Revisiting the sense of education from a critical perspective to contribute to social justice

Abstract

This discussion article offers a revision of the meaning of educating in times of neoliberalism when we care about social justice, proposing that more than a speech about it, a critical education would consist in putting efforts into developing democratic human interactions.The Western neoliberal societies in which we live nowadays, have given education an important place as an engine of development, but paradoxically, have acquired instrumental rationality as common sense, making decisions in educational processes driven by an interest of control. Thus, these societies have developed educational systems obsessed with instrumental criteria to improve quality, such as effectiveness, efficiency, and performance. Therefore, the micro educational level, the human interaction, has impregnated with this instrumental logic, dehumanizing the people involved, mainly teachers and students, turning them into objects that must be able to achieve predetermined results.Considering this concern and following the thinking of Iris Young and Hanna Arendt, this work seeks to shed light to orient educational processes to strengthen social justice. In order to reach such aim, this article defends that any attempt to educate should start from the micro educational level, trying to confront dehumanizing logics of control and rejecting domination by interacting in a democratic way that strengthen the capacity of action of others.

Introduction

In the context of my PhD research “Initial Teacher Formation for Social Justice in the Chilean neoliberal context” that I am carrying out as an ANID (ex Conicyt) fellow at Lancaster University, I explore in my theoretical framework the meaning of education to identify critical aspects of the process of human development to contribute to social justice, understood critically as the fulfilment of recognition (Honneth, 1995) and lack of institutionalized oppression (Young, 1990). This discussion article is part of that work.

Western neoliberal societies have given to education a crucial importance, putting it in many cases as a priority at the level of public policies. Much it is said that education is important, but scarcely it is said if the meaning of the word “education” is much more than just going to school, and what it translates into in the ordinary and immediate life. Consequently, this article proposes to break down the concept to understand its deep meaning.

As education is a process of cultural transmission that takes part at all times and places, and the common sense imposed by neoliberalism is instrumental, then human relations, and with that, educational processes, distort when try to dominate instead of liberate. Then, it is crucial to re-visit the concept of education and its foundations to reflect deeply on what we are doing when we take part in the growth of a human being. In this discussion article, I intend to remind the reader that education is woven at the primary level—human interaction—so as to remark that education is much more than providing someone a place in an educational institution: as discussed in this article, education is played out in the kind of relationships lived by people through their lives.

If education has anything to do with the formation of human beings, the obligated reference to start this discussion is a reflection about what the human being is, followed by a discussion on other concepts related: culture, democracy, human interaction, critical awareness, and agency, to end with a discussion regarding the relation between the concepts of education and social justice.

Notion of human being

The importance of developing a clear conception of human being is that, as a deep belief, impact our expectations and in turn, influences the way we treat each other. Here, we will start this revision with an analytical position to visualize the different elements implied, to understand what makes us human. An excellent analysis is made by the Spanish philosopher of education Octavi Fullat, who reflects about the distinction between human and non-human animals. He says:

The other animals, when they are born, have already finished their careers; I mean that they are born prefabricated, although not dead. What they are going to be is already programmed in their genetic code, concretized over time in the environment that they had in luck or in disgrace. The human animal, on the contrary, has the feeling that it is unfinished, that it is always to be done (Fullat, 1992, own translation).

Thus, there is a key distinction between non-human and human animals, which is that the biological inheritance determines the whole existence of the former, meanwhile it is just a part of the constitution of the latter, which makes them absolutely dependent of other kind of inheritance: a cultural one. This is, they depend on other human beings to live and to be inserted in the cultural world to learn how to be human, which is to develop capacities and acquire behaviours and habits typical of the human group in which they were born. This process of becoming humans occurs as they have something that distinguishes them from other sentient beings: language as an articulator of awareness (Freire, 1996; Fullat, 1992).

But not only language, it was also their capacity to create things to facilitate their survival, which meant new information that began to accumulate, information that was not trespassed by the genetic transmission: it was then when a socialization process was required to the human being inserted in the world, now not just a natural world, but a cultural one. Thus, although born with capacities, human being needs cultural stimulation to unfold, to learn skills. It needs cultural transmission, or, in other words, education (Pérez Tapias, 1996).

Even though this clear distinction, the difference between non-human animals and human animals is not only that the former are just the result of their biological inheritance and the latter the result between their biological and cultural inheritance. It is also another and deeper distinction: Eric Fromm affirms that what distinguishes man from animals is self-awareness. Animals, says Fromm, have awareness too: they are aware of objects; they know this is one thing and that another. But humans have a different consciousness, a consciousness of themselves; they know that they exist and that they are something different, they experience themselves. That is the specific quality that makes human beings, actually human (Fromm, 2014).

Nevertheless, developing this capacity for consciousness is not guaranteed by the mere fact of being human: it depends on the quality of the process of cultural transmission. It could be that the person will be limited to the cultural heritage received from their caregivers, resulting in adapting to the cultural world; or, if he/she is offered the opportunity to do something new, resulting in a being of options, who is able to transform the world they live in (Freire, 1996). It is this latter development of awareness that Fullat names nous, a Greek ancient concept, saying:

Education of human beings is more than biological mechanisms configured by sociocultural mechanisms. The human being is also nous, that is, the urge for projects. If education is resolved by understanding only the first, the human being will be formed only as an adaptive being. If the person is also understood to be nous, then he/she will be formed to trace his/her own path (Fullat, 1992, own translation).

Fullat affirms then that the human being is a subject, as also Freire states, when he declares that a human being´s vocation is to be a subject, not an object. This is a very interesting meeting point with Critical Theory, which refuses to understand human beings as means to an end. As Kellner says introducing the Marcuse´s work One dimensional man: “Alienated from the powers of being-a-self, one-dimensional man thus becomes an object of administration and conformity” (Kellner, in Marcuse, 1994: xxix).

Thus, the element that makes us human is our capacity to inherit culture—language, knowledge, habits, behaviours, beliefs, traditions, etc.—and to transform it and contribute with new things coming from our own singularity. We are more human when we develop our nous (Fullat, 1992) or, when we are aware of our inconclusiveness (Freire, 2012: 76).

Arendt contributes to this issue in her work The human condition, making the difference between diverse human activities, highlighting as properly human our capacity to begin (Arendt, 2018), this is, our capacity to initiate something new, as opposite to be a bureaucrat, who has a limited and predefined capacity to act from a pre-established role. As Arendt says, when the discriminating ability to think is not exercised, the habit of questioning oneself about what is being done or what is thought to be abandoned. Under such conditions, the initiative of action atrophies and is replaced by the automatism of behaviours (Goyenechea de Benvenuto, 2012).

Our humanizing dimension must be exercised through the development of our capacity of thinking and doing things in new ways; on the contrary, we would be condemned to be just living predictable entities, this is, non-humans in human bodies, automatons. The danger of this is expressed by Arendt when she says that total power “can be achieved and safeguarded in a world of conditioned reflexes, of puppets without the slightest trace of spontaneity” (Arendt, 2003: 677).

The fragility of this is that developing this capacity depends on how we are treated by others appealing or not to our interiority, or capacity of consciousness, as we will discuss later.

Notion of culture

Having argued that what distinguishes us as humans is our dependence on cultural transmission, it is important now that we discuss the concept of culture, and we will do it from the perspective of three important scholars in the critical tradition: Bauman, Freire, and Arendt. Bauman offers the complete picture of culture explaining the different senses in which the term is used; Freire, reaffirms a notion of culture based on praxis; and Arendt, develops the notion of action, which has deep political and educational implications.

In his work Culture as Praxis, Bauman (1998) offers three different perspectives from which culture can be understood: as a concept, as a structure and as a praxis. Beyond the positions that distinguish cultured from uncultured persons, as if culture was a detachable part of a human being, or there was an ideal form as the right and the true, Bauman defends the meaning of culture as praxis, which implies that culture is intrinsically part of the human existence. Bauman understands that culture is unique for humankind in the sense that only humans, of all living creatures, are able to challenge their reality and to call for a deep meaning, justice, freedom, and good—whether individual or collective (Bauman, 1998).

Also alluding to culture as praxis, Freire defines praxis in his work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2012) as reflection and action aimed at the structures to be transformed. Thus, through praxis, oppressed people can acquire a critical awareness of their own condition to struggle for liberation (Freire, 2012). Thus, praxis is the process by which theory is enacted or realized by human beings in the social and natural world, which has deep implications in political and educational realms, because it implies interaction and transformation.

This notion is intimately related to the notion of active life (vita activa) of Arendt, who understands praxis as the highest and most important level of the active life, the true realization of human freedom. Arendt (2018) distinguishes three sorts of human activities: labour, work, and action. The first one, labour, is understood by Arendt as a human activity directed at meeting biological needs for self-preservation, that is never completely fulfilled, so never really reaches an end. The second one, work, unlike labour, has a clearly defined beginning and end, comprising the whole process, from the original idea of the object to the obtaining of raw materials, to the finished product. Finally, action, which includes speech, is how humans disclose themselves to others, which allows us to distinguish ourselves from others as unique and unexchangeable beings (Arendt, 2018).

An education to become and remain human

Considering then that culture is a human praxis, and this praxis has to do with activities related to action, this is, the true realization of human freedom by participating in public life (Arendt, 2018), we can say then that an education at the service of humanization should help people to develop their capacity for action to be included in public life. This kind of education would need two basic elements: (1) a human interaction that develops self-awareness and (2) a balance between this individualization process with a socialization process (Pérez Tapias, 1996). We will revise both as follows.

A human interaction that develops self-awareness

As processes of cultural transmission occur in the human relation, it is important to reflect about a constant tension between carer and growing-person, especially if they are children and young people: the possibility to influence and being influenced, and, at the same time, to promote the right to have an own voice, to develop a self-awareness, an original and singular position. It seems to be paradoxical, but it is not if we accept that influencing is inevitable but still leaves room for freedom to the influenced person.

It is inevitable to have to decided between a process that imposes messages as truths, no matter how well intentioned it is, and a process that appeals to the growing person´s inner self to evaluate these messages before incorporating them as truths, teaching to question what is being taught. The first is unilateral, a one-way transmission of a message; the second, dialogue. It is in that decision that there is an implicit and subconscious message, a hidden curriculum: I allow you or not to be conscious about the cultural heritance I want you to absorb and shape you. That requires first, obviously, a critical awareness from the carer to transmits a culture from a conscious decision. Therefore, we are in a delicate process that can be a vicious or a virtuous cycle: reproductive or transformative.

An important action to take is to develop a kind of relation that enables becoming aware of the self-existence due to the person is treated as if he was able to behave as a legitimate person. As Pritchard (1972) says that rather than appeal to the capacity for a sense of justice, he prefers to appeal to the capacity for developing it (Pritchard, 1972). Accordingly, I would add that it is preferable to appeal to the capacity for having a conscious, for developing it. And this can be extended to appeal to the capacity to feel, think, reflect, value, understand, and create… understanding that a human being is marvellous, able to do unexpected things.

We can infer, then, that a relationship based on dialogue will generate better conditions to nourish awareness than if it was based on one-way transmission. Unfortunately, in most areas of human interactions, the primacy of imposition over shared decision-making to become co-creators of the circumstances that are lived is the usual. This lack of possibilities of being a co-creator threatens no less than our human condition, relegating us to be adaptive beings. We cannot speak about educational processes if they undermine our human condition. Cultural transmission processes can be, then, something different from education, resulting even in indoctrination if they do not leave room to raise people´s own voice.

A process that balances individual and social dimensions

When speaking about education, in modern western liberal societies great importance is attributed to the process of individuation of the person. This, however, should not mean ignoring the social dimension in the formation, as participating in public life, as well as capacity of action (Arendt, 2018) is what makes us being human.

To achieve this necessary balance, Pérez Tapias (1996) affirms that an education at the service of humanization should harmonize the problematic interrelation of individual and social dimensions, balancing individual and social demands, developing in every person the feeling of being part of something that represents them, and, at the same time, feel respected by the whole in their singularity, because we are neither just individual beings nor standard components of a whole. A perspective of democracy is implicitly valued here, as a way of living in every space of people’s daily life, in which decisions are made with the participation of the ones affected by the norms to develop a fair and impartial sense of justice.

This perspective of democracy overcomes the representative paradigm by being deliberative and participative, allowing to develop a sense of belonging to every individual who wants to contribute to the whole, feeling responsible for their community; and society values every one of its members as a unique and singular contribution. We are describing then, the participation in a public sphere that is pluralistic, respectful of the differences, inclusive, diverse, and empathetic with others’ realities.

This is intimately related to the Arendtian conception of active citizenship, the value and importance of civic engagement and collective deliberation about all matters affecting the political community (Passerin, 2019). According to this tradition, politics finds its authentic expression whenever citizens gather in a public space to deliberate and decide about matters of collective concern. Here, democracy is more than a means: it is an end by itself.

This position overcomes the liberal notion of autonomy inherited from modernity, that applies to the individual, and considers the close relationship between autonomy and recognition (Honneth, 1995). As we recognize ourselves, which is a process that originates thanks to others, we know who we are, and can develop a self-conscious of our existence, needs, and expectations. We cannot be free if we do not display our beings in a stage shared with others, nor can the collective space be so if it does not have individuals who contribute to its collective emancipation.

Critical education: Reflecting on our Western cultural heritage for a fairer world

A critical education recognizes that no cultural transmission process can be neutral because all of them transmit thoughts, beliefs, traditions, habits, etc., that imply a model of a human being and society. As it is impossible not to influence others, Critical Theory is very helpful to define education at the service of humanizing, as it provides categories to think education in terms of why, what, how, and what for, to understand that common sense and goodwill are not enough.

Critical Theory could help people to understand their living conditions, to aspire to a more dignified life and to realize that the majority is oppressed by a controlling dominant discourse that seeks to shape culture to continue oppressing in a veiled form. Accordingly, Critical Education is a philosophy of education connected to those struggles against oppression in all its forms which develops reflective thought and practice for social change from the ground up for challenging power structures from the immediate and real context.

As every person absorbs a cultural legacy through human interaction and develops a subjectivity, the most important decision to make from critical education is how to allow others to absorb cultural transmission in a critical way, this is, with some filters or criteria to protect themselves from manipulation and dominion. This demands to accept that our subjectivities are impregnated with notions inherited from modernity that must be revised to decide if we want to repeat them, as the notions of autonomy, reason, progress, and democracy, among others.

In the case of autonomy, it could be appropriate to consider that is more than the absence of external obstacles, because they can also be internal. How do we know how “independent” our desires, decisions, and options are, if they are influenced or are a deeply reflect the cultural transmission we have received? It is inevitable to be influenced by them, nonetheless, absorbing this influence uncritically is completely different from having clear criteria—filters—to decide which to absorb and, therefore, accepting that such influence shapes who we are.

In relation to progress, we also must reflect about its meaning, as the advance of modernity showed us a horrible reality: stop being human. Let us think about the German soldiers who made the holocaust possible by choosing to become just gears in a machine, giving up their own will to act like mere puppets. In Arendtian terms, it is precisely such lack of self-reflection the precondition for the appearance of automatisms, both in thought and behaviour. Bárcena and Mélich say about it that “it is not unwise to claim that without a large-scale bureaucratic organization of subjects who are incapable of thinking for by themselves and without a technology developed outside of a morally formed conscience, mass murder would not have been possible” (Bárcena and Mélich, 2000: 45, own translation). Thus, the progress that we thought we had made in the last century as humanity is not such, if we consider that the effect it has produced on a human scale has been devastating.

Other concept important to revise is the notion of democracy, wondering how free we are in the kind of life administration we live in. Although we know we do not live in totalitarianisms but in modern liberal representative democracies, it is important to consider that there are ways of control that deprive citizens of the ability to act in the world. As Bárcena and Mélich point out:

…the management of life, its administration and putting it into circulation in the market under the perhaps less fearsome, but no less cruel names, of globalization and all that jargon of competitiveness and efficiency (…) Under this new face, apparently more friendly, politics uses whatever it takes to achieve its purposes, and one of its effects is to control, to avoid surprises and uncertainties, the ability of initiative and radical novelty of citizens (Bárcena and Mélich, 2000: 42–43, own translation).

Maybe the most important concept behind all this conception of world is reason. As our recent history shows, the reason unfolded along modernity, instrumental reason, did not turn out to be a tool for progress, but rather for barbarism. Horkheimer and Adorno affirm that reason perverted in its own trajectory by deploying unilaterally, as an instrumental-strategic reason, to the detriment of its other dimensions, such as moral reason (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1994; in Pérez Tapias, 1996). This invites us to interact with the world from a broader perspective overcoming the means-ends spirit, as it is restricted to technical development that hindered the moral field. An education that is able to assume critically the modernity legacy should promote instead a situated and dialogic rationality, moral reason (Pérez Tapias, 1996).

Considering that technical rationality has reached all areas of modern human life, a critical education should find ways to raise new generations through processes of cultural transmission guided by a moral instead of instrumental reason. Thus, critical education is at the service of social justice when we are against oppression and domination, as I discuss in the next section.

Education for social justice: The importance of human interaction

I am concerned about the threat of dehumanization in the face of the advance of instrumental rationality—as the background spirit of neoliberalism—which permeates everyday events expressed in the logics of domination and instrumentalization we live, making us unconscious reproducers of the logic of domination that oppresses us. Genuine attention should be paid to how to remain human, dealing with a culture in which we feel powerless as we do not know how to articulate with others to develop projects to make our individual and collective existence meaningful so as to overcome the feelings of frustration or anger that may arise when we find no alternatives to face injustice.

In this sense, the project of Iris Young is very helpful to orient a critical education towards social justice, which is the elimination of institutionalized domination and oppression (Young, 1990: 15). Accordingly, an education for social justice is the one that promotes capacities to deal against oppression. Even though it is known that a critical education considers in particular this ideal, what I will offer in this section is a reflection about some specific elements that a critical education should consider.

I propose that an education oriented to social justice, more than giving an explicit speech about justice or cover topics directly related to it, should put human interaction as the core of its doing, as it is through interactions that we are allowed to be ourselves, and with that, develop an awareness and capacity of action.

Human interaction is crucial because is the place where subjectivity is gestated. As Pérez Tapias says, through interactions pass attitudes, a key factor that configures individuals. As he says:

The most important thing that is transmitted through the web of relationships through which education runs are attitudes. These, much more than the contents that are expressly taught, are what end up being decisive in shaping the ethos or mood of each individual, as well as the mood that is dominant in a society (Pérez Tapias, 1996: 58).

An education for social justice centred on human interactions as its sensitive core demands educators to develop relations of such a quality that, instead of dominating, are able to take care. This is especially important, necessary, and challenging in a role of offering others a relation with power that, instead of meaning oppression, means sharing wills to carry out things together.

From this perspective, it is possible to implicitly understand that power is a central element of every human interaction. As Foucault says, power is not an extension of the power of the State: Power has autonomy from it and has its own configuration (Foucault, 1980). Micro-mechanisms of power remind us that power is grounded in everyday life (Gledhill, 1994: 126). This perspective allows us to understand critical education as a micropolitical issue, in which are at stake the formation of desire, beliefs, inclinations, and judgements in political subjects (Scherer, 2015).

When interactions unfold, they influence and transform people, in a dynamic and spontaneous process, conforming an experience that a human being has by being there, unconsciously becoming human beings of certain characteristics, according to the way they are treated by others. It is in an imperceptible level, which is cumulative and, day after day, it gestates the persons we are. I would like to invite here to think about micropolitics as that everyday space that, expected or not, for better or worse, we as human beings fill with daily interactions that have an impact in all of us, especially the youngest.

If we accept our responsibility of the implicit messages we give through our attitudes in our daily interactions with others, then we must accept that this thing we call “the system,” the society, is nothing more than what we revive in our encounters with others. We reproduce our cultural legacy through our attitudes unless we decide to change it. Any people responsible to educate newcomers, must reflect on: What kind of society do I want to contribute to build up? What kind of human being do I want to contribute to form? Do I want to reproduce this society? What needs to be maintained and what needs to be changed? How coherent are my intentions with my attitudes towards others? Micropolitics is the level at which we can hold ourselves accountable.

Micropolitics is then the space of human interaction in which this delicate and fundamental task of helping other being to become and remain human can be carried out, by, as Fullat (1992) would say, starting from the person, this is, appealing to the opinion of the growing person, instead of imposing a must-be. If we want them to learn something, we should remember that learning is a search of something, and this cannot start from an already solved knowledge. Starting from a question that is carefully posed, inviting other to genuinely express their point of view, far from intimidating, promotes awareness on the appearance of the starting point of comprehension of something in the learner, inviting the growing person to look for answers into themselves, exploring in their authentic inner world: feelings, sensations, intuitions, and thoughts, to create an own and authentic position about something. What is at stake in the interaction is the possibility of becoming aware of one’s own way of feeling and understanding the world; it is at this micropolitical level that the formation of subjectivity and capacity of action is played out.

If we understand that attitudes are the reflect of our internal subjectivity, and if we consider that this subjectivity as a reflection of how it has been shaped by others’ attitudes, then, to break free from our cultural legacy and feel responsible of its change, it will be possible, being careful with our attitudes and also being responsible with the source or origin of these attitudes, checking and reflecting about those virtues, vices, kindness, and selfishness acquired from the cultural transmission received, hopefully trying to answer the question What this social culture has made with me?, revealing the complex, close, and imbricated relation between culture, sociology, and psychology.

As a way of closure

As a general definition, we can say that an education for social justice, from a critical perspective, is then a humanizing process based on a relation free from domination and oppression, and at the same time leads to develop a uniqueness and singularity helping being part of a whole to build alternatives to decide a common destiny together.

We need to reflect on our understanding about the human being, since an education at the service of social justice must understand the sense of human as the ability to create novelty and have an own voice. Consequently, this depends on the possibility this person has to bring out their inner self, as their caregivers promote and stimulate them to become aware of their feelings, thoughts, sensations, fears, and expectations, to make appear their voice, the singularity of their person.

This will be possible as the educational processes are based on human interactions led by a moral reason, the one which asks about the good and the just, instead of the useful, as instrumental reason does. A way to relate each other not to control others, but to let them be and create new ways to do things together, in a way respectfully enough to develop an own identity as unique and singular human beings; flexible enough to give the person the possibility to develop their own initiative, awareness of their own existence as an individual and social human being; dialogical and reflexive enough to develop an own voice as a starting point to give experience a personal meaning; and free enough to develop an own will to make decisions conquering and living freedom responsibly with others.

Finally, I want to offer what for me is the finest and most concise definition of education, given by Bárcena and Mélich in their book Education as an ethical event: “Education, the authentic experience of formation, constitutes an event of an ethical order within which, as the central nucleus, there is a relationship” (Bárcena and Mélich, 2000: 35, own translation). Considering this, an education for social justice, this is, that promotes liberation through recognition and rejects oppression and domination, is gestated in human interaction. And every one of us could be accountable for that.