Pedagogy of non-domination: Neo-republican political theory and critical education

Abstract

The neo-republican political philosophy (sometimes referred to as civic republicanism) advances the idea of freedom as non-domination, in an attempt to provide democracy with a solid normative foundation upon which concrete principles and institutions can be erected so as to make freedom a reality. However, attempts to develop a republican educational theory are still hesitant, and fail to take the republican radical conception of freedom to its full conclusions.

This article suggests that dialogue between neo-republicanism and critical pedagogy can be mutually productive. In the first part of the article we present the neo-republican theory, and contrast it with traditional liberalism. In the second we focus on existing neo-republican theories of education, and claim that they do not take the republican presuppositions to their necessary conclusion, namely to an educational theory fully committed to the idea of freedom as non-domination. A republican educational theory, we argue, must take into consideration not only the freedom students will have in the future, but also their freedom in the present: it should think of school as a small-scale republic, which prepares its inhabitants to be future citizens of the state while at the same time treating them as free citizens in their own right. In the third part we use insights taken from critical pedagogy to chart the direction republican education must take by applying three key republican notions—democratic control, civic contestation, and trust. In the fourth and last part we outline four aspects in which neo-republicanism can shed new light on contemporary debates in critical pedagogy: the connection between democracy and justice, the multiplicity of forms of domination, critical education within schools, and work with students from relatively privileged backgrounds.

Keywords

Neo-republicanism critical pedagogy non-domination Philip Pettit education for social justice

Introduction

In the last couple of decades, political philosophy has witnessed a revival of republican thought, which occupies a central place in contemporary democratic political philosophy. Neo-republicanism advances the idea of freedom as non-domination, in an attempt to provide democracy with a solid normative foundation upon which concrete principles and institutions can be erected so as to make freedom a reality.¹

At first glance, neo-republicanism may seem a very different political project from critical pedagogy. Whilst the former emerges on the backdrop of liberal democracy and thrives in the Anglo-American philosophical world, the latter originates from Marxism and is most influential in the continental context of critical theory. Moreover, the former starts with an abstract moral value and calls for realizing it, whereas the latter is founded on a critique of existing sociopolitical reality. We suggest, however, that these two projects are related in important ways, and have much to contribute to one another. Most importantly, neo-republicanism and critical pedagogy not only reject traditional liberalism, but are explicitly opposed to the growing trend of neo-liberalism, conservatism and authoritarianism (Giroux, 2011: 8). Although the presence of a shared rival does not mean that the differences between the two approaches are insignificant, we believe that neo-republicanism and critical pedagogy belong to the same “anti-hegemonic bloc” (Apple, 2005: 106), and that dialogue between them can be mutually productive. This article facilitates such dialogue by attempting to accomplish a twofold goal: (1) to help neo-republicans draw a clearer line between republicanism and traditional liberalism by highlighting the political and educational implications of the unique republican conception of freedom; and (2) to offer critical pedagogy a clear conception of freedom, which may assist in its ongoing effort to catch up with changing reality and be relevant to the contemporary world.

In the first part of the article we present the neo-republican theory (sometimes referred to as civic republicanism), and contrast it with traditional liberalism. In the second we focus on existing neo-republican theories of education, and claim that they do not take the republican presuppositions to their necessary conclusion, namely to an educational theory fully committed to the idea of freedom as non-domination. A republican educational theory, we argue, must take into consideration not only the freedom students will have in the future, but also their freedom in the present: it should think of school as a small-scale republic, which prepares its inhabitants to be future citizens of the state while at the same time treating them as free citizens in their own right. In the third part we use insights taken from critical pedagogy to chart the direction republican education must take by applying three key republican notions—democratic control, civic contestation, and trust. In the fourth and last part we outline four aspects in which neo-republicanism can shed new light on contemporary debates in critical pedagogy: the connection between democracy and justice, the multiplicity of forms of domination, critical education within schools, and work with students from relatively privileged backgrounds.

Neo-republican political theory

The renewed interest in the republican political tradition owes a great deal to the influential work of British historian Quentin Skinner. After a long period in which republicanism had been understood as an early, underdeveloped branch of liberalism, Skinner found in thinkers like Niccolò Machiavelli, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and James Madison an independent tradition of thought that originates in Republican Rome and offers a conceptual framework distinct from liberalism. At the heart of this tradition lies a unique concept of freedom, meriting it a place of its own as a political theory—freedom as non-domination (Skinner, 1998, 2002).

In the terms of Isaiah Berlin's (2002) famous distinction between the positive and negative concepts of liberty, freedom as non-domination is negative by nature, for it is defined in terms of absence. But unlike liberal freedom, according to which a person is free so long as no-one interferes with his or her actions, here the relevant absence is that of domination, namely relations in which one is capable of interfering with another's actions at will. Republican freedom emphasizes the existence of the power to interfere, not its exercise; it is not actual interference that matters, but rather the capacity to interfere, which amounts to domination (Skinner, 2002: 247). A person is free, therefore, only as long as he or she is not dominated, namely not subjected to another’s will.

The difference between the two negative conceptions of freedom, the liberal and the republican, carries serious implications. Consider a slave whose master is benevolent enough so as not to interfere with his actions. According to the liberal conception of freedom as non-interference, we cannot but conclude that the slave is free as long as his master stays out of his way, and that slaves in general can become liberated by learning how to avoid intervention by their masters (Lovett, 2010). On the other hand, according to the republican conception of freedom as non-domination, modeled after the free Roman citizen, the slave is not free so long as the master is capable of interfering with his life; freedom is not a matter of contingent intervention but of structural inequality. This point is far from being hypothetical or relevant to ancient history only: it is the situation of the colonized under an “enlightened” colonial regime, of a woman married to a gentleman in a patriarchal society, or of an employee in a society which does not provide proper protections against the employer's whim. Thus, the decline of the republican concept of freedom and the rise of liberal freedom to an exclusive position makes it possible to reproduce various forms of domination while maintaining that the dominated are free.

The republican conception of freedom, brought back to the intellectual arena by Skinner and other historians (Bobbio and Viroli, 2003; Pocock, 2003), was taken up by contemporary political philosophers, primarily Philip Pettit. In a series of publications, Pettit provides a detailed philosophical analysis of the notion of freedom as non-domination, attempting to make it the cornerstone of contemporary democratic theory—one that is inspired by the republican tradition yet rejects the problematic aspects attendant on this tradition, particularly the elitist, exclusive nature of Roman citizenship, which was restricted to propertied males (Pettit, 2012: 8).

Pettit points to important implications of the difference between the liberal and republican conceptions of freedom in terms of the state and its institutions (Pettit, 2012: 134–135, 164). According to the liberal conception, freedom is a natural property, for men and women are free so long as they are not interfered with. The state, in this approach, necessarily impinges upon the freedom of its citizens, for the laws it enforces always intervene with people's wills and actions. Freedom and state—even a democratic state—are therefore essentially contradictory in the eyes of genuine liberals; state interventions may be justified on different grounds, but they always limit freedom. In the republican conception, on the other hand, state laws and institutions do not necessarily limit freedom. In fact, they constitute it: freedom as non-domination can only be brought about by a political structure in which no-one is subordinated to the will of another. Republican freedom is not natural and circumstantial like the liberal one, but rather institutional: it is a result of the structural relationship between people and is meaningless in a hypothetical state of nature. In other words, freedom, as the Romans saw very clearly, is the freedom of the citizen of a republic (Pettit, 2014: 4).

Pettit makes clear that just as domination is possible without intervention, so is intervention possible without domination: not every intervention involves domination, for when I control the intervention, when it expresses a will that is not alien but is rather my own, I am dominated by no-one. The state, therefore, ought to express the will of the citizens and protect them—sometimes through forced interventions—against both dominium, namely domination by other citizens, and imperium, domination by governmental institutions. In Pettit's words, the republic should be “a legal regime stopping people from dominating one another without itself dominating anyone in turn” (1997: 273). Hence, unlike liberal freedom, republican freedom is inherently egalitarian: it is thwarted when some people are freer than others, for this means that the former dominate the later (Pettit, 2012: 17, 88). This implies a deep, necessary connection between republican freedom and democracy: while various theorists suggested that democracy is not necessary for maintaining liberal freedom, since non-democratic governments can refrain from interfering with the lives of their citizens (Berlin, 2002: 177; Kant, 1991), republican freedom requires a democratic regime in which no person or authority can intervene illegitimately with citizens’ lives, while the citizens—the people, the demos—decide which interventions are legitimate (Pettit, 2012: 22).

Pettit claims that the elements necessary for republican freedom to prevail are both objective and subjective: the objective elements are laws and institutions, based on the principle of mixed constitution (Pettit, 2012: 5); but these institutions “are dead, mechanical devices, and will gain life and momentum only if they win a place in the habits of people's hearts” (Pettit, 1997: 241). In other words, the institutional body of the republic must be accompanied by a republican spirit in the form of values, norms, and civic dispositions that are constantly applied by the citizens in order to guard against domination. Although republican freedom does not consist in active political engagement—that is to say, the freedom of the individual is not dependent on his or her own activity, as in some political theories that adhere to “positive” conceptions of liberty (Arendt, 2006; Sandel, 1996) – it is dependent on the ability of the citizenry as a collective to be actively involved in protecting their freedom.

The kind of active citizenship that republicanism advocates requires willingness and capacity for civic commitment and involvement, and these are certainly not natural dispositions. They have to be learned and practiced. Education, therefore, has a crucial role to play in fostering the republican spirit. Although school—as a generic term for state educational institutions—is by no means the only place where education takes place (Peterson, 2011: 2) it is undoubtedly an institution of the highest importance in a republic: the nurturing of public spirit is best facilitated in a public institution. However, school is often presented as a site of domination, surveillance, and lack of freedom (e.g. Foucault, 1995; Gray, 2013; Illich, 2000). Must freedom as non-domination be bought at the price of domination within schools? The republican understanding that not all intervention amounts to domination suggests a negative answer. If schools can be thought of as small-scale republics, they may be redesigned as places in which freedom is constituted rather than violated.

We now turn to discuss the republican approach to education. Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy will inform us in developing the idea of schools as free communities, thereby making neo-republican education more consistent and allowing its differences from liberal education to appear with greater clarity.

The neo-republican approach to education

Although the two most influential republican theorists, Skinner and Pettit, have hardly touched upon the subject of education, other contemporary republicans have stressed its importance for every functioning republic (Dagger, 1997; Honohan, 2002; Maynor, 2003; Peterson, 2011). In the words of Andrew Peterson, “it is not too strong to suggest that without civic education, civic republican projects are seriously undermined” (2011: 119). And yet, Peterson observes that “there is currently little detailed exploration of the links between civic republicanism and education and how such links might help to build a better understanding of the purposes and content of civic education” (Peterson, 2011: 5). In line with this observation (and notwithstanding Peterson’s own work), we believe that except for general statements, attempts to develop a republican educational theory are still hesitant, and fail to take the republican radical conception of freedom to its full conclusions.

The existing neo-republican discourse of education attempts to distinguish itself from the classical-liberal approach to education. Liberal educationalists traditionally argue that the state must not promote concrete values or specific conceptions of the good, and that education ought to be politically neutral, focusing only on acquainting students with their civil rights (Honohan, 2006: 203; Peterson, 2011: 13). The politicization of education, according to this liberal view, not only borders on political indoctrination, but also interferes with students' lives, thereby illegitimately impinging on their freedom. Nevertheless, most liberal educationalists are well aware that full political neutrality is impossible (Frazer, 1999), and insist that civic education aimed at developing virtues such as individuality, autonomy, and critical thinking is the responsibility of the state (Callan, 1997; Gutmann, 1999). These virtues are taken to be the necessary minimum for freedom and democracy, but it is argued that education must not pour substantive contents into them, lest it lapse into political indoctrination.

The republican approach is much less reluctant to introduce politics to the field of education. The emphasis it places on the concept of citizenship, as opposed to the concept of humanity that stands at the heart of liberalism, obliges republicans to acknowledge the need for political education and the state's responsibility to provide it:

Ttaking a cue from the classical republican approach, a modern republican state must play an active role in the content of public education by educating its citizens in the substance and forms of nondomination, and the necessary values and virtues that accompany it. In doing so, a modern republic hopes to cultivate certain types of individuals who locate their good with that of the greater community to foster group-level commitments that will reduce the amount of arbitrary interference within society. (Maynor, 2003: 181)

That is to say, civic education is critical to ensuring a reality in which society is not a battlefield of conflicting interests but rather an arena in which citizens cooperate to achieve a common good.

However, we believe that the current republican discourse of education still does not realize the full potential of the notion of freedom as non-domination, and fails to draw all the necessary conclusions from this starting point. We will attempt to illuminate the blind spots of this discourse, which are probably a result of a reluctance to break with the prevailing liberal discourse, with the help of Freire's critical pedagogy. Although republicanism and critical pedagogy seem to belong to two very distinct discursive worlds – liberal democracy and Marxism, respectively – their conceptual points of departure are in fact quite close, as freedom is central to both.

To be sure, Freire's and Pettit's concepts of freedom are by no means identical. Freire, who starts with observing a reality of oppression, conceives of freedom in active terms of liberation from existing domination, while Pettit thinks of freedom as constituted by a political structure, and his concept is consequently static by nature. Yet in both cases the heart of the matter is objection to unequal, hierarchical relations, and reflection on ways to engage in a political struggle against them.

One of the most important lessons of critical pedagogy is that school is no mere training ground for future political engagement, but rather a political arena in its own right and that those who attend it—both young and old—do so already as political agents (Freire, 1996: 36, 49; Giroux, 1988, 2009). Freire suggests that the mechanisms of oppression that tear contemporary society apart do not stop outside the school gates, and that students suffer from systematic oppression in school no less and often even more than anywhere else. Hence, the struggle against oppression must also take place in school: Freire aspires to turn schools from sites that reproduce the oppressive relations prevailing in society into sites of freedom and equality that serve as a starting point for the broader social struggle (Freire, 1996: 135–136). Under the conventional approach, which Freire refers to as the “banking” concept of education (pp. 52–53), teachers are the only sources of knowledge, and their task is to “deposit” it in the empty minds of passive students. This kind of education reestablishes time and again the hierarchical relations between teachers and students and dehumanizes the latter by not treating them as active, responsible persons. In the kind of education Freire advocates, on the other hand, teachers and students are learning partners: the differences between them are not ignored, but the starting point is a concept of learning as a common endeavor of producing knowledge, to which all parties have much to contribute (Freire, 1996: 45, 61; Freire, 2000: 30).

Neo-republican educational theory is also aware that schools often reproduce unequal social relations. But unlike critical pedagogy, the primary concern of existing republican discussions of education is society in general, while everything that occurs in school is considered first and foremost in terms of its relevance to what lies outside it in space and time: the students as adult citizens living in society. Concern for democracy and active citizenship, to be more precise, is aimed at creating a future society of free citizens, and the freedom of schoolchildren is, if anything, only a means to this end. Consequently, contemporary republican theory is not sensitive enough to various kinds of relations of domination that often exist within school. That is to say, existing theories tend too easily to allow education to take the form of domination if it seems that dominating students can contribute to non-domination in a future society. Although Richard Dagger, for example, explicitly objects to any approach that tries to mold students after a pre-given image (1997: 117), and Iseult Honohan warns against education that produces obedient citizens (2006: 205–206), they both conceive of education as one-way flow of knowledge and patterns of action, from teachers to students. Even when they emphasize active participation of students, they clearly have in mind practice or simulation directed from above in order to bear fruit in the future.

More recently, Neil Hopkins (2015) has pointed out that students are “stakeholders,” whose freedom is in danger if they do not take part in deliberative discussions on issues that concern them at school. But Hopkins limits his discussion to debates over school curriculum and does not apply the argument to other aspects of school life.

Sure enough, freedom as non-domination is relevant only to autonomous subjects capable of independent reasoning. But as Freire has taught us, if we assume in advance that some people—including the young—are incapable of thinking for themselves and need to be told what to think and to do, we risk reproducing the existing mechanisms of domination rather than challenging them. In order to realize the full political potential of the idea of non-domination, a republican theory of education must follow the path paved by critical pedagogy and reflect on the proper ways to make school a site of non-domination. In the next part of this article we try to outline a republican theory of education that applies three principles developed by Pettit to form a school model that is akin to a small-scale republic in which students are free citizens.

School as a site of non-domination

Pettit's republican theory rests on a philosophical definition of freedom and develops principles that ought to guide a state in order for it to grant its citizens such freedom. But are these principles also valid for schools? The obvious differences have to do not only with the age of the people in question, but also with the fact that at school the division of roles is quite strict, and attendance is usually compulsory.² We suggest that refusing to automatically see students as passive objects of intervention, namely realizing that students are potential subjects of domination, makes it possible as well as useful to think of school in terms of a state, and apply republican principles to it. This parallelism is not perfect, of course, but if we want school to be a site of freedom, it would be beneficial to adopt some of the principles conceived in the context of republican states. In what follows, we will focus on three basic principles found in Pettit: democratic control, civic contestation, and trust.

Democratic control

Pettit raises the notion of popular control over government as an answer to the question of state legitimacy. As the state is authorized to use power to enforce laws on its citizens, every political theory—let alone one that places the concept of liberty in its center—must confront the question of what legitimizes this authority (Pettit, 2012: 147). The common answer to this question, which originates with Hobbes (1996) but has become one of the cornerstones of liberalism, is consent: drawing on the idea of freedom of contract, this line of argument holds that if a person willingly consents to an arrangement, then every intervention that is part of the arrangement does not count as interference and does not impinge on the person's freedom. From the republican point of view, this answer is highly problematic: past consent may leave the person under the dominating will of another (Pettit, 2012: 158); the freedom of contract does not allow one to willingly sell oneself to slavery, and such a “free” contract is certainly an abuse of freedom.

Republican theory, therefore, answers that state interventions are legitimate so long as they are effectively controlled by the people: “The idea of controlled interference provides us with the core element for a republican theory of political legitimacy. It suggests that if the people governed by a state control the interference practiced by government… then they may not suffer domination at the hands of their rulers and may continue to enjoy their freedom in relation to the state” (Pettit, 2012: 153). To have a degree of control over a result, explains Pettit, means having some influence over the process leading to it, and using that influence to impose a desired direction on the process (for random, undesired influence does not give one control). It does not mean fully determining the process or the result (Pettit, 2012: 153). Control over government, therefore, does not erase the differences between the government and ordinary citizens, but rather gives the latter power to steer governmental activities. When popular control over government is effective and equally accessible to all, state legitimacy may properly be called democratic (Pettit, 2012: 169). In such a case we can say that every state intervention is carried out, as the title of one of Pettit's books reads, “on the people's terms.”

The argument we wish to develop, following Pettit, is that school education is legitimate so long as the “citizens” of the school community, both teachers and students, have control over the power exercised in it. At first glance, the idea may appear to be quite problematic: schoolchildren should study on the teachers' terms, rather than decide on their own when, what and how to learn. But control, as we have seen, does not imply full determination. Allowing students, together with teachers, to control school activities means letting them take some part in determining them. The degree of control may vary, of course, according to the students' age and abilities. That is to say, students’ control over school processes does not imply eliminating the differences between students and teachers, but developing mechanisms that make it possible for students to speak out and making sure their voices are heard.

The call to involve students in whatever takes place in their school is related to an important trend in contemporary theory of democratic and republican education that emphasizes open processes of deliberation (Gutmann, 1999). The deliberative democracy approach attempts to ground democracy in active participation of citizens in public forums of open communication and decision making (Christiano, 2008; Dryzek, 2003; Estlund, 2007; Gutmann and Thompson, 2004; Habermas, 1998). Education is of great importance for deliberative democracy, for it can develop the intellectual and emotional capacities needed for citizens to express themselves in discussion and listen to what others have to say (Peterson, 2011: 136–137). However, existing theories of deliberative education focus on preparing students to take part in future deliberative processes, as adult citizens; they are aware of the need to bring various themes to open discussions in school, but rarely view such discussions as an inherent aspect of decision-making in the present, behind school gates. Consequently, students have no effective control over the power exercised in school, and are in fact dominated.

A genuine republican approach, one that views students as partners in processes of decision-making in the present, may benefit from thinking of deliberation in terms of Freirean dialogue: a dialogue (or rather multilogue) between teachers and students that recognizes that each party has relevant knowledge and ideas from which all others can learn (Apple, 2002; Freire, 1996: 71; Kincheloe, 2008). Children, just like the peasants and workers of which Freire often writes, may lack the capacity to articulate and sometimes even to be fully aware of their needs and interests.³ Nevertheless, the unique way in which they experience the world makes them an important source of knowledge rather than merely its recipients. Teachers should thus “establish an intimate connection between knowledge considered basic to any school curriculum and knowledge that is the fruit of the lived experience of students as individuals” (Freire, 2000: 36). This insight is relevant not only to theoretical learning but also to practical engagement. Deliberative processes which scaffold students in understanding and articulating their own views, and give these views due weight when determining school policies, will enable students to control the power exercised in school and make it a site of non-domination.

Civic contestation

One of the key tenets of republican political theory, which differentiates it from most contemporary liberal-democratic theories, is that deliberation is simply not enough to secure democratic freedom. In republican terms, shared, equal and effective control of government is insufficient to provide for freedom as non-domination. Even when effective means of control are in place it is still possible that some people be subjected to unjust laws, or suffer from “the problem of the sticky minority,” in which certain individuals or groups are structurally in a position in which they are likely to be on the losing side of every vote, and are thus more or less permanently blocked from effectively controlling relevant processes (Pettit, 2012: 211–213). The republican solution is “to introduce a system of individualized contestation… There ought to be openings for particular individuals and subgroups to test the laws or proposals for how far the process in which they are generated respects the value of equal access to influence, and more generally, the value of equal status” (p. 213). That is to say, in addition to institutions of control and popular deliberation a republic should make available institutional channels—from designated courts and ombudsmen to support for public demonstrations—through which all those who feel they suffer injustice can contest any decision or law and receive fair, unbiased hearing. This way more voices will be heard, and fewer will be subjected to domination (Pettit, 1999, 2000).

Pettit is well aware that the formal existence of institutions for contestation is not enough, for the appeal to these institutions is essentially voluntary and circumstantial. There ought to be a “contestatory culture” that disposes people to oppose any instance of domination (Pettit, 2012: 225).

People must be on the watch for proposals or measures that are not suitably supported … and they must be ready to organize in opposition to such policies. It is only … in the presence of civic vigilance … that we can have any assurance that government will be forced to remain responsive to popular inputs. (Pettit, 2012: 226; see also Eylon and Harel, 2006)

To be sure, not everyone must be a political activist, but the community in general must practice a high level of civic engagement, which is the price to be paid for freedom as non-domination (Pettit, 2012: 174).

Education obviously has a crucial role in fostering a republican spirit of readiness to challenge moral and political wrongs. In this vein, Honohan claims that school education must cultivate “an orientation to challenge infringements not only of one’s own rights, but also those of others” (2006: 205). Ways to challenge such infringements must be taught not only in theory, but also be actively practiced: a truly republican school must allow its student-citizens open channels for contesting the decisions of teachers and management, and make sure their views are given fair consideration.

And yet, the nature of republican contestation can be easily misunderstood. Peterson's discussion of the role of contestation in republican education, for example, relies on Pettit and Maynor to argue that the aim of “contestatory deliberation” is to strive to consensus and the formation of shared values (Peterson, 2009: 64–66). This interpretation, which understands contestation as an aspect of deliberation and popular control, misses an essential and unique element of republicanism. Contestation, like contemporary republicanism in general, is not so much a matter of agreement and consensus but rather has to do with the conflictual, antagonistic nature of democratic politics: “freedom as non-domination supports a conception of democracy under which contestability takes the place usually given to consent; what is of primary importance is not that government does what the people tells it but … that people can always contest whatever it is that government does” (Pettit, 1997: ix). The republican spirit requires not only that citizens are taught how not to dominate others, but also that they be taught how not to be dominated.

We believe that this aspect of republican education will also be best understood if considered not in relation to liberal-democratic education but rather to critical pedagogy. As an offshoot of Marxist politics, critical pedagogy conceives of politics first and foremost as a struggle, and its addressees—or better, its agents—are primarily the oppressed, the “wretched of the earth” (Freire, 2000: 22). The emphasis on dialogue and cooperation in Freire's theory and praxis must not blur this starting point: the aim of politics is liberation, which means a radical change in existing relations of domination. Moreover, Freire argues that as modern capitalist society denies people their freedom, it also dehumanizes them: it does not allow them to consider themselves to be human subjects capable of fighting for what is theirs and changing reality (Freire, 1996: 25–27). Its outcome notwithstanding, political struggle, therefore, is intrinsically valuable as it rehumanizes the oppressed (Freire, 2014: 74). Accordingly, everything that takes place at school, including the curriculum and the student-teacher multilogue, should be thought of through the political prism of rehumanization through active struggle. Republican education that places non-domination at its center must work along the same lines: it must enable students to grow from children to citizens by way of civic engagement, an essential aspect of which is the struggle for rights and liberties. It must realize that other aspects of school life, including the acquisition of theoretical knowledge, will only be enhanced by active involvement of students in all aspects of the learning process.

Contestation is clearly a delicate issue. Schools are small, fragile communities, and many of their members are highly vulnerable, as their personal and civic virtues are still in the process of formation. Hence, every challenge to authority might be dangerous for both the institution and the individuals within it. It is therefore especially important that the channels of contestation be jointly and judiciously developed by students and teachers. These channels can include joint student-teacher committees, as well as petitions and even strikes and demonstrations. But as forms of civic engagement, they must not be limited in advance. For school citizenship to be pluralist and inclusive, it must acknowledge that different students need different ways to express protest. In this manner, schools can become effective platforms for genuine citizenship – not merely places in which citizens are trained, but rather laboratories in which ever new ways of political engagement and contestation are explored. Just like in the vision of critical pedagogy, political engagement within school will be a source of inspiration and action that will promote freedom and equality in society in general.

Trust

Where and how should we draw the borderline between effective civil contestation and sheer rebelliousness? On the one hand, if the school administration has the right to determine when contestation is legitimate, this would blunt the edge of republican contestation and turn school citizenship into mere simulation. On the other hand, if students are allowed to contest everything that takes place at school as they please, the entire school system would be undermined. To deal with this problem, we will borrow one last concept from Pettit's republicanism, which is of great relevance to education—trust.

Trust among citizens, and between citizens and state, is a crucial element in a republic (Pettit, 1997: 262). At first sight trust may seem to clash with civic vigilance, since vigilance implies constant refusal to automatically assume that all others respect the shared laws and norms. But Pettit insists that feeling trust does not necessarily mean expressing it, and that the citizens of the republic may certainly trust the state and their fellow citizens while publicly expressing distrust:

The republican recommendation is that, whatever confidence people feel in the authorities, they will have all the more reason to feel such confidence … if they always insist on the authorities going through the required hoops in order to prove themselves virtuous. To be vigilant in this sense will not be to feel an attitude of distrust towards the authorities – or at least not necessarily – but to maintain a demanding pattern of expectations in their regard. (Pettit, 1997: 264)

That is to say, trust and vigilance, properly understood, are complementary: the possibility of effective contestation is the ground from which trust between citizens and state grows, while one of the fruits of trust is the citizens’ reluctance to protest in ways that might undermine the very foundations of the republic.

As Freire makes clear, the notion of trust is especially relevant for the school community. Critical pedagogy, while explicitly calling for radical political action and undermining the traditional hierarchical relations between teachers and students, appeals to trust as the basis upon which dialogical cooperation must stand. It is often the case, according to Freire, that teachers bring their prejudices to school, and even the best-intended among them lack confidence in their students’ ability to think and learn (1996: 42). Therefore, “it is necessary to trust in the oppressed and in their ability to reason” (p.48), just as it is necessary that the oppressed learn to trust their educators even if they happen to belong to the ranks of the oppressors. Furthermore, the process through which people gain civic consciousness makes them politically responsible subjects, thereby restraining fanatical tendencies (p.18) and making it possible for teachers to trust that their students’ political engagement will not become mere violent rebelliousness.

This is of great importance also in the context of republican education. The way to making school a sustainable site of non-domination necessarily passes through the exhausting, dangerous effort of building mutual trust: if schools succeed in getting students to trust them, they will be able to trust students not to let contestation get out of hand.

Neo-republicanism and contemporary debates in critical pedagogy

Just as neo-republicanism can benefit from dialogue with critical pedagogy, so it can contribute to contemporary critical pedagogy. In the last couple of decades—following Freire's demise and due to significant changes in sociopolitical realities and academic discourses—critical pedagogy has suffered from disorientation, sometimes termed “crisis” (Tubbs, 2005: 226), leading to claims that it should “reinvent itself” (Allen and Rossatto, 2009: 165). In the following section we present four issues on which post-Freirean critical pedagogy is engaged in heated debates and show how neo-republican theory can help adjust critical pedagogy to contemporary realities.

Democracy and social justice

Various scholars have suggested that contemporary critical pedagogy is not a unified, coherent theory but rather a collection of theories and approaches that are not always compatible with and sometimes even contradict each other (Breuing, 2011; Gur-Ze'ev, 1998; Kincheloe, 2004). The common denominator of this plurality seems to be rather broad, consisting of deep commitment to democracy as well as to social justice. Although plurality of opinions under one “big tent” (Tarlau, 2014: 372) is not necessarily a problem, the relationship between the twin pillars of democracy and social justice is in need of explicit articulation to prevent the pillars from pointing in opposite directions. For they are not necessarily related: people may enjoy full democratic citizenship, at least in theory, even when there are huge economic gaps between them, and democratic rights may be violated even when such gaps are relatively small.

Neo-republicanism argues for an inherent relation between democracy and justice, as both are equally derived from the concept of freedom as non-domination. As shown above in the discussion of Pettit and conceptions of freedom, in the absence of democracy freedom as non-domination is necessarily violated. Pettit (2012) makes a similar claim in relation to justice: although non-domination does not require full economic equality, large economic differences inevitably lead to a situation in which some are in a position of power and domination over others. “If the state seeks to promote equal freedom as non-domination,” writes Pettit, “then it will be systematically programmed to reduce material inequalities in people’s resources and protections” (2012: 91; see also 2014: 77–108; for criticism of Pettit’s view, see Macleod, 2015). Hence, embracing freedom as non-domination can help critical pedagogues stabilize their common ground.

Multiple forms of domination

A fundamental debate among scholars and practitioners working under the “tent” of critical pedagogy concerns whether oppression is economic by nature, splitting society into two major classes of oppressors and oppressed, or whether there are multiple forms of oppression and domination (Peters, 2005). While various scholars have written on the need to include in critical pedagogy the struggle against oppression on racial (hooks, 1994), gender (Lather, 1991) or disability grounds (Gabel, 2002)—to name just a few examples—Peter McLaren (2005) insists on returning to classical Marxism and foregrounding class differences (Ellison, 2009).

Neo-republicanism is clearly in favor of acknowledging a plurality of forms of domination. The concept of domination it posits against freedom is not limited to the economic sphere, but is applicable to any sphere in which people are structurally empowered to interfere with others’ lives. Republican theories of education have therefore stressed the multicultural aspect of education for non-domination. Against some versions of republicanism, such as French Republicanism, that requires students, for example, to leave their religious identity markers outside school, neo-republicans argue that privileging majority over minority cultures creates unequal relations of power and constitutes a form of domination (Dagger, 1997; Honohan, 2006). Republicanism, therefore, should make sure that no identities or differences become a source of domination. Hence, dialogue with neo-republicanism can strengthen the critical pedagogy trend of rejecting the limitation of domination to the economic sphere, and provide it with an effective conceptual tool to present various structural relations as lacking freedom.

Freedom within school

What is critical pedagogy’s appropriate sphere of action? To some, school is the most important place for confronting insults to democracy and social justice (Giroux, 2011; Tarlau, 2014). For others, school is inherently oppressive, reproducing rather than challenging power relations (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Kincheloe, 2004). Accordingly, calls for deschooling, or at least for practicing critical pedagogy mainly in informal or voluntary sites, have become central in critical education (Illich, 2000; Macedo, 2006).

Neo-republican theory can be of great help to those seeking to challenge the linkage between school and lack of freedom. As Pettit makes clear, the mere existence of laws and regulations does not in itself violate freedom. In the section above on democratic control we have shown that when people take part in “editing” the laws, influencing them even if not actually writing them, their freedom is not at all violated. Hence, schools need not be sites of arbitrary interference and domination. Although republicanism shares critical pedagogy's concern in the face of the growing conservative and authoritarian trends in contemporary Western schools, it does not accept this as given and offers important tools – in the form of democratic control and contestation as discussed above – with which schools can be made into sites of non-domination.

Students of privileged backgrounds

Critical pedagogy originated in Brazil in the 1950s and 60 s, where Freire worked with extremely poor and oppressed populations. Although extreme poverty has by no means disappeared, critical pedagogy's immigration to the “First World,” particularly the US, raises the question of whether its principles and practices are suitable for privileged students, or even those who clearly belong to “oppressor” class (Allen and Rossatto, 2009). Moreover, the vision of radical, revolutionary change so central to critical pedagogy seems irrelevant and naïve to contemporary Western students, and many scholars call for replacing it with goals more suitable to today's world (Apple, 2005; Ellison, 2009).

We believe that republicanism, which has relatively little to offer in contexts where radical social change is needed, can help critical pedagogy approach privileged populations and promote democracy and social justice among middle- and upper-class students. The republican contribution in this context has a moral as well as a motivational aspect. Traditionally, critical pedagogy has not emphasized moral values: in the Marxist vein, it trusts the oppressed to understand the need for democracy and social justice as a result of their living conditions, without recourse to philosophy and abstract values. As this is not the case with more privileged students, the ethical dimension of critical education becomes much more important, and republicanism may help teach the well-thought-out value of freedom as non-domination from which the values of democracy and justice are easily derived. The motivational aspect lies in the fact that the application of this value seems much less implausible than the socialist vision of the founders of critical pedagogy. Engaging Western students in a struggle for non-domination, therefore, is much more realistic than expecting them to become revolutionaries.

Conclusion

Henry Giroux writes that in light of the growing anti-democratic trends, there is need for “a new vocabulary for linking hope, social citizenship, and education to the demands of substantive democracy” (2011: 175). The dialogue proposed here between neo-republicanism and critical theory contributes to such vocabulary, without suggesting that the two approaches should renounce their differences. They represent two separate intellectual and political projects, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and a plurality of approaches committed to democracy and social justice is not necessarily a problem. The important thing is for both theories not to remain static but rather adjust to historical dynamics. Dialogue between different stances is essential for maintaining such flexibility. In the words of Michael Apple, “Keeping such debates alive and vibrant is one of the best ways of challenging ‘the curriculum of the dead'. Building and defending a truly democratic and critical education is a collective project. We have much to learn from each other” (2005: 112).

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by The Open University of Israel's Research Fund (grant no. 47633).

Notes

Author Biographies

Itay Snir is a teaching faculty member at the Open University of Israel and research fellow at the Minerva Humanities Center, Tel Aviv University. He is co-editor of Mafte'akh: Lexical Review of Political Thought. His research interests include political philosophy and philosophy of education.

Yuval Eylon is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University of Israel. His research interests include ethics, metaethics, and political philosophy.

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