Education

EDUCATION. Two fundamental and in many respects contradictory perspectives underlie virtually all Left educational theory since the 1930s: liberatory pedagogy, which emphasizes the possibility of social change through critical teaching and learning; and social reproduction, which analyzes the ways in which schools as institutions reproduce existing class, gender, and race structures. Underlying both of these perspectives is the question of the extent to which schools and universities as institutions within sexist and racist capitalist society are controlled by the demands of capital and the dominant ideology and the extent to which they provide the spaces for critical and political work.
In the early twentieth century the Progressive education movement and in particular the educational thought of John Dewey influenced liberal experiments in curriculum and pedagogy; more clearly Left experiments such as the anarchist Modern Schools and worker education programs in urban unions developed more politicized alternative pedagogies. But the first clearly articulated analysis and program for schools from the Left is found in the 1930s, in the work of George Counts and the social reconstructionist movement and in their journal, Social Frontier. Counts called capitalism “cruel and inhumane” and called for teachers in the public schools to “build a new social order.” But while the social reconstructionists called for the political transformation of the schools, they did not provide a theoretical analysis of the role of the schools in the existing social order.

After the World War II and in the emerging Cold War, the creation of a permanent war economy increasingly tied the universities to the demands of the defense industries and military research, while reformers like James Conant called for the reform of the public schools to better meet the needs of an industrialized, capitalist state. At the same time, schools and universities became the focus of right-wing attacks. Conservative groups began to monitor textbooks, and liberal and Left professors and teachers were condemned as Communists and in some cases lost their jobs. Throughout this period, Left intellectuals used their energies to defend themselves from attack and to fight for rights of free expression. The major exception to this defensive stance were desegregation struggles, which, in challenging racism, were calling for a new social order, but in racial rather than class terms. Except for the powerful educational writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (collected as The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906–1960), there was no direct Left analysis of race, class, and schooling in this period.
The call for a politicized pedagogy and the development of a Left critique of the existing educational system emerged from the New Left social protest movements of the 1960s—the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the women’s movement. Freedom schools in the South, teach-ins around the Vietnam War, “free universities” offer a counter-curriculum, and women’s consciousness-raising groups provided examples of teaching and learning outside formal educational institutions and led to calls for more relevant and politicized teaching within the colleges and universities and to anarchist calls for the abolishment of formal state schools. The activists of the late 1960s and early 1970s who founded libertarian free schools, radical alternative programs in colleges, and journals such as Radical Teacher argued that a critical and liberatory schooling could be created to replace the old. Theoretically, the basis for a Left pedagogy was found in the work of Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated into English in 1968. In his emphasis on the power of a politicized literacy to contribute to revolutionary movements, Freire provided a theoretical and practical model for Left teachers and intellectuals in the United States. His work influenced Left Catholic movements and many teachers in literacy programs and community colleges.

New Left critics also turned to an analysis of the role of schools in reproducing class and, to a lesser extent, race oppression. As the fundamental nature of US society as a capitalist and imperialist power was explored, the ties of the universities to the state and the role of the public schools began to be examined and critiqued. A number of first-person accounts exposed the racism of public schools. Left historians of education challenged the dominant consensus in educational history that the schools were central institutions in providing social mobility and preserving democracy; instead, they asserted that schools as institutions must be viewed in relation to developments within capitalism and to the growth of the state.

Michael Katz was perhaps the best known of a number of Left historians who examined such topics as the development of urban school systems as a struggle among competing groups, the growth of scientific management and control, and the ties between the schools and capitalist elites. A number of Left theorists addressed the ways in which curriculum and social relationships inside schools reproduce class structure.

One of the most influential analyses of schools in relation to political economy was Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’s Schooling in Capitalist America, published in 1975. Bowles and Gintis argued that there is a functional correspondence between what is learned in working-class schools (work discipline, acceptance of monotonous work outside of individual control, bureaucratic authority) and what is experienced in the workplace. Thus the schools as state institutions reproduce the class structure of capitalism. While Bowles and Gintis’s study had a powerful influence on subsequent Left analyses, it was also criticized for an implicit functionalism and failure to address the struggles over schools documented by Left educational historians or to recognize the various forms of radical pedagogy developed by the Left.

In the 1980s, critiques by the black, gay, and women’s movements as well as other disempowered groups challenged traditional Left analyses of schooling. While these critiques were not always been tied to a class analysis, the criticisms of white feminists and both men and women of color called into question the adequacy of a Left analysis of education in solely class terms and pointed to the need for a Left analysis to address all forms of oppression. Despite the contributions of both the civil rights movement and the women’s movement in creating liberatory and democratic forms of pedagogy, often these contributions were ignored in white male calls for a socialist pedagogy or in analyses of education that discuss class exclusively without considering the fact that most teachers were women, or that the structure of schooling in the United States has been consistently racist. Henry Giroux and Michael Apple were the best known of a number of Left theoreticians attempting a synthesis that would take into account the social-reproduction theories of writers like Bowles and Gintis, the liberatory pedagogy of Freire, and gender and racial struggles around teaching and schools that take place in terms of actual practice.

During the Reagan administration, conservative and right-wing forces began a broad attack on public education while initiating a new wave of “education reform” through a variety of national reports and commissions. This attack took varied forms, including ideological opposition to the teaching of evolution, to sex education, and to multicultural reforms designed to revise standard curriculums in light of revisionist scholarship and the increasing multiracial composition of the public school population (which, by the 1990s, was approaching 40 percent nonwhite). Conservatives also increasingly withdrew political and budgetary support for public schools and proposed a number of privatization and market strategies designed to undermine public education, including vouchers, tuition subsidies for religious schools, and turning management of public schools over to private, for-profit companies. These political and fiscal attacks accelerated the ongoing crisis of public schools, which was especially acute in urban areas and communities of color. Residential segregation and funding inequities among suburban and urban areas helped perpetuate a “dual school system” decades after the 1954 Supreme Court declared “separate and unequal” schooling unconstitutional.

Progressive and Left forces responded to these developments in several ways. The Milwaukee-based journal Rethinking Schools, first published in 1985 by activist public school teachers, became a national voice for progressive reform, combining critical ideas about classroom practice with progressive trends in multicultural and feminist curriculum reform and an antiracist, pro-equity perspective on education issues. The National Coalition of Education Activists and other groups promoted coalition building across class and race lines among teachers, parents, and education union activists. Faced with declining political support for public education, the two main teacher unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, took tentative steps toward merger. Widespread concern about school failure also created space for a variety of radical experiments in public schooling on a broader scale than at any time since the 1960s. These experiments included decentralized school management by councils of parents and teachers; the creation of new, nontraditional schools and school programs; and experiments in Afrocentric and community-based schooling. Limited resources, the weight of traditional bureaucratic school management, and increasing inequality in society at large restricted the reach of these reforms.

Left educators analyzed and critiques these trends, which, for the most part, continued into the early decades of the twenty-first century. Advancing under the Reagan Administration, the move toward privatization and vouchers at the K-12 level gained speed. Both neoliberal Democrats and Republicans advocated public-private partnerships, which played out vividly at the college level. Many public universities experienced a steady decline in state funding for programs and staffing, leaving students and their families soldiering most of the cost and culminating in enormous debt. The presidential campaigns of independent socialist Bernie Sanders advocated the cancellation of college debt and the introduction of tuition-free education at higher levels, particularly in community colleges and vocational schools.

The Left, including Sanders, at the same time targeted charter schools as a growing source of inequity. Charter schools gained ground following the passage of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, which allowed parents to transfer their children out of “under-performing” schools; and was enhanced by President Obama’s Race to the Top program. Advanced by Bill Clinton and secured by President George W. Bush, the No Child Left Behind Act positioned Left educational reformers to line up against the national curriculum standards that effectively demanded teachers to “teach to the test” and face assessments based on their students’ performance. The national educational policy served to widen the gap based on income and race in most locations, prompting further unionization among K-12 teachers.

After the GOP sweep of state houses in 2010, the charter school movement gained greater autonomy and significant financial support, including direct funding by state legislatures. The US Department of Education under Betsy DeVos during the presidency of Donald J. Trump acted aggressively to undercut public education and promote for-profit schools. The Left and many teachers’ unions mounted campaigns against these developments, pointing out that public funding was being drained into private enterprise and underscoring the high turn-over of teachers and students in charter schools. Nevertheless, universal access to free public education for all was increasingly uncertain, and structural inequality was becoming more foundational to the US system of education.

Apple, Michael. Teachers and Texts. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986.

Aronowitz, Stanley, and Henry Giroux. Education under Siege. South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1985.

Bunch, Charlotte, and Sandra Pollack, eds. Learning Our Way. Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1983

Giroux, Henry. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014.

Levine, David, et al., eds. Rethinking Schools: An Agenda for Change. New York: New Press, 1995.

Slaughter, Sheila and Gary Rhoades. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Marklets, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Weiler, Kathleen. Women Teaching for Change. South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1987.