This review has been accessed  times since October 26, 1998
Giroux, Henry A. (1997). Pedagogy and the Politics
of Hope: Theory, Culture, and Schooling. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press.
290 Pp.
ISBN 0-8133-3274-5 (Paper) $21.95
Reviewed by Marina Gair
Arizona State University
October 26, 1998
Henry Giroux's Pedagogy and the Politics of
Hope is a collection of essays published during the last two
decades. It is organized according to three major themes central to
pedagogy and schooling: Theoretical Foundations for Critical Pedagogy,
Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom, and Contemporary
Concerns. Giroux's energy is initially invested in
analyzing the structural and ideological constraints
on public schooling. He addresses the political
aspects of pedagogy, and then broadens to social and
moral matters relevant to schooling that involve the
larger society. Each section represents a
particular phase in his development: late 1970s
reflections on social class and schooling rooted in
neo-Marxism and the Frankfurt School theory, the
development of "critical pedagogy" in the early
1980s, and various new approaches to understanding
the pedagogical process in the 1990s.
The first section, Theoretical Foundations for
Critical Pedagogy, comprises four essays: "Schooling
and the Culture of Positivism: Notes on the Death of
History" (1979), "Culture and Rationality in
Frankfurt School Thought: Ideological Foundations
for a Theory of Social Education" (1982), "Ideology
and Agency in the Process of Schooling" (1983); and
finally, "Authority, Intellectuals, and the Politics
of Practical Learning" (1986). Giroux pursues
radical democracy by isolating the historical
dynamics, prevailing hegemonic ideologies and
structural forces that influence and shape the
American educational experience. Most central for
him are the epistemological, political, cultural,
and social margins that confine and undermine
knowledge and the process of schooling, and in
particular the culture of what he calls positivism
and technocratic rationality. He contends that this
culture did not simply become the dominant
ideological formation ex nihilo, but in fact evolved
into a material force with oppressive features
having important implications for the process of
schooling. "This form of rationality," writes
Giroux, "prevents us from using historical
consciousness as a vehicle to unmask existing forms
of domination as they reproduce themselves through
facts and common-sense assumptions that structure
our view and experience of the world. The logic of
positivist thought suppresses the critical function
of historical consciousness. For underlying all the
major assumptions of the culture of positivism is a
common theme: the denial of human action grounded
in historical insight and committed to emancipation
in all spheres of human activity. What is offered
as a replacement is a form of social engineering
analogous to the applied physical sciences. It is
this very denial which represents the essence of the
prevailing hegemonic ideology" (p. 12). Giroux
charges that positivism, by ignoring the value of
historical perspectives and thus contributing to the
"irrelevance" of the past in understanding the
future, freezes both human beings and history. His
major aim has been to illuminate the workings of
contemporary schooling by introducing into
educational discourse cultural politics, notions of
ideology, power, history, race, gender, and class
struggle in order to illuminate the relationships among
these factors and their relationships to the process
of schooling.
Giroux sees a passive conception of humanity
implied by the perspective of technocratic
rationality. "Central to this form of rationality
in the curriculum field is the notion of objectivity
and neutrality. Guided by the search for
reliability, consistency, and quantitative
predictions, positivist educational practice
excludes the role of values, feelings, and
subjectively defined meanings in its paradigm" (p.
19). In the positivist pedagogical model, Giroux
finds that there is a place neither for social
history nor the generation of personal meanings nor
respect for individual potential. This "methodology
madness" as he calls it, "is rampant in public
school pedagogy and has resulted in a form of
curricular design and implementation that
substitutes technological control for democratic
processes and goals" (p. 20). Thus, Giroux believes
that the manner in which teachers view knowledge,
teach students to view knowledge, and structure
classroom experiences reflects an impersonal,
universalized, ahistorical, context- free knowledge
that is driven by a positivist ideological
undercurrent.
Giroux points to the work and insights of the
Frankfurt School, existentialism, and new left
thought as vital resources for undermining
technocratic rationality and expanding the terrain
for developing a reconstructed theory of pedagogy.
Frankfurt School theorists on the whole rejected
forms of rationality that subordinated human
consciousness and adopted a perspective that
supported critical thinking pursuant to individual
emancipation and social change. They conceptualized
schools as cultural sites that mirror societal
organization and further explored the relationship
between ideology, power, and class and how these
shaped the process of schooling. Giroux credits the
Frankfurt School with dismantling traditional and
uncritical views of socialization in American
education, and thereby making way for new types of
inquiry. Frankfurt School theorists have helped us
see schools as political rather than neutral, and in
the process have revealed schools to be sites of
cultural reproduction with a significant role in
reinforcing and legitimizing the dominant social
relations and their ideologies.
In the second section, Critical Pedagogy in the
Classroom, Giroux develops his theory of border
pedagogy with three essays; "Radical Pedagogy and
the Politics of Student Voice" (1986); "Border
Pedagogy in the Age of Postmodernism" (1988),
"Disturbing the Peace: Writing in the Cultural
Studies Classroom" (1993). Giroux tries to awaken
not just educators but all Americans to create
liberatory pedagogical possibilities through a
radical form of "border crossing." Giroux proceeds
to define and discuss transformative and
emancipatory pedagogy and learning. Paramount to
this discussion, he draws on the work of Paulo
Freire and Mikhail Bakhtin, who articulate the
notions of struggle, student voice, and critical
dialogue, and he attributes central notions in the
development of emancipatory pedagogy to these
visionaries. He writes, "I believe that schools need
to be reconceived and reconstituted as democratic
counterpublic spheres as places where students learn
the skills and knowledge needed to live in and fight
for a viable democratic society. Within this
perspective, schools will have to be characterized
by a pedagogy that demonstrates its commitment to
engaging the views and problems that deeply concern
students in their everyday lives. Equally important
is the need for schools to cultivate a spirit of
critique and respect for human dignity that will be
capable of linking personal and social issues around
the pedagogical project of helping students become
active citizens" (p. 143). Giroux writes that "the
dominant school culture generally represents and
legitimates the privileged voices of the white
middle class and upper classes. In order for
radical educators to demystify the dominant culture
and to make it an object of political analysis, they
will need to master the language of critical
understanding. If they are to understand the
dominant ideology at work in schools, they will need
to attend to the voices that emerge from three
different ideological spheres and settings: these
include the school voice, the student voice, and the
teacher voice" (p. 141). As pedagogical practice,
border pedagogy underscores the need to challenge
and resist existing boundaries of knowledge and
create new ones. Thus, it is imperative to create
classroom conditions that facilitate students'
ability to speak, write, and listen in a
"multiperspectival language". Within this discourse
students are no longer marginalized but engaged as
border-crossers who challenge, cross, remap, and
rewrite borders as they enter into counter-discourse
with established boundaries of white, patriarchal,
and class-specific knowledge. Likewise, "border
pedagogy provides opportunities for teachers to
deepen their own understanding of the discourse of
various others in order to effect a more dialectical
understanding of their own politics, values, and
pedagogy. What border pedagogy makes undeniable is
the relational nature of one's own politics and
personal investments. But at the same time border
pedagogy emphasizes the primacy of politics in which
teachers assert rather than retreat from pedagogies
they utilize in dealing with the various differences
represented by the students who come into their
classes" (p. 158). In essence, teachers become
border-crossers when they legitimize excluded social
narratives, experiences and voices and make them
available in the classroom. In this way, teachers
enhance their own political, social and intellectual
efficacy. Giroux urges educators to redefine their
role from servants of hegemonic power to public and
"transformative intellectuals" that reject dominant
forms of rationality or "regimes of truth," and
commit themselves instead to furthering equality and
democratic life.
Giroux also promotes the use of "border
writing," which he describes as a form of border
literacy in which students are engaged as active
learners in analyzing popular texts to challenge
disciplinary borders. Giroux has found that in his
own practice "border-writing" is also an attempt to
"get the students to learn from each other, to
decenter power in the classroom, to challenge
disciplinary borders, to create a borderland where
new hybridized identities might emerge, to take up
in a problematic way the relationship between
language and experience, and to appropriate
knowledge as part of a broader effort at self-
definition and ethical responsibility" (p. 176). In
Giroux's view, it is essential to make everyday
experience "problematic and critical" by exposing
its hidden political assumptions. For Giroux, this
critical undertaking takes on an emancipatory
purpose by empowering students to develop the
"social imagination" and "civic courage" necessary
for them to participate in their own "self-
formation." Giroux also argues that students should
develop a counter-discourse that challenges and
critiques established models of Western culture.
Instead of a common culture, he calls for the
construction of a new common language, a democratic
language.
In the last section, Giroux examines
contemporary issues including postmodernism and
feminism, concentrating on cultural difference in
the classroom. The essays of the last section
include "Rethinking the Boundaries of Educational
Discourse: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Feminism"
(1990) and "Insurgent Multiculturalism and the
Promise of Pedagogy" (1994). Giroux finds support
in postmodernist and feminist theory for his vision
of shaping academic disciplines and discourse
through educational theory. What Giroux identifies
as modernist sensibilities are by nature progressive
and emancipatory. He writes that "postmodernism
raises questions and problems so as to redraw and
re-present the boundaries of discourse and cultural
criticism. The issue that postmodernism has brought
into view can be seen, in part, through its various
refusals of all natural laws and transcendental
claims that by definition attempt to escape from any
type of historical and normative grounding. In
fact, if there is any underlying harmony to various
discourses of postmodernism, it is in their
rejection of absolute essences" (p. 193). The
criticism offered by contemporary theorists, argues
Giroux, "provides an important service in assisting
those deemed Other to reclaim their own histories
and voices. By problematizing the dominant notion
of tradition, postmodernism has developed a power-
sensitive discourse that helps subordinated or
excluded groups to make sense out of their own
social worlds and histories while simultaneously
offering new opportunities to produce political and
cultural vocabularies by which to define and shape
their individual and collective identities" (p.
198). Postmodernism, then, challenges the
egocentricity of elite culture and legitimizes
popular culture and everyday experience. Likewise,
feminist positions "have challenged the
essentialism, separatism, and ethnocentrism that
have been expressed in feminist theorizing, and in
doing so have seriously undermined the Eurocentric
and totalizing discourse that has become a political
straightjacket within the movement" (p. 205).
Giroux does not dwell on the possible conflicts
between certain forms of postmodernism and feminism,
but rather focuses on how they complement one
another and forge a practical partnership towards
improving democratic life. Together, they offer
emancipatory pedagogy a language that "offers
educators an opportunity to develop a political
project that embraces human interests that moves
beyond the particularistic politics of class,
ethnicity, race, and gender" (p. 226). "Central to
such a politics and pedagogy," claims Giroux, "is a
notion of community developed around a shared
conception of social justice, rights, and
entitlement" (p. 227). For Giroux, all this works
in the service of democracy.
Finally, in a new essay, "Intellectuals and the
Culture of Reaganism in the 1990s," Giroux
identifies the conservative logic of the Reagan era
as a cultural revolution that has redefined the role
of education. Giroux writes, "one tragic legacy of
Reagan's cultural revolution is that youth,
especially poor urban youths, have become scapegoats
in the neoconservative attack on welfare, civil
rights laws, and health care policies. Demonized in
the press as thugs and criminals, young black males
in particular have been blamed for the breakdown of
public civility while young, unwed mothers have been
targeted as the source of all social evils in
American society" (p. 255). Instead, he argues,
these must be understood as inherited ones that are
shaped by larger historical conditions. He claims
that schools did not do well under Reaganism, where
"neoconservatives have attempted to make the public
school an adjunct of the corporation, offering its
services to the highest corporate bidder" (p. 255).
The marketplace mindset has withered political
movements and the priority of democracy in both the
academic and public arena. Essentially, the role of
education has been redefined in terms of
"privatization and standardization" (p. 255). This
conservative trend thwarts efforts to make schools
democratic spheres. In opposition, Giroux protests
that there has been a "consistent attempt to remove
schools from their role in educating students as
social subjects who can take up the burdens and
responsibilities of democratic public life.
Instead, neoconservatives have largely defined
education using a monocultural and commercial logic
by which pedagogy serves primarily to produce
consumers" (p. 256). "When not demonized, youths
are viewed as merely filling market niches in
commercial culture that uses mass media, especially
television, to sell young children and adolescents
toys, clothes, and every other conceivable product"
(p. 256). Mainstream political leadership, he
believes, ignores these questions of culture,
identity, power and social responsibility, thereby
stifling any real discussion of such topics as
hierarchy, exploitation, and multiculturalism.
Against the rise of "corporate culture" and its
push toward vocationalization of colleges of
education, Giroux calls for the reconsideration and
restructuring of the study of pedagogy within a
cultural studies framework. He advocates a
conception of educational policy that situates
university education within a more expansive
political and ethical discourse. For Giroux, such
policies would "move away from an assimilationist
ethic and the profoundly ethnocentric fantasy of a
common culture to a view of
national identity that includes diverse traditions,
histories, and the expansion of democratic public
life" (p. 268). Giroux makes an appeal for
curricula that examine culture as it is actually
lived rather than culture as it is "fixed" in the
minds of certain elites. The establishment of
Cultural Studies in the university is a political
project that would develop what Giroux characterizes
as an oppositional public sphere that should replace
the established "fixed" disciplines with a
scholarship of oppositional discourse. Such
discourse legitimates rather than suppresses more
radical forms of knowledge.
Giroux suggests that educators should become
vigorously involved in social criticism so as to
return universities to their most important task:
creating a public sphere in which citizens exercise
power over their own lives and learning: "Whether
in schools or in other cultural spheres, public
intellectuals must struggle to create the conditions
that enable students and others to become cultural
producers who can rewrite their own experiences and
perceptions by engaging with various texts,
ideological positions, and theories. They must
construct pedagogical relations in which students
learn from each other, learn to theorize rather than
simply ingest theories, and begin to address how to
decenter the authoritarian power of the classroom.
Students must also be given the opportunity to
challenge disciplinary borders, create pluralized
spaces from which hybridized identities might
emerge, take up critically the relationship between
language and experience, and appropriate knowledge
as part of a broader effort at self-definition and
ethical responsibility" (p. 263). Higher education
should engage in political education by "teaching
students to take risks, challenge those with power,
honor critical traditions, and be reflexive about
how authority is used in the classroom" (p. 265).
Such a political education would allow students to
understand the workings of power and how it shapes
their growth as critical citizens. Otherwise,
"Lacking a political project, the role of the
university intellectual is reduced to a technician
engaged in formalistic rituals unconcerned with
disturbing and urgent problems that confront larger
society" (p. 265).
The collection under review reaches beyond
traditional educational theory and into truly cross-
disciplinary territory. By doing so, Giroux has
broadened our understanding of the relationship
between schooling and political life by challenging
the traditional roles of students, teachers and
schooling by conceptualizing new "spaces" for
learning. Giroux thus helps democratic educators
with one of their most pressing tasks: to develop a
cogent critical language for articulating how race,
class, gender, power and ideology impinge upon
educational practice and experience.
In terms of style, there has always been
controversy surrounding Giroux's use of language,
particularly over linguistic clarity, or more
appropriately, the utter lack of it. This
collection of essays is continued evidence of the
thorny, formidable, vigorous, and restless (to the
point of frustration) kind of discourse that has
been attributed to Giroux. Unlike some of his
earlier essays which were more a pastiche, or
accessible conversation pieces, this book is dragged
down by an undertow of frustrating, alienating
discourse that does not call upon the participation
of the "average" reader. While he makes no apologies
for the complexity of his style, arguing that "the
call for clarity suppresses difference and
multiplicity, prevents curriculum theorists and
other educators from deconstructing the basis of
their own linguistic privilege, and reproduces a
populist elitism that serves to deskill educators
rather than empower them" (Giroux, 1992, p. 220),
his opaque language unduly burdens the reader.
In that sense it hampers
his proclaimed emancipatory cause. Through a
language that is "critical,
oppositional and
theoretical," Giroux believes educators can be moved
from deskilled, silenced, and subordinate
positions, to a realm of discourse in which they
labor intellectually at educational criticism. But
for teachers and students, his words appear as "all
talk"--"talk" that is predominantly addressed at
intelligentsia. To question, define, and challenge
--to become political activists in the spirit of
Giroux, some sense of accessibility to his points is
necessary. Giroux's work would be enhanced by what
Habermas has called "nonrepressive dialogue" in
which meaning and reality can be mutually
negotiated. In this collection, Giroux does not
provide for more "interpersonal" interaction with
the reader.
Thus, his work would have been significantly
enriched with sharper visions of how teachers as
"transformative intellectuals" can survive in the
classrooms and how is it that they are to transform
classrooms from what seem to be pseudo-democratic
spaces to authentic "democratic public spheres" in
the face of constraints and competing forces.
Namely, these often contradictory agendas include
what preservice teachers were heavily schooled and
socialized into believing upon entrance into their
preparation program, what colleges of education
attempt to redefine and inculcate in terms of
expectations, and what the market in which teacher
preparation programs are situated demands.
Positioning his call for teachers to become
transformative intellectuals within the context and
interplay of these forces would better articulate
how his vision might be realized. This means speaking
not so much from an "intangible," theoretical,
sociopolitical orientation, but from the stance of a
teacher, perhaps personalizing his writing to
include his own classroom experiences as a
university teacher or that of others who survive
within such established power structures.
Giroux's work lacks more focused inquiries into
teachers' experiences or the undertaking of more
ethnographic perspectives within institutional
settings that might inquire into teacher, student,
and institutional interactions. Participant
observation, photography, and interviews with
students and faculty to uncover and describe the
nature of the teaching and educational experience
from a more emic or insider's perspective would make
more informed theory. In doing so, the answers to
questions Giroux never asks, such as: 'how can my
vision take effect where I direct it most?' or 'how can
I help educators translate the ideals I espouse into
real situations?' or 'how is a critical education
possible?' can be answered more realistcally and helpfully.
Educators
cannot become the
political activists Giroux wants unless he is willing
to make himself more
comprehensible to them on their own terms.
Giroux projects a sort of militancy that
pushes the reader (unaware of what position propels
his distinct style) to take residence somewhere in
the "margins"of the book, precisely where Giroux is
calling for us not to rest. On occasion he appears
to leave the lofty academic tower he has often
denounced (but in which he has taken residence
throughout the book), making himself almost
accessible to the reader. One is left wanting more of
these refreshing interludes.
The discourse remains largely on a scholarly
and theoretical plane, directed predominantly at
intelligentsia, and would probably be marginally
enlightening to K-12 practitioners who need to
understand the historical construction of
contemporary schooling and the theory of critical
pedagogy. It does not provide concrete or tangible
pedagogical "practices" for critical pedagogy or on
becoming critical educators; therefore, its
"usefulness" to K-12 practitioners is going to be
marginal. This does not mean that a critical
pedagogy needs to be explained exclusively in instrumental terms, but
rather that it should be presented more as a dialogue and less as a
repressive monologue. Leaving the
discussion exclusively on a scholarly and theoretical plane
somehow depreciates the transformative nature of
pedagogy or what has traditionally been and
continues to be the commitment, focus and intent of
Giroux's work.
While the essays are organized in terms of
Giroux's theoretical progression, the sections, and
in fact, the essays can be read independently and
each serves as forceful and convincing evidence of
the need to transform pedagogy into an emancipatory
project. While Giroux is among the few scholars who
have ventured beyond his counterparts in
contributing to the interrogation of pedagogy,
schooling, and educational theory, he still fails to
address the potential consequences of some of his positions.
Namely, if higher
education becomes characterized as a "political
education," does this mean teachers and professors
should dissent whatever the cost (essentially facing Socrates' fate
of altruistic suicide)? How do they yield to
established structures and market realities, and at
the same time not abandon his pedagogies of hope and
possibility? Furthermore, Giroux needs to be
careful that in so boldly driving his own critiques,
he does not contribute to the sorts of relationships
he fights against. In keeping with the spirit of
Giroux, we must then question if critical reflection
in educational frameworks offsets hegemonic
relations and reverses the course of social
reproduction towards autonomy. There is ample
room left in Giroux's book for discussing hegemonic
relations and how these relations function in the
educational experience, yet the remedies Giroux
defends need broader and more informed reflection.
Gadamer's objection of the critical reflector
alludes to that to which Giroux devotes little time:
"the critique of ideology overestimates the
competence of reflection and reason. Inasmuch as it
seeks to penetrate the masked interests which infect
public opinion, it implies its own freedom from any
ideology; and that means in turn that it enthrones
its own norms and ideals as self-evident and
absolute" (Gadamer, Hermeneutics and Social Science,
p. 315). Gadamer's point is that critical
conversation and reflection are not fully possible
because we cannot escape hermeneutical constraints,
which includes hegemonic relations. Essentially, no
critical pedagogical discourse can be benign and
embraces some element of politics. Thus, Giroux's
work embodies some inherent contradictions, namely
underdeveloped questions of hermeneutics and
critical theory in and of itself as well.
Giroux's is a utopian vision of schools
and children that would have to be preceded by several small
"revolutions" were it actually to occur. But for the pedagogically
weary, Giroux's hope and vision of what is
possible, serves as a source of strength. The essays
of this book reflect trademark Giroux: an attempt
at pedagogical empowerment. While Giroux can be
sharply contested on a number of fronts, his critics ought to agree that he
ranks as one of the most scathing critics
and provocative educational thinkers of our time. In these
essays, Giroux gives compelling support to his
ongoing emancipatory project.
Reference
Giroux, Henry A. (1992). Language, Difference, and
Curriculum Theory: Beyond the Politics of Clarity.
Theory Into Practice, 31, 221-227.
About the Reviewer
Marina Gair
Email: gair@aol.com
Marina Gair
is a PhD student in the Division of Educational Leadership & Policy
Studies in the College of Education at Arizona State University.
She specializes in Social and Philosophical Foundations of
Education.
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