We live in dangerous times. Global corporatism, war, violence, racism, and arms race, militarism, terrorism, climate change, the threat of nuclear weaponry, and the rise of authoritarian societies internationally pose a dire threat not just to human rights and democracy, but to humanity itself. Matters of education, civic literacy, civil rights, and pedagogies that support the social contract, equality, justice and the common good are crucial in the struggle against authoritarianism. Within this climate, education has to be seen as more than a credential of a pathway to a job, and pedagogy more than a methodology or teaching to the test. One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators and students is the need to reclaim the role that education has historically played in developing political literacies and civic capacities, both of which are essential prerequisites for democracy. Education must also be viewed as a form of moral witnessing and as a crucial element of historical memory. In this case, educational struggles of the past are resuscitated and critically engaged for the variety of ways in which they connect teaching to social responsibility, learning to social change, and knowledge to modes of individual and social agency. There is a need to use education to mobilize students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to addressing important social issues, and acutely alert to the responsibility of deepening and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy.
If we are to survive ourselves, education has to be seen as more than a credential or a pathway to a job. It has to be viewed as crucial to understanding and overcoming the current crisis of agency, democracy, environment, and historical memory. Central to such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish in a democracy. What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political, and ethical conditions necessary to endow people with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic priorities, what will it take to educate young people to challenge authority and in the words of James Baldwin “rob history of its tyrannical power, and illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is after all, to make the world a more humane dwelling place.”
What role might education and critical pedagogy have in a society in which the social is individualized, emotional life is redirected into “retail therapy.” And quality education is only for those who can afford it? Progress, particularly economic progress, is defined through a simple culture of metrics, measurement, and efficiency: that which benefits the ultra-rich. In a social order drowning, in a new love affair with empiricism and date reified by the marketplace, that which is not measurable is ignored. Lost here are the registers of community, cooperation, care for the other, the radical imagination, democratic vision, and a commitment for economic and social justice.
The great Spanish painter Goya once created and engraving titled The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. Goya’s title is richly suggestive, particularly in regards to the role of education and pedagogy in mentoring students to recognize, as my colleague David Clark points out, “that an inattentiveness to the never-ending task of critique breeds horrors: the failure of conscience, the wars against thought, and the flirtations with irrationality that lie at the heart of the triumph of every-day aggression, the withering of political life, and the withdrawal into private obsessions. -- America at War with Itself
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