cultural invasion’: “Cultural invasion, which like divisive tactics and manipulation also serves the ends of conquest. In this phenomenon, the invaders penetrate the cultural context of another group, in disrespect of the latter’s potentialities; they impose their own view of the world upon those they invade and inhibit the creativity of the invaded by curbing their expression” (Freire, 1993: 133) In other words, the ‘equality of opportunity’ that we have long been promised in education can be seen as a form of cultural invasion, in that, where ever you begin, educationally speaking, you have the same, standardized opportunities. This is perhaps most famously evident in the cultural and class bias of I.Q. tests or the 11+ examinations of the grammar school era (Greenfield, 1997; Lareau & McNamara Horvat, 1999). So in order to fight the cultural invasion in our school system and move toward a discourse of social justice we need a re-evaluation of what education is and what its purposes are. This will then enable us to begin to change the vast inequalities and low expectations that our education system produces. The idea of finding an educational model that ‘fits all’ is at best problematic and at worst just another form of cultural invasion. Any ‘one size fits all’, standardising model, becomes a form of repression to those who are not ‘standard’ for that model. So choosing the most flexible model of schooling becomes paramount. It is important to remember that the purposes of education are by no means agreed or incontestable (Dadds, 2001: 48), which gives educators and parents a mandate to reinvent education for the better. Another essential criteria when thinking about the most appropriate form of education is that “humans are emotional beings and the emotions are central to any learning process” (Ollis, 2012: 216), especially if one wishes to create an education that re-organises social relationships in order to establish a more collective and communitarian outlook in those experiencing that system of education. Therefore, any ‘model’ of education you may wish to apply to your context must consider this essential understanding. Perhaps then, it is acceptable to argue for a model of

education that is emancipatory, as this should allow the emotive nature of students to come through and allow them to learn ‘to be’ in a way that is not only good for them, but also good for society. Certainly, from a critical education point of view this stands, as, “an emancipatory education is essential not only to empower people, but also for them to become subjects of their world” (Cho, 2013: 127). In fact, the ultimate aim of emancipatory pedagogy, at least of revolutionary working pedagogy that adopts a Marxist framework and thus represents the most far-reaching, controversial and cutting edge contemporary educational theory and practice, is to change the world. This ultimate goal though, cannot be achieved through emancipatory education, despite how emancipatory or critical that education is. Even though the process may start with education at some stage, the change of the world will be completed with the transformation of the social reality, which in the last analysis determines consciousness (Skordoulis and Hill, 2014). An agreed goal in many forms of critical education, is that individual emancipation and empowerment is not enough. Individual emancipation and empowerment can serve to increase feelings of displacement and disillusion, as, if we are not also changing the world through the emancipation of those who are currently subjugated, then these people will ‘mis-fit’ for yet another reason. In this case we may be creating, even more, a class of people who, although they have a voice, they have no one to hear it and are therefore emotionally displaced within society. At first glance this seems to support the ‘building bridges to nowhere’ criticism, as discussed by Illich (2011): the criticism goes as such; if we create thinking, critical young people, individually empowered and emancipated, without first changing the political and economic system in order for them to ‘fit’ into a pre-existing structure that tolerates such amazing people, then we are ‘building bridges to nowhere’. However, Illich’s answer to this criticism is that the asker is underestimating the fundamental political and economic nature of schooling as well as the political potential inherent in any change to it. Further to this, Holloway (2010: 12) tells us that “social change is not produced by activists, however important activism may (or may not) be in the process. Social change is rather the outcome of the barely visible transformation of the daily lives and activities of millions of people. We must look beyond activism, then, to the millions and millions of refusals and other-doings, the millions and millions of cracks that constitute the material base of possible radical change” In this sense, education becomes one of the ‘refusals’, the ‘other-doings’ of Holloway’s argument. It is arguable whether any activity that promotes social change however big or small should or should not be called ‘activism’, but that is for a different discussion. The

point is that political activism alone may not change society in any fundamental way and that it is the responsibility of every person to live their live in opposition, or in refusal of the things that they see as harmful to their quality of life and opportunities for personal growth.

Our question, therefore, to those who criticise in this way, would be who is going to change the political and economic system for these young people? And what do we do in the meantime? Keep selling them short? Conditioning them out of criticity and imagination? Keep telling them they will never amount to anything so that they passively accept their fate when they leave school? Apple et al. (2009: 3, original stress) insist that “in order to understand and act on education in its complicated connections to the larger society, we must engage in the process of repositioning. That is, we must see the world through the eyes of the dispossessed and act against the ideological and institutional processes that reproduce oppressive conditions.”

There are many strands in all our lives where we can actively resist oppressive conditions, and education is one of them. The education of our children and young people and the education of ourselves (I will return to the education of ourselves later). However, this is only true if young people are not subjugated within the education or schooling system employed, as Apple et al. state, so it is to this ‘repositioning’ which we must now turn. To be effective, any model of education that claims emancipation and justice as its goal has to be cooperative, collective or community minded and therefore must discourage forms of, particularly aggressive, competition. In order to achieve these forms of collectivism, cooperation and community, democratic models of schooling and education are indicated. As Jeffs and Smith (2005; 43) suggest, “a democratic system at least holds out the promise that people can collectively come together to reduce or perhaps even eliminate ..… inequalities”. This is because in a democratic model of schooling, any discourse of inequality can become a discourse of justice (as discussed earlier) because all the voices in the group can be heard through the democratic mechanisms employed. In turn, democratic education suggests a repositioning from the traditional ‘teacher centred’ forms of pedagogy to more dialectic ones. Dialectic education can come in several forms, most usually posited as ‘problem-posing education’ (see for example Bahruth & Steiner, 2000; Freire, 1985; Freire, 2008; Shor & Freire, 1987). Problem posing education allows young people to explore their subjective realities in an objective way and understand the conditions of their own lives and those of the wider world. This is achieved by, instead of being given information masquerading as ‘knowledge’, often called the banking method of education (Freire, 1993), young people are posed questions about the world and their place in it in order to explore relations of power and

the normalisation of ‘the way things are’. The traditional ‘banking method’ of education assumes that “students are identical empty vessels” (Bahruth & Steiner, 2000, p. 120), and that that is “not only erroneous, but punitive to students who have non-mainstream backgrounds”. Freire puts it this way: “Whereas the banking method directly or indirectly reinforces men’s [sic] fatalistic perception of their situation, the problem posing method presents this very situation to them as a problem. As the situation becomes the object of their cognition, the naïve or magical perception which produced their fatalism gives way to perception which is able to perceive itself even as it perceives reality, and can be critically objective about that reality”. (Freire, 1993, p. 66). Problem posing education sits neatly into an overarching democratic educational model as it allows for a mature positioning of the young people’s views, needs and desires, which allows them to make critical decisions and moral judgements (Giroux, 2011) in a democratic forum. This will also enable young people to understand the relationship between knowledge and power; “by asserting that knowledge is intrinsically interwoven with power, critical pedagogy adamantly and steadfastly dismisses the mainstream assumption of knowledge as objective and neutral” (Cho, 2013: 71). This means that once young people have accepted that knowledge is not objective and is therefore not only contextual and subjective in nature but that knowledge is a useful tool in personal and community empowerment and success, then young people should become more active and engaged learners. This is only the case if the system of schooling pro-actively engages this understanding of subjective knowledge and ensures that the connections between knowledge and power, and the deconstructions of the current, dominant use of ‘powerful knowledge’, are a central part of the education received. This is another example of where the process of substituting hope with expectations mentioned earlier, can be reversed, as with the understanding that there is a relationship between knowledge and power, coupled with the realisation that any knowledge, if used and posited correctly, can be powerful, including previously subjugated knowledge, young people can start to see the point in learning. This also could go a long way to counter-act the ‘not cool to be clever’ attitude held by so many young people, as intelligence becomes, for them a more effective form of resistance against the injustices they experience than rejection of learning. In other words, school becomes the ally in their emancipation rather than their oppressor. This is particularly achieved through a critical pedagogy within schools due to the tenet that critical pedagogy not only replaces ideology with discourse, allowing subjugated forms of knowing to have a space to flourish and contesting existing representations and social practices but also because one of its central aims is to construct counter-hegemonic

forms of knowing and knowledge with the aim of changing power forms and patterns (Cho, 2013). In doing so, the purpose of critical pedagogy is to arm students with a capacity to contest existing representations and social practices and assess inequalities and oppressive institutional structures that perpetuate their economic, gendered, sexual, racial and cultural subordination within the capitalist mode of production. Using what McLaren calls ‘‘pedagogical surrealism’’ (2007, p. 190), educators that integrate the principles of critical pedagogy and revolutionary working-class pedagogy in their teaching practices, rather than trying to make the different comprehensible, they attempt to make the ‘‘strange familiar and the familiar strange’’ (McLaren, 2007, p. 190). Within such context, teachers instead of questioning the meaning of schooling, they aim at unravelling the reasons for which schooling has come to mean what it has. Far from the latter, another main principle of critical pedagogy and revolutionary working class pedagogy is the students’ consciousness transformation, which is largely derived from Freire’s work and is perceived as ‘‘the political act of knowing, an active intervention against the barriers that prevent the students from achieving their role as agents of history’’ (McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2001). In the context of Freire’s discourse, best developed in his most influential work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), teaching is eminently a political and moral practice which aspires to provide students with a new avenue upon which to obtain the optimum conditions ‘‘for selfreflection, a self-managed life and particular notions of critical agency’’ (Giroux, 2010). Any point of view that considers teaching as being part of a project for ‘‘democracy and critical citizenship’’ (Giroux, 2007, p. 2), recognises at the same time as indispensable task of education, the need to promote all the above qualities. It’s a twofold path, as on the one hand these qualities don’t grow up like a plant and on the other hand, as Cornelius Castoriadis argues (1996, pp. 221-241), it is impossible to have a democratic society with no ‘‘democratic paideia’’. The type of education that a society and its institutions promote is inseparable from the alleged democracy because as Jeffs and Smith (2005, p. 44) remind us, “democratic systems require an educational infrastructure. Their survival, in part, depends on the existence of an informed and committed electorate”. In this perspective, democratic citizenship and the kind of democracy conceived as ‘‘the regime in which the public sphere becomes truly and effectively public – belongs to everyone and is effectively open to the participation of all’’ (Castoriadis, 1996, pp. 221-241) can only be achieved if one of the main objects of society and of its institutions, is to educate social individuals in a critical manner. Social individuals, already fabricated through the social-historical process and within the existing framework of the larger society need to change and turn into ‘‘autonomous’’ social individuals that correspond to democracy and who are capable of making it function and reproducing it. That means, citizens ‘‘capable of governing and being governed’’ (Aristotle, 1984, 1252a16) that

have been granted all the conditions for an equally participation and intervention in the social life. Thus, for Freire, pedagogy and literacy was never simply confined to teaching methods, practices and techniques instrumental in preparing students ‘‘for the world of subordinated labour or careers’’ (Aronowitz, 2009, p. ix). On the contrary, pedagogy is a performative practice that provides the suitable environment for the development of a language of scepticism and possibility and at the same time a space where fundamental questions about democracy can be raised (Giroux, 2007, pp. 1-5). Paulo Freire, throughout his work, called for the learner’s ‘critical reflection’ on the social, economic, political and cultural forces that penetrate education and learning processes (Aronowitz, 1998, p. 12) and for a ‘critical thinking’ (Giroux, 2011) that was much more than the simple understanding of the present and the reproduction of the past. It was a tool for ‘‘civic engagement’’, the cornerstone of ‘‘unconditional freedom’’ to question, to make vital judgments, to engage and participate, to exercise choices and to shape decisions that affect everyday life, institutional reforms and governmental policies (Giroux, 2007, pp. 1-5; 2011). Therefore, if the educational structure is already democratic and practices a critical form of pedagogy, you will turn out young people who are indeed an informed and committed ‘electorate’, ‘culturally free’ to choose principles, values and rules of behaviour that challenge the conventional ones, with an intrinsic understanding of democratic mechanisms and the central importance of democracy for a cohesive and just society that is ready to fully participate in every aspect of public life. All that is needed for a humanised society.

However, this does not mean that we should just change the school system and sit back with our fingers crossed. As it has been largely argued above, the change in society cannot come from education alone. Let alone, that even if educational change is to occur the road ahead will be even more difficult and insidious than we imagine. Modelling just democracy in schools through practices that enable dialogue and teacher and student autonomy is not enough, and the same goes for the mere forcing of elements of critical pedagogy around the edges of existing curriculum (De Lissovoy, 2015). In the same vein, it could be suggested that developing critical conscious in students through teaching, dialogue and readings does not by itself induce them to participate in direct action (English and Mayo, 2012), or that the democratic paideia will not on its own ensure a fully humanised society. In fact as Brown (1904) stated more than a century ago ‘’Civilisations are destroyed by great ideals apprehended but not lived up to’’. Moreover, we should not forget that apart from our aspirations, commitment and action, what we will be able to achieve in the last analysis is also dependent upon concrete, existential and concrete conditions that put limits on our autonomy and will. As Kevin Harris (1982) successfully wrote ‘‘there are favourable and unfavourable times for achieving tangible results’’ in terms of both the existential economic

conditions and the overall conditions of the class struggle, only on a national scale but predominantly on an international one. But sitting back and waiting for the right conditions as if they will automatically come is akin to hoping that capitalism will breakdown on its own weight (Agostinone-Wilson, 2013, p. 61) or that the enormous financial repression and unprecedented austerity will automatically transform people’s consciousness and they will be thrown into the battle against the existing system. We cannot sit back and say, ‘let it be the young people’s responsibility to clear up the mess that the generation before them left’. It is the responsibility of all of us to ensure that these young people - educated in a more critical, more just system of education - are greeted by a world outside that celebrates them, instead of forcing them to fight to stay off the scrap heap of history. What can be said for sure is that any struggle for fundamental change should be a collective one, consisting of diverse sectors from teachers, students, parents and community to social justice activists, social movements, trade unions and academics. There are avenues already open at local, national and transnational political struggles both linked to educational reforms and to issues of inequality, human rights, and discrimination that need to connected and expanded. As McLaren (1995, p. 9) insists, what educators and indeed parents, need to realise is that “a New World Order cannot be realistically achieved without creating a new moral order at home first”, and that means in the classrooms and the living rooms of the nation. We cannot sit back and expect that schools will do the job of bringing up, in a holistic way, our children to be better adults and better stewards of a just social order than we have been. Teachers are human too and are just as much victims of the current crisis of justice and identity as the rest of us and part of their conditioning comes from their teacher training. This is where parents, governors and the local community have an active role to play. Not to struggle with teachers, but to constantly strive for the education they want to see teachers deliver, which means resisting parts of the National Curriculum as an ideological strategy: “because schools are in part sites of ideological reproduction and production, they are contested because ideologies themselves are contested and continually struggled over” (Au & Apple, 2009, p. 87). It may be wise to choose a model of schooling, then, that is democratic, dialectic (or problem posing) and that is able to reject the National Curriculum, as many Free Schools are. Then what are you to teach in your new school? According to Blakemore and Firth (2005, p. 141) “Many years of research have shown that people are able to learn more information in the absence of information”. So one could teach anything and see that a valuable and large quantity of knowledge has been gained, although what Blakemore and Firth were actually alluding too was that the sourcing of information teaches a person more than being handed that information. This has echoes of Dewey’s (Dewey, 1965; Dewey, 1997) laboratory schools in the United States. Dewey set up a school in which the children decided everything and were

merely facilitated by their teachers. For example if they wanted to build a table, they were to understand through research the form and functions of tables. They would then go on to decide through discussion what was the most appropriate material and design, where to source the materials and what tools they would need to build the table. Then they would set up the workshop to build the tables of their designs. Every step of the process was a journey of discovery in which they learnt not only, how to measure, design and build a table, but also about the social relations inherent in sourcing wood or metal, the sociology of tables; what form or function depended on your life-style and why you might want a table (For more information, see among others Žižek, 2008; Žižek, 2013). Included in this process was maths, geometry, cooperation, communication skill and so on. The laboratory school has the absence of information, which Blakemore and Firth spoke of and that lack became the learning experience, closely, but without becoming authoritarian, facilitated by teachers. Even if this does not happen in schools, there are opportunities for the learning at school to be supplemented by this type of learning at home. However, this type of schooling should not be confused with critical pedagogy as that would be to subsume critical pedagogy into a liberal agenda of self-sufficiency and transferable skills. It must be remembered that “critical Pedagogy – and critical educational studies in general –broadly seeks to expose how relations of power and inequality, (social, cultural, economic) in their myriad forms combinations, and complexities, are manifest and are challenged in the formal and informal education of children and adults” (Apple et al., 2009: 3) it “involves the fundamental transformations of the underlying epistemological and ideological assumptions that are made about what counts as ‘official’ or legitimate knowledge and who holds it.” So it is about more than learning through doing, it seeks interruption of the normative ways of thinking. “It is also grounded in radical shifts in one’s social commitments. This involves a commitment to social transformation and a break with the comforting illusions that the ways in which our societies and their educational apparatuses are currently organised can lead to social justice” (Apple et al., 2009). This does not, of course, exclude the realm of experiential learning for young people, as long as that is framed in a radical political project. This project may not be completely explicit in the classroom, especially for younger children, although it needs to become more and more so throughout the educational experience, but it must be key in the organising principles of any model of education if we are to elicit real, fundamental change. The change in education must come from all quarters, be supported by anyone and everyone who has a vested interest in the future and as Holloway (2010, p. 56) assures us, “seizing the initiative means moving beyond confrontation: we determine our action according to our own needs. Let capital and the state run after us, let it try and co-opt or repress us”. The time is passed now to make demands for change from a state that is hell bent on cuts to education and other social enterprise. Holloway is correct in his statement that seizing the initiative, and

seize it we must, will lead us beyond confrontation. We do not wish to confront those in power, we only wish to make that kind of coercive, at best, and repressive, at worst, power redundant Holloway (2010, p. 18-19) implores us to review real examples of where his has happened. He cites the story of a group of teachers in Puebla, Mexico: “The government announced in 2008 the creation of a new scheme to improve the quality of education by imposing greater individualism, stronger competition between students, stricter measurement of the outputs of teachers, and so on, the teachers said, ‘no, we will not accept it.’ When the government refused to listen, the dissident teachers moved beyond their mere refusal and, in consultation with thousands of students and parents, elaborated their own proposal for improving the quality of education by promoting greater cooperation between students, more emphasis on critical thinking, preparation for cooperative work not directly subordinate to capital, and began to explore ways of implementing their scheme in opposition to state guidelines, by taking control of the schools. Here too the initial refusal begins to open towards something else, towards an educational activity that not only resists but breaks with the logic of capital”

Maybe we should take a lesson from the story of Puebla. There is a way to change and it starts with a refusal to accept the way things are. So, let the young people of today become the generation who really changes things, with our preparation, of course. Let them spend time in schools imagining a better world so that one day they may continue our project to create it. Let them understand their potential as beings-in-the-world. Let them be the project not the resource of human experience. This may sound like a utopian project, but maybe we need to reinvigorate the use of utopian thinking, as Cho (2013, p. 122) says, “utopian pedagogy is a broad idea to help us pursue alternative thinking and models, beyond what seems common and feasible”. This is what is needed to educate counter to the logic of capitalism, so that our young people are able to succeed in a world that wants and allows them to, whoever they are and whatever their starting points. Teachers are in a strategic position to assume organic leadership as public intellectuals. Leonardo (2006, p. 95) supports this by saying that “they comprise a critical mass of intellectuals who function as social critics, as provocateurs of what Gramsci (1971, p. 59) called ‘passive revolution’”. But teachers alone cannot change the culture and educational paradigms of all young people that has to come from all the walks of life that young people engage with. As McLaren stated earlier, the change has to also be in our ‘living rooms’. Which means that parents must educate themselves in the ways of critical education, develop what Freire (1993) calls their ‘epistemological curiosities’ and they too must learn to question everything, alongside their

children and young people. They must learn, however, not only to question, but to collectively find answers, to problematize those answers and then to seek solutions to those problems. The culture in the home relationships must match that of the relationships at school in order to prevent young people from living a contradiction. The school ethos of democratic, emancipatory, critical pedagogy must be supported and actively experienced outside, with those who insist every morning that their child must attend school. This idea is supported by Freire (1998, p. 58): “to be in the world without making history, without being made by it, without creating culture, without a sensibility towards one’s own presence in the world, without a dream, without a song, music, or painting, without caring for the earth or the water, without using one’s hands, without sculpting or philosophising, without any opinion about the world, without doing science or theology, without awe in the face of mystery, without learning, instruction, teaching, without ideas on education, without being political, is a total impossibility”

Young people have knowledge outside of what is packaged and handed to them in schools and this creates their personal and emotional biographies, the experiences that will stick with them their whole lives. Biographies that should be explored in schools to create other ways of knowing, bringing the context of the individual into the consideration of the collective. As Allman (2010, p. 150) suggests, “critical education on its own is not capable of bringing about the transformation of a society; on the other hand, it is impossible to see how a society that is capable of guaranteeing a better future for humanity will ever come about without critical education”. The transformation of our society from the current one, characterised by oppression, racism, sexism, homophobia and intolerances of many kinds, into the kind of society we would all like to live in, which is yet to exist, and in that sense exists not-yet, through our utopian impulses, can be encouraged by critical education in our schools, colleges and universities. Alongside our efforts in other realms of life. In this sense I agree with Allman (2010, p. 150), in that the approach to critical education that I advocate is “not only intended to prepare people to engage in social transformation, but it is also meant to serve as a prefigurative experience of the type of social relations that would lie at the heart of a transformed society”. In other words, what we see in our schools today, is what we will see reproduced in our society tomorrow; including inequalities and injustices, or, thinking, critical citizens collectively striving to create on a daily basis the kind of just society where everyone does, indeed, fit in.

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