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Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett
unwitting members of society. Here, higher education becomes a vehicle for
combating perniciousness—as they see—inherent in capitalist society. They
see advertising, for example, as encouraging and fostering increased material
consumption while simultaneously reinforcing the myth that large corpora-
tions are there to serve their customers, when they are, in fact, serving their
own interests, and maximizing profit, often at the expense of both customers
and the social good (Burbules and Berk 1999, 50).
The critical pedagogues accordingly believe that the aim of education
should be about turning students against the idea of being trained for the
economic needs of large corporations. The followers of the critical pedagogy
movement see the role of higher education not as reinforcing but as dispel-
ling these uncritical attitudes and questioning these assumptions. They see the
role of higher education as working within higher educational institutions to
identify and critique power inequities in society, the myths of opportunity in
capitalist economies, and “the way belief systems become internalized to the
point where individuals and groups abandon the very aspiration to question or
change their lot in life” (Burbules and Berk 1999, 50). Thinking critically, for
the critical pedagogists, is a matter of recognizing, critiquing, and combating
societal formations (really
de
formations)—including discourses—that main-
tain the capitalist status quo. This can be achieved by developing students and
their teachers not only as critical intellectuals (Giroux 1988) but also as criti-
cal activists. This is clearly a very different sense of critical thinking than the
other camps identified earlier here.
Like Barnett, the critical pedagogists see action as an intrinsic, not separable,
aspect of criticality. However, they take critical action much further. They see
action as important not merely for encouraging students’ personal individual
critical comprehension of, and reaction to, events, but as a justification for
wholesale social and political
change.
As Burbules and Berk put it, for them:
“challenging thought and practice must occur together . . . criticality requires
praxis
—both reflection and action, both interpretation and change . . .Critical
pedagogy would never find it sufficient to reform the habits of thought of
thinkers, however effectively, without challenging and transforming the insti-
tutions, ideologies, and relations that engender distorted, oppressed thinking
in the first place—not an additional act beyond the pedagogical one, but an
inseparable part of it” (1999, 52). Critical pedagogy, accordingly, becomes a
way of alerting students to the indoctrination that is felt here to be endemic in
society
and
of combating it—so, deliberately and systematically deploying the
potential of higher education as a transforming device in society.
For the critical thinking movement, this is a misguided stance. It amounts to
taking for granted and prejudging the conclusions to an issue (that society
is
inequitable, that society
is
ideologically saturated and so on, and that society
is
characterized by undue repression). It is itself equivalent to indoctrination.
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