critical theory definition in education

Critical Theories of Education: An Introduction

• First Online: 14 September 2022

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• Greg William Misiaszek 4 ,
• Janna M. Popoff 5 &
• Ali A. Abdi 6  

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This chapter gives an overall introduction to critical theories essential to education, as we lay out the histories, reasoning, needs, and overall structure of the Palgrave Handbook on Critical Theories of Education . We discuss the five groundings that are the conceptual and theoretical thematic constructions of the book as follows: praxis-oriented, fluidity, radical, utopic with countless possible future s , and using bottom-up approaches. We give our own brief summaries of the chapters within the following book’s parts: general critical theoretical perspectives and philosophies of education, critical race theories of education, critical international/global citizenship education, critical pedagogy/critical literacy studies in education, critical media/information studies and education, critical community-engaged learning/research, critical perspectives on science and mathematics education, critical gender/feminist studies in education, and critical Indigenous and Southern epistemologies of education.

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Misiaszek, G.W., Popoff, J.M., Abdi, A.A. (2022). Critical Theories of Education: An Introduction. In: Abdi, A.A., Misiaszek, G.W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook on Critical Theories of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86343-2_1

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Critical Pedagogy

• Introduction to Critical Pedagogy

About this Guide

What is critical pedagogy, why is critical pedagogy important.

• Types of Critical Pedagogy
• Getting Started with Critical Pedagogy
• Publications in Critical Pedagogy

Critical Pedagogy Research Librarian

This guide gives an overview to critical pedagogy and its vitalness to teaching and education. It is not comprehensive, but is meant to give an introduction to the complex topic of critical pedagogy and impart an understanding of its deeper connection to critical theory and education.

One working definition of critical pedagogy is that it “is an educational theory based on the idea that schools typically serve the interests of those who have power in a society by, usually unintentionally, perpetually unquestioned norms for relationships, expectations, and behaviors” (Billings, 2019). Based on critical theory, it was first theorized in the US in the 70s by the widely-known Brazilian educator Paolo Freire in his canonical book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2018), but has since taken on a life of its own in its application to all facets of teaching and learning. The "pedagogy of the oppressed," or what what we know today to be the basis of critical pedagogy, is described by Freire as:

"...a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity. This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade...[It] sis an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization." (p. 48)

Perhaps a more straightforward definition of critical pedagogy is "a radical approach to education that seeks to transform oppressive structures in society using democratic and activist approaches to teaching and learn" (Braa & Callero, 2006).

There are many applications of theory-based pedagogy that privilege minoritarian thought such as antiracist pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, engaged pedagogy, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and social justice, to name a few.

Billings, S. (2019). Critical pedagogy. Salem press encyclopedia. New York: Salem Press.

Braa, D., & Callero, P. (2006, October). Critical pedagogy and classroom praxis. Teaching Sociology, 34 , 357-369.

Freire, P. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Critical Pedagogy is an important framework and tool for teaching and learning because it:

• recognizes systems and patterns of oppression within society at-large and education more specifically, and in doing so, decreases oppression and increases freedom
• empowers students through enabling them to recognize the ways in which "dominant power operates in numerous and often hidden ways
• offers a critique of education that acknowledges its political nature while spotlighting the fact that it is not neutral
• encourages students and instructors to challenge commonly accepted assumptions that reveal hidden power structures, inequities, and injustices

Kincheloe, J. L. (2004). Critical pedagogy primer. P. Lang.

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13 Critical Pedagogy

At the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Identify key elements of social reconstructionism and critical pedagogy
• Explain the major tenets of critical pedagogy and how they can be utilized to support instruction
• Summarize the criticisms of critical pedagogy and educational implications

Scenario: Ms. Barrows woke in the middle of the night to rethink her unit on ratios. Students seemed totally uninterested. She thought back to her own schooling and recalled the teacher who made the difference in her schooling, the one who encouraged the students to consider different points of view on contemporary and historic events and develop critical questions that connected to their own lives. Ms. Barrows recalled how she and her classmates had conducted a role play and hotly debated the issues. The students ultimately wrote letters to their city council about the issues. They felt they were actually doing something about it. It did not feel like school work, and it ultimately drew Ms. Barrows to the teaching profession. Through the years, Ms. Barrows had become the “expert teacher” who mastered her content area with great pride. Her lesson plans had not changed much from year to year, and they were becoming rather tiring, even to her.

Thinking about this special teacher, Ms. Barrows knew her learning activities needed to engage the students with something meaningful, something they would care about. Thinking about the legacy of the institutions that informed the social fabric upon which her students exist, it became clear that provisioning an environment where students could analyze disparities and act on them would provide a relevant topic in which to explore ratios.

After a long night of contemplation and rumination, she began to plan a lesson on income inequality, showing salaries of famous athletes, rappers, politicians, social media celebrities, teachers, construction and restaurant workers. She found some Youtube videos profiling these individuals to draw students in at the start. She built in places for students to express their ideas on the topic and feel the impact on their own lives. She took students through the concepts of ratios and created relevant word problems for students to solve. Depending on the students and the learning experience, Ms. Barrows knew she wanted to create space for students to come up with next steps, not just with math but with this topic of income inequality. She knew she had to see where the learning experience took them, that she had to open herself up to this uncertainty, that her students needed to decide what was important to them and co-create next steps in the learning.

As you read about critical pedagogy, consider how important it is for educators to know what is meaningful to their students, and how this involves getting to know their students. Students are not blank slates. They are full of rich stories and experiences, and effective critical educators seek to engage those stories and experiences.These educators know that  learning must be co-constructed and that they need to engage students in things they care about.

What kind of questions could such a photo elicit? Consider the rich discussion possibilities on the concepts of freedom, fear and love.

Introduction.

What is Social Reconstructionism?

Social reconstructionism was founded as a response to the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust to assuage human cruelty. Social reform in response to helping prepare students to make a better world through instilling liberatory values. Critical pedagogy emerged from the foundation of the early social reconstructionist movement.

What is Critical Pedagogy?

Critical pedagogy is the application of critical theory to education. For critical pedagogues, teaching and learning is inherently a political act and they declare that knowledge and language are not neutral, nor can they be objective. Therefore, issues involving social, environmental, or economic justice cannot be separated from the curriculum. Critical pedagogy’s goal is to emancipate marginalized or oppressed groups by developing, according to Paulo Freire, conscientização, or critical consciousness in students.

Critical pedagogy de-centers the traditional classroom, which positions teachers at the center. The curriculum and classroom with a critical pedagogy stance is student-centered and focuses its content on social critique and political action. Such educators propose a liberatory practice, in which the central purpose of educators is to liberate and to humanize students in today’s schools so that they can reach their full potential. Using power analyses, they seek to undo structural societal inequities through the work of schooling. They emphasize the importance of the relationship between educators and students, as well as the co-creation of knowledge. Education is a way to freedom.

Major influences on the formation of critical pedagogy: John Dewey, W.E.B. Dubois, Carter G. Woodson, Myles Horton, Herbert Kohl, Paulo Freire, Maxine Greene, Henry Giroux, Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, Martin Carnoy, Michael Apple, bell hooks, Jean Anyon, Stanley Aronowitz, Peter McLaren, Donaldo Macedo, Michelle Fine

Paulo Freire: 1921-1997

Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in the northeastern city of Recife in Brazil’s poorest region, Pernambuco. Much of Brazil’s citizenry were impoverished and illiterate, and run by a small group of wealthy landowners.  Freire’s family was middle class but experienced hardships, especially during the Great Depression. His father died in 1934 and Paulo struggled to support his family and finish his studies. After completing his studies, Freire went on to work in a state-sponsored literacy campaign. It was here that Freire began to interact with the peasant struggle. Freire was nominated to lead Brazil’s National Commission of Popular Culture in 1963  under the liberal-populist government of João Goulart whose government created many policies to assist the poor such as mass literacy campaigns. As is often the case, these reforms were opposed by the upper classes who eventually supported the military coup which overthrew the government and installed a right-wing dictatorship. Freire was imprisoned for his political leanings and role with literacy reforms. Upon his release from prison, Freire went into exile for a number of years, returning in 1980 to become the secretary of education for the state of  São Paulo.

  Image 13.4

It was during his exile that Freire wrote the book which would make him globally famous.   Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in Portuguese in 1968, and in English in 1970 has had tremendous influence on educators worldwide. As people struggled for civil rights across the globe in the 1970s, Freire’s work had popular appeal. “However, [Freire’s] enduring popularity and influence attests to another, even more intractable context: even as many more people around the world have access to education, schooling everywhere remains intertwined with systems of oppression, including racism and capitalism, and traditional models of top-down education don’t work well for everyone” (Featherstone).

Freire’s critique of education was replicated and perpetuated the classist inequitable society, feeding oppressed workers into the capitalist structure. He wrote that  our educational systems have the potential to liberate or oppress their students, and in the process humanize or dehumanize their students. Freire argues that people live one of two ways: humanized or dehumanized, and that this is the central problem of humankind. Freire argued that people become dehumanized because of unjust systems, systems that provide access to some and not to others.

Freire highlighted the power dynamic between teacher and students and critiqued the power that teachers held with the supposed “truth” of their opinions and curriculum (what should be taught in a particular discipline), as well as their evaluation of students.  Freire critiques the  traditional frame of the teacher as the authority or expert and the students as “empty vessels” or sometimes referred to as “blank slates.”

Freire coined the term “the banking method” for the way in which traditionally teachers deposit information into their students, as if they are empty vessels or receptacles. Students become oppressed through this system of education where they learn to memorize and regurgitate the facts deposited in them by their teachers. Students in these systems, in fact, come to expect such oppression and are in fact upset when their teachers do not take on the expert role. Freire believed that the traditional model creates a kind of ignorance where students are unable to critique knowledge and power, and are in fact dependent on their expert teachers.

In fact, Freire believed this mentality makes students vulnerable to oppression in their lives moving forward: at work, school, and in society at large. Freire believes it is critical for students to participate in this process of learning, to liberate themselves.

“For apart from inquiry, apart from praxis, men cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (Freire).

Freire proposes to overthrow the traditional hierarchy in the classroom. Liberation and humanization result from what Freire referred to as “dialogical” interaction between teachers and students and a co-creation of knowledge and learning. He came to understand that true liberation comes about through dialogue between the teacher and student, where they learn from each other.

“The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them” (Freire).  This pedagogy creates an environment of mutual respect, love, and understanding and leads students toward liberation. Freire believed that it is important that oppressed people define the world in their own terms. It is only with this common language (defined by the oppressed) that dialogue can begin. The concept of a superiority or hierarchy  of educators such as a teacher has no place in Freire’s classroom. Dialogue must engage everyone equally.

bell hooks: 1952- 2021

Image 13.5 “to educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. that learning process comes easier to those of us who teach who also believe there is an aspect to our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. to teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.” (hooks).

bell hooks was born with the name Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25, 1952 in a segregated town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky to a working-class African American family. She was one of six children. Her mother worked as a maid for a White family and her father was a janitor. Eventually she took on the name of her great-grandmother, to honor her female lineage, spelling it in all lowercase letters to focus attention on her message rather than herself. She has written many books, and initially famous for her work as a Black post modern queer feminist and her first published work Aint I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism in 1981. She taught English and Ethnic Studies for many years at a variety of institutions of higher learning. She wrote books on many topics including multiple forms of oppression, racism, patriarchy, Black men, masculinity, self-help, engaged pedagogy, personal memoirs, sexuality, feminism, and identity.

bell hooks grew up in segregated schools which provided shining examples of what schooling could be. Bell loved her Black teachers and describes school as a place of ecstasy and joy. Her black teachers were committed to nurturing intellect and activism among their Black students. They considered learning especially for Black people in the US, an important political act, a way to counter White racist colonization. These teachers made it their mission to know their parents and communities. Bell describes how these missionary Black teachers saw this important work as uplifting the race and provided a level of caring  for the whole child, in order for that child to survive in a racist society.  Bell’s disillusionment with education began with school integration, when she was bussed across town to White schools, where schooling was about ideas and no longer the whole person. She continued to feel disillusioned when she entered higher education.

hooks describes Paulo Friere as a mentor for he embraced the idea that learning could be liberatory. At a time when hooks had become quite disillusioned with education, Freire gave her hope and the confidence to transgress as an educator. She recalled  “Finding Freire in the midst of that estrangement was crucial to my survival as a student” (p. 17). All the things Freire said about the banking method and traditional education complimented her ideas about what education should and should not be. hooks desired to co-create learning spaces with her students, to do away with the idea of the dictatorial teacher as an all-knowing expert. She passionately believed that learning should be engaging and ‘never boring,’ and without preconceived set agendas. Creating this excitement and engagement was dependent on knowing each other through dialogue in the classroom. The teacher must make every student feel valued and recognize that everyone in the classroom affects the dynamic.

The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, was another major influence for hooks particularly regarding health and well-being. Self-actualization can not occur without self-care. Hooks’ holistic concept of engaged pedagogy  centers care and healing in the process of learning. Thich Nhat Hanh was concerned with the whole body, more than just the mind (on which Freire primarily focused) according to bell hooks. This wholeness includes mind, body and spirit and emphasizes well-being, a somewhat radical notion in academia.

Bettina Love: c. 1981-present

“When you understand how hard it is to fight for educational justice, you know that there are no gimmicks; you know this to be true deep down in your soul, which brings both frustration and determination. Educational Justice is going to take people power, driven by the spirit and ideas of the folx who have done the work of anti-racism before: abolitionists…this endless, and habitually thankless, job of radical collective freedom-building is an act of survival, but we who are dark want to do more than survive: we want to thrive. A life of survival is not really living” (Love, p.9).

Bettina Love describes being raised in the 1980s in Rochester, New York. She is an American academic and author, and currently is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she has been instrumental in establishing abolitionist teaching in schools. Love defines abolitionist teaching as restoring humanity to children in schools. Abolitionist schooling is based on intersectional justice, anti-racism, love, healing and joy, that all children matter, and specifically affirming that Black Lives Matter.

“Abolitionist teaching asks educators to acknowledge and accept America and its policies as anti-Black, racist,  discriminatory and unjust and to be in solidarity with dark folx and poor folx fighting for their humanity and fighting to move beyond surviving. To learn the sociopolitical landscape of their students communities through a historical intersectional justice lens” (Love, p. 12)

Love weaves themes of hip hop into her education praxis. She believes the elements of hip hop have everything to do with self-awareness, critical thinking, and social emotional intelligence. She gives particular attention to knowledge of self. In elementary classrooms, she breaks down the elements of  hip hop to work with her students.

Love is known for advocating for the elimination of the billion-dollar industry of standardized testing, opposing English-only policies and the school-to-prison pipeline, and providing a strong critique of how teachers are prepared. She began her teaching career in a “failing” school in Florida serving low-income immigrant children of many educational and language backgrounds. It was here she began to see how “educational reforms” such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Common Core, and Race to the Top created a sense of hopelessness for students, their families, and staff.

Love unapologetically states that some people should not be teaching because they lack understanding of oppression and oppressed groups who may be sitting in their classrooms  (Love, p. 14) and that such teachers should not be teaching Black, Brown, or White children. “Many of these teachers who ‘love all children’ are deeply entrenched in racism, transphobia, classism, rigid ideas of gender, and Islamophobia” (Love, p. 12).

“Teachers must embrace theories such as Critical Race Theory, Settler Colonialism, Black Feminism, dis/ability, critical race studies and other critical theories that have the ability to interrogate anti-Blackness and frame experiences with injustice, focusing the moral compass toward a north star  that is ready for a long and dissenting fight for educational justice” (Love, p. 12).

Love points out that when educators do not understand the meaning behind the statement/the movement “Black Lives Matter,” they should not be teaching because they lack a fundamental understanding of systemic and historic racism and how it has impacted Black communities and Black students. Such educators tend to blame the victim instead of the systems, for example blaming the incarcerated father instead of learning about how the justice system has incarcerated disproportionate numbers of Black men.

Critical Race Theory

So, what is Critical Race Theory anyways? Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been used by all sides of the political spectrum as a marketing tool or divisive instrument. In popular media, there is not much accurate information about it. Educators who use CRT believe it is vital to understand how racism operates at all levels in US society, whether by law or custom. Any educator who cares about effectively working with communities of color must spend some time understanding the tenets of this theory, and it behooves anyone who works in US schools to take the time to learn the theory, and especially if they are critiquing it. This is simply a brief introduction and further study is strongly recommended.

CRT was initially developed by Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman who were frustrated by the slow pace of racial reform in the US. In the 1970s many activists and scholars felt that while the Civil Rights Movement had stalled, the law disregarded people of color and lacked an understanding of racism and how deeply embedded it was in US society. CRT provides an analysis in which power structures in the US are based in historic and systemic White supremacy and White privilege which in turn marginalizes people of color. With CRT, the individual racist is irrelevant because society is set up to give more access to White people over others in all areas of society: education, health care, housing, politics, justice etc. This is what is known as White privilege and it has to do with our collective history of inequities upon whose foundation this nation is built. If you do not know much about this history, plan on building your knowledge base through workshops, classes and other resources such as what is listed below:

As leaders and as educators, we should not perpetuate wrongs of the past, and this happens when we do not examine our past and do not account for things that have had a huge impact on our present lives. We need to recognize historical patterns and understand their impact, such as how the people who had access to housing (especially in certain neighborhoods) built their wealth which has compounded and created the income gap that exists between White and Black families (see Video 13.2), and impacts all aspects of society including education. The US educational system has not adequately educated us on this topic and at the same time has become highly politicized regarding topics such as race or inequality which have been presented as antithetical to notions of meritocracy and patriotism. This dichotomy does not serve us well as it prevents us from evolving and moving forward as a nation. As a result, many educators have been coached or mandated to avoid these topics. Generations of US Americans have internalized these stories, unconsciously or consciously, and hence, do not see the oppression unless they are called to examine it, and this is what Critical Race Theory helps us to do.

What does “White Supremacy” Mean?

White supremacy is a historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and individuals of color by white individuals and nations of the European continent; for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power and privilege .

The main tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) are:

• Racism is deeply embedded in all aspects of US society . The power structure  is based in W hite supremacy and privilege. CRT rejects myths of meritocracy and liberalism because they ignore systemic and historic inequities (for example: meritocracy doesn’t add up when some people have been accumulating generational wealth due to historic racism for many decades. Check out resources above; educate yourself!
• Intersectionality : recognizes a multidimensionality of oppressions including race, sex, class, gender, sexual orientation and how in combination, these play out in a variety of settings. CRT seeks to recognize all oppressions and how they intersect with race.
• Counter narratives challenge the dominant narrative and give voice to those who have been silenced by white supremacy . Their stories are critical to centering the experiences of people of color.
• There is a commitment to Social Justice to end all forms of oppression.

While CRT started in the legal field, it has spread to other disciplines such as education.

When applying CRT to public K-12 education, one must consider:

• Who are our teachers?
• Who are our students?
• What is in our curriculum? Who created it? Who is promoted in the curriculum? Which voices are centered? Which voices are left out? Do they not matter?
• Who gets promoted in our schools?
• Who tests well? Who gets into TAG and honors courses?
• Who sits on our school boards? Who are our educational leaders?
• How are schools funded?
• Whose language is promoted? Whose language is left out and what is the impact of that?
• How is success measured? Grading for what? Whose values? Who decides?
• Who is made to feel that they belong? Who does not belong?
• Who typically gets the best prepared teachers?
• Who gets college degrees, masters degrees, and how recently?
• Does race correlate with any of this? (a fundamental question when using a CRT lens)

How do the answers to all these questions help you to think about CRT as it applies to our educational system? If you do not know how race correlates, you probably will not understand CRT. Critical educators would recommend that you deepen your understanding of how race is so embedded in our institutions and our history, and specifically our educational system, which has clear repercussions for how our society is ultimately structured, and who becomes our political, economic, and social leaders. In order to live in a more just society, critical educators want our students to wrestle with these questions, and fight for a more just future. They want the learning to move beyond the classroom and connect with the lives and challenges of our students. Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Bettina Love, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King and many others have said this will be a fight and a struggle that will likely not be realized in your own lifetimes. When you understand this, you can grasp the enormous potential and responsibility of educators on a daily basis in the United States.

Criticism of CRT

Critical Race Theory very recently has become a source of much debate across the country, somewhat to the surprise of people who have been studying these issues for years. “Fox News has mentioned ‘critical race theory’ 1300 times in less than four months. Why? Because critical race theory (CRT) has become a new bogeyman for people unwilling to acknowledge our country’s racist history and how it impacts the present” (Rashawn Ray and Alexandra Gibbons, Brookings Institute). NBC News reported that Critical Race Theory is not actually taught in K-12 education but due to the negative attention it is getting, educators are weary of using certain authors, teaching about systemic racism or on a variety of historic and social topics. Most people critiquing CRT do not seem to understand what the theory actually stands for, and have framed it as a divisive framework. Again, it is important for all educators to understand what the theory stands for, and that is not taught in US schools. This debate continues to highlight how divided the country is on race and racism, as is brought into focus through the debate over the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”

ATTRIBUTIONS

Image 13.1 “Fist Typography” by GDJ  is in the Public Domain, CC0

Image 13.2 “Liberate Minnesota Protest” by Wikipedia Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Image 13.3 “Paulo Freire” by Flickr is in the Public Domain

Image 13.4 “Income Inequality”  is in the Public Domain

Image 13.5 “As More People of color Raise their consciousness” by Flickr is in the Public Domain

Image 13.5 “We want to do more than survive” by Bettina Love  

Image 13.6 “HipHop Mascot” by vectorportal.com is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Image 13.7 “Nelson Mandela Quote” by j4p4n open clipart  is in the Public Domain

Image 13.8 “United States Public School for Eskimos – Frank G. Carpenter collection” by is in the Public Domain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqrhn8khGLM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY2C_ATNFEM

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-obsession-critical-race-theory-numbers

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/critical-race-theory-teachers-union-honest-history

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teaching-critical-race-theory-isn-t-happening-classrooms-teachers-say-n1272945

• Darder, Baltodano, Torres, The Critical Pedagogy Reader, 2nd edition, New York, RoutledgeFalmer,  2009

2.         Featherstone , Liza https://www.jstor.org/stable/4028864?mag=paulo-freires-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed-at-fifty

3.     Freire, Paulo, 1921-1997. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York :Continuum, 2000.

4.     Hooks Bell. Teaching to Transgress : Education As the Practice of Freedom , Routledge 1994.

5.    https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-oneonta-education106/

6.         https://newsreel.org/video/RACE-The-House-We-Live-In

7.     https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-obsession-critical-race-theory-numbers

8.    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/books/bell-hooks-dead.html

9.    Ladson-Billings, Gloria; Tate, William F, IV. Towards a Critical Race Theory of Education, Teachers College Recor d, Vol. 97, Iss. 1,  (Fall 1995): 47.

10.   Love, Bettina L. We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Boston, Massachusetts, Beacon Press, 2019.

11.   McCausland, P. 2021. Teaching critical race theory isn’t happening in classrooms, teachers say in survey. NBC News , July 1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teaching-critical-race-theory-isn-t-happening-classrooms-teachers-say-n1272945

12.   O’Kane, C. 2021. Head of teachers union says critical race theory isn’t taught in schools, vows to defend “honest history”. CBS News , July 8. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/critical-race-theory-teachers-union-honest-history/

13.   Ray, R., and A. Gibbons. 2021. Why are states banning critical race theory? The Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/07/02/why-are-states-banning-critical-race-theory/

14.   Sawchuck, S. 2021. What Is critical race theory, and why is it under attack? Education, Week , May 18. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=eml&utm_campaign=eu&M=62573086&U=1646756&UUID=cc270896d99989f6b27d080283c5630c

15.     Skloot, Rebecca, 1972-. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York :Random House Audio, 2010.  

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Understanding Critical Theory

• Key Concepts
• Major Sociologists
• News & Issues
• Research, Samples, and Statistics
• Recommended Reading
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Critical theory is a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole. It differs from traditional theory, which focuses only on understanding or explaining society. Critical theories aim to dig beneath the surface of social life and uncover the assumptions that keep human beings from a full and true understanding of how the world works.

Critical theory emerged out of the Marxist tradition and was developed by a group of sociologists at the University of Frankfurt in Germany who referred to themselves as  The Frankfurt School .

History and Overview

Critical theory as it is known today can be traced to Marx's critiques of the economy and society. It is inspired greatly by Marx's theoretical formulation of the relationship between economic base and ideological superstructure and focuses on how power and domination operate.

Following in Marx's critical footsteps, Hungarian György Lukács and Italian Antonio Gramsci developed theories that explored the cultural and ideological sides of power and domination. Both Lukács and Gramsci focused their critique on the social forces that prevent people from understanding how power affects their lives.

Shortly after Lukács and Gramsci published their ideas, the Institute for Social Research was founded at the University of Frankfurt, and the Frankfurt School of critical theorists took shape. The work of the Frankfurt School members, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas , and Herbert Marcuse, is considered the heart of critical theory.

Like Lukács and Gramsci, these theorists focused on ideology and cultural forces as facilitators of domination and barriers to freedom. The contemporary politics and economic structures of the time greatly influenced their thought and writing, as they lived during the height of national socialism. This included the rise of the Nazi regime, state capitalism, and the spread of mass-produced culture .

The Purpose of Critical Theory

Max Horkheimer defined critical theory in the book  Traditional and Critical Theory.  In this work, Horkheimer asserted that a critical theory must do two important things: It must account for society within a historical context, and it should seek to offer a robust and holistic critique by incorporating insights from all social sciences.

Further, Horkheimer stated that a theory can only be considered a true critical theory if it is explanatory, practical, and normative. The theory must adequately explain the social problems that exist, offer practical solutions for how to respond to them, and abide by the norms of criticism established by the field.

Horkheimer condemned "traditional" theorists for producing works that fail to question power, domination, and the status quo. He expanded on Gramsci's critique of the role of intellectuals in processes of domination.

Texts associated with the Frankfurt School focused their critique on the centralization of economic, social, and political control that was transpiring around them. Key texts from this period include:

• Critical and Traditional Theory  (Horkheimer)
• Dialectic of the Enlightenment  (Adorno and Horkheimer)
• Knowledge and Human Interests  (Habermas)
• The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere  (Habermas)
• One-Dimensional Man  (Marcuse)
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction  (Benjamin)

Critical Theory Today

Over the years, many social scientists and philosophers who rose to prominence after the Frankfurt School have adopted the goals and tenets of critical theory. We can recognize critical theory today in many feminist theories  and approaches to conducting social science. It is also found in critical race theory , cultural theory, gender, and queer theory, as well as in media theory and media studies.

Updated by Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph.D.

• The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory
• All About Marxist Sociology
• Understanding Conflict Theory
• Juergen Habermas
• Theories of Ideology
• What Is Cultural Hegemony?
• Definition of Cultural Materialism
• Biography of Antonio Gramsci
• Understanding Culture Jamming and How it Can Create Social Change
• Understanding Private and Public Spheres
• What Mills' "Power Elite" Can Teach Us
• Famous Sociologists
• What Is Social Order in Sociology?
• Major Sociological Theories
• Karl Marx's Greatest Hits
• Understanding Karl Marx's Class Consciousness and False Consciousness

Understanding Critical Theory

Charlotte Nickerson

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Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

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Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

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Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

On This Page:

• Critical theories aim to change and critique society as a whole by finding the underlying assumptions in social life that prevent people from participating in a “true democracy.”
• Critical Theory developed in the Frankfurt school from scholars such as Horkheimer and Adorno with an emphasis on examining and deconstructing fascism and mass media.
• Habermas continued the tradition of Critical Theory through his notion of the lifeworld and the public sphere. He theorized that political and economic institutions had invaded public life, leading to a lack of nuance in discourse and preventing people from participating in a “real democracy.”
• Critical Theory morphed into critical legal theory in the latter 20th century, which eventually gave rise to branches such as critical race and critical gender theory.

Critical Theory is a social theory that aims to critique and change society as a whole. Critical theories attempt to find the underlying assumptions in social life that keep people from fully and truly understanding how the world works.

These underlying assumptions, in the view of critical theories, create a “False consciousness” that actively undermines people’s progress toward a true democracy.

Critical Theory, first emerging from Horkheimer at the Frankfurt School, bridges its reach to ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of history.

Critical theorists claim that the social sciences must integrate philosophy into their methods to make their findings practical to advance the moral cause of freeing humans from circumstances such as domination and oppression (Horkheimer, 1993).

While Critical Theory is most associated with the Frankfurt School, beginning with Horkheimer and Adorno and ending with Marcuse and Habermas.

Critical Theory has extended to many other disciplines, such as feminism, critical race theory, and critiques of colonialism.

Critical Theories of Gender

Critical theories of gender are concerned with the ways in which literature and other cultural media reinforce or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of people of various genders.

Critical feminist theories, in particular, focus on issues of power and seek to explain the origins and consequences of gender relations, particularly those that privilege men.

They study the ways that assumptions and ideologies around gender are produced, reproduced, resisted, and changed in and through the everyday experiences of men and women (Coakley and Pike, 2014).

Like critical theories of race, critical theories of gender see their origins in critical legal studies.

Critical Theories of Race

Racism is prevalent in everyday life, and Critical Theory scholars agree that the ideology and assumptions of racism are so ingrained in the political and legal structures of society as to be nearly unrecognizable (Parker and Roberts, 2005).

The critical study of race and ethnicity is centered on examining the experiences of racial oppression in the context of an attempt to challenge existing assumptions about the construction of race.

Critical theories of race can also trace their roots to philosophical, historical, and sociological critiques of oppression, such as Marxism , feminist theory, and postcolonialism (Parker and Roberts, 2005).

Critical Race Theory emerged as an outgrowth of the critical legal studies movement originating at Harvard Law School in the early 1980s.

Law professors and students criticized how the law served to privilege the wealthy and powerful in US society while impeding the poor from using the courts as a means of writing their own wrongs (Parker and Roberts, 2005).

One of the main tenets of critical race theory is that, while classical racism has subsided, everyday racism remains alive, characterized by mundane practices and events infused with varying degrees of racism, such as “microaggressions” and other subtle, automatic, non-verbal exchanges.

For example, an educational institution can commit a microaggression by creating hostile environmental encounters for African Americans, such as seeing black males engaged in black youth culture as predatory (Parker and Roberts, 2005).

Globalization

One criticism of the Frankfurt school is that it lacked a solid grounding in social reality (Kozlarek, 2001).

Kozlarek (2001) argues that Horkheimer and Adorno take an overly euro-centric stance on the world and that Eurocentrism is a crucial impediment to Critical Theory, and suggests alternatives to the Eurocentric worldview in modern Critical Theory research.

Rather than philosophically constructing ideas of what should be normal and an ideal society, Kozlarek claims, one must ask where the underlying assumptions of Critical Theory come from and what their sociocultural functions were and are.

Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School

Critical Theory has many distinct historical phases spanning several generations; however, it was born in the Frankfurt School.

The Frankfurt School opened as the Institute for Social Research in the 1920s in the social context of rising fascism in Germany and Italy. The theorists of the Frankfurt school went into exile in Switzerland and the United States before returning to Frankfurt in 1953.

According to the theorists in the Frankfurt School, a so-called “Critical Theory” could be distinguished from a “traditional” theory in that critical theories have a specific practical purpose, such as promoting an understanding of the world that leads to human “emancipation from slavery” (Horkheimer, 1973).

In order for a Critical Theory to be a Critical Theory in Horkheimer’s view, it must be explanatory, practical, and normative.

By these, Horkheimer means that the theory must explain what is wrong with the current social reality, identify the people and actors that can change it, and provide both achievable, practical objectives for social transformation and ways of criticizing those objectives (Horkheimer, 1972).

Research that furthers Critical Theory must, in this view, combine psychological, cultural, and social dimensions, as well as an examination of institutional forms of domination.

Horkheimer’s Critical Theory, heavily influenced by Marxism, aimed to transform contemporary capitalist society into a more consensual one.

By this, Horkheimer meant that a capitalist society could only be transformed by becoming more democratic in order to make sure that all of the conditions of social life that are controllable by people can be determined by the consensus of the people living in that society (Horkheimer, 1972).

The Frankfurt School theorists extended the work of Marx, Weber, and Freud, as well as considering the pull of authoritarian regimes, the relationship between art, technology, mass society, and social psychology.

Initial Concerns of the Frankfurt School

In its initial phases, Critical Theory attempted to differentiate the idea of a “real democracy” from the forms of government then present in Western societies.

According to critical theorists, real democracy is rational because it allows individuals to gain control over the social processes that affect themselves and their life choices.

The next phases of Critical Theory were concerned with anti-democratic trends, such as the emergence of fascism in the 1930s. These studies focused on phenomena such as fascist states and authoritarian personalities.

Horkheimer saw these anti-democratic trends and a process called reification as undermining people’s ability to determine their own social circumstances.

Reification is a complex idea where something that is immaterial — like happiness, fear, or evil — is treated as a material thing. In the context of Critical Theory’s early musings about authoritarianism, this meant that the spread of increasingly abstract but fascist social principles led to societies that were more fascist on a concrete level.

To critical theorists in the 1940s, reification happened at two different levels. Firstly, reification happened at a small scale, and theorists could examine the psychological conditions that lead to people supporting democracy or authoritarianism.

Secondly, reification also happened at a larger scale and over a longer time period, where people explained enduring societal trends by projecting their democratic or authoritarian principles onto retellings of history (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Habermas sought to develop a level of analysis between that of the individual and the entire society. He called this intermediate level the “public sphere” or Offentlichkeit.

Ideology Critique

One of the main concerns of the scholars of the Frankfurt School was the rise of “mass culture” — the technological developments that allow cultural products, such as music, movies, and art, to be distributed on a massive scale.

Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse speculated that technology allowed audiences to consume content passively rather than actively engaging with one another, making people intellectually inactive and politically passive.

Contemporary Critical Theory: Habermas

Habermas was a member of the second generation of Critical Theory. Habermas’s Critical Theory went beyond the theoretical roots of the Frankfurt school and became more life-American pragmatism, which holds that both the meaning and the truth of any idea are a function of its practical outcome.

Haabermas’ work in Critical Theory was concerned with two main issues: developing a justification for the normative dimension of critical social theory and the problem of establishing a connection between the theory and political practice.

These problems were carried over from the Frankfurt school (Roderick, 1986).

The first of these problems dealt with what counts as a rational criticism of society, while the second is directed at how these criticisms can be used to construct a society that is more rational.

Habermas dealt with three kinds of knowledge: empirical knowledge, which is technical or scientific; Hermeneutic or interpretive knowledge, which is interested in human understanding and cooperation; and critical knowledge, which is focused on freeing humans from societal assumptions.

Habermas acknowledged that science cannot be value-free and that those who study society are part of its subject matter. Critical Theory, to Habermas, unmasks the distortions, representations, and politics embedded in our knowledge and speech.

The Lifeworld

Habermas focused on the idea of the lifeworld, which is a person’s everyday life and experiences. The lifeworld encompasses culture, social relations, and everyday communication.

Habermas’s theory is that the lifeworld is increasingly being taken over by political and economic systems. As politics is about power, attempts at becoming more powerful by politicians and the interests of political parties affect everyday lives.

People also, according to Habermas, are heavily influenced by the system of capitalism – they talk about companies, work at them, and consume constantly. Habermas believed that the lifeworld could not be reduced to what he calls “media ” — such as the power of the state and money.

However, the modern state and economic systems have imposed their media on the lifeworld, and as money and politics seek to dominate the local lifeworld of people, they impede them from achieving a “true democracy.”

To Habermas, value rationality — attempts to achieve value-based goals that make life meaningful, such as being a good father — is tied to the lifeworld. Meanwhile, instrumental rationality — such as calculations of the means necessary to achieve a particular end — is tied to the state and economy.

The everyday relationships of people in society in modernity have been overtaken by a social structure that promotes money and power as keys to success and what is seen as morally right.

Habermas emphasized that money and power, and the instrumental relationships that people form in trying to achieve them, cannot be the sole foundation for consensus and communication.

The Colonization of the Public Sphere

Another idea that Habermas considers is the colonization of the public sphere. Habermas believed that news sources motivated by profit, promoting entertainment, and oversimplification dominated public life.

Rather than focusing on the nuances of issues through lengthy public debate, these colonizers encouraged arguments between people with simplified perspectives.

Habermas sets an ideal for public discourse, which he calls ideal speech communities. Habermaass differentiated communicative action — any action that someone takes with the intent to communicate — from strategic speech — which is instrumentally based and permeates the lifeworld under capitalist-based societies.

Rather than trying to simply communicate with people, those who use strategic speech are trying to manipulate people into achieving an end.

Habermas believed that the promise and hope of enlightenment and modernity is a society where people can talk in order to reach a consensus and make reasoned decisions. To have this, everyone needs an equal chance to speak without coercion, where any topic can be discussed, and where everyone can keep their speech free from ideology.

Such a situation constitutes the ideal speech community, which is the basis for and gives rise to civil society. This civil society must develop in the context of a liberal political culture that promotes equality and draws strong boundaries between large institutions and the lifeworld.

In the public sphere of real democracy, the state’s power is limited, and people can use persuasion but cannot obtain political power in the public sphere (Roderick, 1986).

Critical Evaluation

As a broad-ranging philosophical project, Critical Theory has experienced many tensions between theorists both in the same generation and across different generations of the tradition.

Critical Theory has also drawn criticism from outside.

Perhaps the most major criticism of Critical Theory is that it fails to provide rational standards by which it can show that it is superior to other theories of knowledge, science, or practice.

Gibson (1986), for example, says that critical theories suffer from cliquishness, conformity, elitism, immodesty, anti-individualism, contradictoriness, criticalness, and naivety.

As Hughes and Hughes say of Habermas’s theory of ideal public discourse, it “says much about rational talkers talking, but very little about actors acting: Felt, perceptive, imaginative, bodily experience does not fit these theories” (1990).

Critical Theory has also been criticized from a feminist perspective. This feminist criticism of Critical Theory contends that critical theories can be as narrow and oppressive as the rationalization, bureaucratization, and cultures they seek to unmask and change.

Ellsworth (1989), for example, acknowledges that critical theories are often so tied to their vision of the truth that they fail to see themselves as one of many voices and that the enlightening of the false consciousness of others may be a form of domination rather than liberation.

Coakley, J., & Pike, E. (2014). EBOOK: Sports in Society. McGraw Hill.

Critical Theory. (2005). In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/

Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard educational review, 59(3), 297-325.

Gibson, R. (1986). Critical Theory and education. Hodder and Stoughton.

Habermas, Jürgen (1990a): Moral consciousness and communicative action. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.). Maldon, MA: Polity Press.

Horkheimer, M. (1972). Critical Theory: Selected essays (Vol. 1). A&C Black.

Horkheimer, M. (1993). The present situation of social philosophy and the tasks of an institute for social research. Between philosophy and social science: Selected early writings, 11.

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (1973). The Dialectic of Enlightenment (London, Allen Lane).

Kozlarek, O. (2001). Critical Theory and the challenge of globalization. International Sociology, 16(4), 607-622.

Parker, L., & Roberts, L. (2005). Critical theories of race. RESEARCH METHODS, 74.

Roderick, R. (1986). Habermas and the foundations of Critical Theory. Macmillan International Higher Education.

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Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation of educational aims and interventions.

Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial; some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.

This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.

1. Problems in Delineating the Field

2. analytic philosophy of education and its influence, 3.1 the content of the curriculum and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.2 social, political and moral philosophy, 3.3 social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and the epistemology of education, 3.4 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 4. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

The inward/outward looking nature of the field of philosophy of education alluded to above makes the task of delineating the field, of giving an over-all picture of the intellectual landscape, somewhat complicated (for a detailed account of this topography, see Phillips 1985, 2010). Suffice it to say that some philosophers, as well as focusing inward on the abstract philosophical issues that concern them, are drawn outwards to discuss or comment on issues that are more commonly regarded as falling within the purview of professional educators, educational researchers, policy-makers and the like. (An example is Michael Scriven, who in his early career was a prominent philosopher of science; later he became a central figure in the development of the field of evaluation of educational and social programs. See Scriven 1991a, 1991b.) At the same time, there are professionals in the educational or closely related spheres who are drawn to discuss one or another of the philosophical issues that they encounter in the course of their work. (An example here is the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner, the central figure in the development of operant conditioning and programmed learning, who in works such as Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972) grappled—albeit controversially—with major philosophical issues that were related to his work.)

What makes the field even more amorphous is the existence of works on educational topics, written by well-regarded philosophers who have made major contributions to their discipline; these educational reflections have little or no philosophical content, illustrating the truth that philosophers do not always write philosophy. However, despite this, works in this genre have often been treated as contributions to philosophy of education. (Examples include John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] and Bertrand Russell’s rollicking pieces written primarily to raise funds to support a progressive school he ran with his wife. (See Park 1965.)

Finally, as indicated earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, and the like. It is not surprising that scholars who work in this broad genre also find a home in the field of philosophy of education.

As a result of these various factors, the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content of arguments and methods of argumentation in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—all of which are at least part of the philosophical toolkit—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity. In any case, as they gained prominence and for a time hegemonic influence during the rise of analytic philosophy early in the twentieth century analytic techniques came to dominate philosophy of education in the middle third of that century (Curren, Robertson, & Hager 2003).

The pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie 1962: xix)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D. J. O’Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences. Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), which contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and, he argued, should be seen as truncated arguments), Conditions of Knowledge (1965), still the best introduction to the epistemological side of philosophy of education, and Reason and Teaching (1973 [1989]), which in a wide-ranging and influential series of essays makes the case for regarding the fostering of rationality/critical thinking as a fundamental educational ideal (cf. Siegel 2016). B. O. Smith and R. H. Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of prominent British writers, most notably R. S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the United States), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education (APE) throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970) and Peters (1973) of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage,” it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for, it was argued, getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by the content taught, the intention of the instructor, the methods of instruction used, the outcomes of the instruction, or by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook 1972). The danger of restricting analysis to ordinary language (“normal English usage”) was recognized early on by Scheffler, whose preferred view of analysis emphasized

first, its greater sophistication as regards language, and the interpenetration of language and inquiry, second, its attempt to follow the modern example of the sciences in empirical spirit, in rigor, in attention to detail, in respect for alternatives, and in objectivity of method, and third, its use of techniques of symbolic logic brought to full development only in the last fifty years… It is…this union of scientific spirit and logical method applied toward the clarification of basic ideas that characterizes current analytic philosophy [and that ought to characterize analytic philosophy of education]. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 9–10])

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import. (It is worth noting that a 1966 article in Time , reprinted in Lucas 1969, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970’s radical students in Britain accused Peters’ brand of linguistic analysis of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education; there even had been a surprising degree of interest on the part of the general reading public in the United Kingdom as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner’s book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner’s side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced a list of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta 1963.)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with (see Peters 1973, where to the editor’s credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted).

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s and 1980s, including The Dialectic of Freedom (1988); the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation . In more recent years all these trends have continued. APE was and is no longer the center of interest, although, as indicated below, it still retains its voice.

3. Areas of Contemporary Activity

As was stressed at the outset, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren 2003), which contains more than six-hundred pages divided into forty-five chapters each of which surveys a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge, truth and learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, the purposes of universities, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Siegel 2009) contains a similarly broad range of articles on (among other things) the epistemic and moral aims of education, liberal education and its imminent demise, thinking and reasoning, fallibilism and fallibility, indoctrination, authenticity, the development of rationality, Socratic teaching, educating the imagination, caring and empathy in moral education, the limits of moral education, the cultivation of character, values education, curriculum and the value of knowledge, education and democracy, art and education, science education and religious toleration, constructivism and scientific methods, multicultural education, prejudice, authority and the interests of children, and on pragmatist, feminist, and postmodernist approaches to philosophy of education.

Given this enormous range, there is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to highlighting contemporary work that makes solid contact with and contributes to important discussions in general philosophy and/or the academic educational and educational research communities.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education, and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches and the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including/excluding particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why should evolution or creation “science” be included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Do the justifications for including/excluding materials on birth control, patriotism, the Holocaust or wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some school districts stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato’s pioneering efforts all draw, explicitly or implicitly, upon the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues.

First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same)? Many aims have been proposed; a short list includes the production of knowledge and knowledgeable students, the fostering of curiosity and inquisitiveness, the enhancement of understanding, the enlargement of the imagination, the civilizing of students, the fostering of rationality and/or autonomy, and the development in students of care, concern and associated dispositions and attitudes (see Siegel 2007 for a longer list). The justifications offered for all such aims have been controversial, and alternative justifications of a single proposed aim can provoke philosophical controversy. Consider the aim of autonomy. Aristotle asked, what constitutes the good life and/or human flourishing, such that education should foster these (Curren 2013)? These two formulations are related, for it is arguable that our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life—although this is not obvious, both because it is not clear that there is one conception of the good or flourishing life that is the good or flourishing life for everyone, and it is not clear that this is a question that should be settled in advance rather than determined by students for themselves. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to think and act autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. A rival justification of the aim of autonomy, associated with Kant, champions the educational fostering of autonomy not on the basis of its contribution to human flourishing, but rather the obligation to treat students with respect as persons (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988). Still others urge the fostering of autonomy on the basis of students’ fundamental interests, in ways that draw upon both Aristotelian and Kantian conceptual resources (Brighouse 2005, 2009). It is also possible to reject the fostering of autonomy as an educational aim (Hand 2006).

Assuming that the aim can be justified, how students should be helped to become autonomous or develop a conception of the good life and pursue it is of course not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the general question of how best to determine curriculum content. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing and then pursuing a conception of the good life, and because logical analysis shows, he argued, that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms (Hirst 1965; see Phillips 1987: ch. 11). Another, suggested by Scheffler, is that curriculum content should be selected so as “to help the learner attain maximum self-sufficiency as economically as possible.” The relevant sorts of economy include those of resources, teacher effort, student effort, and the generalizability or transfer value of content, while the self-sufficiency in question includes

self-awareness, imaginative weighing of alternative courses of action, understanding of other people’s choices and ways of life, decisiveness without rigidity, emancipation from stereotyped ways of thinking and perceiving…empathy… intuition, criticism and independent judgment. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 123–5])

Both impose important constraints on the curricular content to be taught.

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as a vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a dominant group, or any particular group, including one’s own; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as an instrument of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect and serve the interests of powerful cultural elites. What to do about this situation (if it is indeed the situation of contemporary educational institutions) is far from clear and is the focus of much work at the interface of philosophy of education and social/political philosophy, some of which is discussed in the next section. A closely related question is this: ought educational institutions be designed to further pre-determined social ends, or rather to enable students to competently evaluate all such ends? Scheffler argued that we should opt for the latter: we must

surrender the idea of shaping or molding the mind of the pupil. The function of education…is rather to liberate the mind, strengthen its critical powers, [and] inform it with knowledge and the capacity for independent inquiry. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 139])

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able?—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all.”

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all. Medically, this is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings 2015.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato’s system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the most notable event in the history of political philosophy over the last century. The book spurred a period of ferment in political philosophy that included, among other things, new research on educationally fundamental themes. The principles of justice in educational distribution have perhaps been the dominant theme in this literature, and Rawls’s influence on its development has been pervasive.

Rawls’s theory of justice made so-called “fair equality of opportunity” one of its constitutive principles. Fair equality of opportunity entailed that the distribution of education would not put the children of those who currently occupied coveted social positions at any competitive advantage over other, equally talented and motivated children seeking the qualifications for those positions (Rawls 1971: 72–75). Its purpose was to prevent socio-economic differences from hardening into social castes that were perpetuated across generations. One obvious criticism of fair equality of opportunity is that it does not prohibit an educational distribution that lavished resources on the most talented children while offering minimal opportunities to others. So long as untalented students from wealthy families were assigned opportunities no better than those available to their untalented peers among the poor, no breach of the principle would occur. Even the most moderate egalitarians might find such a distributive regime to be intuitively repugnant.

Repugnance might be mitigated somewhat by the ways in which the overall structure of Rawls’s conception of justice protects the interests of those who fare badly in educational competition. All citizens must enjoy the same basic liberties, and equal liberty always has moral priority over equal opportunity: the former can never be compromised to advance the latter. Further, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth are permitted only to the degree that it serves the interests of the least advantaged group in society. But even with these qualifications, fair equality of opportunity is arguably less than really fair to anyone. The fact that their education should secure ends other than access to the most selective social positions—ends such as artistic appreciation, the kind of self-knowledge that humanistic study can furnish, or civic virtue—is deemed irrelevant according to Rawls’s principle. But surely it is relevant, given that a principle of educational justice must be responsive to the full range of educationally important goods.

Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educational distribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessary understanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for just as much as job-related skills. An interesting implication of doing so is that the rationale for requiring equality under any just distribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not (Hollis 1982). If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.

In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions. Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship (Satz 2007; Anderson 2007). Then again, fair equality of opportunity in Rawls’s theory is derived from a more fundamental ideal of equality among citizens. This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work (Dworkin 1977: 150–183; Rawls 1993). So, both Rawls’s principle and the emerging alternative share an egalitarian foundation. The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over (e.g., Brighouse & Swift 2009; Jacobs 2010; Warnick 2015). Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred. Another Rawls-inspired alternative is that a “prioritarian” distribution of achievement or opportunity might turn out to be the best principle we can come up with—i.e., one that favors the interests of the least advantaged students (Schouten 2012).

The publication of Rawls’s Political Liberalism in 1993 signaled a decisive turning point in his thinking about justice. In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection. A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture. Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. The shift to political liberalism involved little revision on Rawls’s part to the content of the principles he favored. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications. How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question (cf. Callan 1997; Clayton 2006; Bull 2008).

Other philosophers besides Rawls in the 1990s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1984) strongly influenced the development of communitarian political theory which, as its very name might suggest, argued that the cultivation of community could preempt many of the problems with conflicting individual rights at the core of liberalism. As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics (e.g., Strike 2010). Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care (Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). Noddings’ work is particularly notable because she inferred a cogent and radical agenda for the reform of schools from her conception of care (Noddings 1992).

One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated. The controversy is partly about what we should teach in our schools and is commonly discussed by philosophers in that context (Galston 1991; Ben-Porath 2006; Callan 2006; Miller 2007; Curren & Dorn 2018). The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. For example, Gutmann and Thompson claim that citizens of diverse democracies need to “understand the diverse ways of life of their fellow citizens” (Gutmann & Thompson 1996: 66). The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they (like Rawls) believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content. Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as (diversely) morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen.

Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family. The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.

The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories. There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle (Burnyeat 1980; Peters 1981). But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Other aspects of moral education—in particular, the paired processes of role-modelling and identification—deserve much more scrutiny than they have received (Audi 2017; Kristjánsson 2015, 2017).

Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists. (The papers collected in Kotzee 2013 and Baehr 2016 highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education.)

There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. Alvin Goldman argues that truth (or knowledge understood in the “weak” sense of true belief) is the fundamental epistemic aim of education (Goldman 1999). Others, including the majority of historically significant philosophers of education, hold that critical thinking or rationality and rational belief (or knowledge in the “strong” sense that includes justification) is the basic epistemic educational aim (Bailin & Siegel 2003; Scheffler 1965, 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2005, 2017). Catherine Z. Elgin (1999a,b) and Duncan Pritchard (2013, 2016; Carter & Pritchard 2017) have independently urged that understanding is the basic aim. Pritchard’s view combines understanding with intellectual virtue ; Jason Baehr (2011) systematically defends the fostering of the intellectual virtues as the fundamental epistemic aim of education. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. (Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee 2015, summarized in Siegel 2018, and helpfully analyzed in Watson 2016.)

A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: In what circumstances if any ought students to trust their teachers’ pronouncements, and why? Here the epistemology of education is informed by social epistemology, specifically the epistemology of testimony; the familiar reductionism/anti-reductionism controversy there is applicable to students and teachers. Anti-reductionists, who regard testimony as a basic source of justification, may with equanimity approve of students’ taking their teachers’ word at face value and believing what they say; reductionists may balk. Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief?

The correct answer here seems clearly enough to be “it depends”. For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them. For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: they can assess them for plausibility, compare them with other opinions, assess the teachers’ proffered reasons, subject them to independent evaluation, etc. Regarding “the teacher says that p ” as itself a good reason to believe it appears moreover to contravene the widely shared conviction that an important educational aim is helping students to become able to evaluate candidate beliefs for themselves and believe accordingly. That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them. There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education (for further discussion see Goldberg 2013; Siegel 2005, 2018).

A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination : How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. If the indoctrination is successful, all have the result that students/victims either don’t, won’t, or can’t subject the indoctrinated material to proper epistemic evaluation. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination (which is always bad) and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons (the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc.), but in such a way that critical evaluation of all such material (and everything else) is prized and fostered (Siegel 1988: ch. 5). In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent (Siegel 2018).

Education, it is generally granted, fosters belief : in the typical propositional case, Smith teaches Jones that p , and if all goes well Jones learns it and comes to believe it. Education also has the task of fostering open-mindedness and an appreciation of our fallibility : All the theorists mentioned thus far, especially those in the critical thinking and intellectual virtue camps, urge their importance. But these two might seem at odds. If Jones (fully) believes that p , can she also be open-minded about it? Can she believe, for example, that earthquakes are caused by the movements of tectonic plates, while also believing that perhaps they aren’t? This cluster of italicized notions requires careful handling; it is helpfully discussed by Jonathan Adler (2002, 2003), who recommends regarding the latter two as meta-attitudes concerning one’s first-order beliefs rather than lessened degrees of belief or commitments to those beliefs.

Other traditional epistemological worries that impinge upon the epistemology of education concern (a) absolutism , pluralism and relativism with respect to knowledge, truth and justification as these relate to what is taught, (b) the character and status of group epistemologies and the prospects for understanding such epistemic goods “universalistically” in the face of “particularist” challenges, (c) the relation between “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-that” and their respective places in the curriculum, (d) concerns raised by multiculturalism and the inclusion/exclusion of marginalized perspectives in curriculum content and the classroom, and (e) further issues concerning teaching and learning. (There is more here than can be briefly summarized; for more references and systematic treatment cf. Bailin & Siegel 2003; Carter & Kotzee 2015; Cleverley & Phillips 1986; Robertson 2009; Siegel 2004, 2017; and Watson 2016.)

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one. (For an illuminating account of the historical development of educational research and its tribulations, see Lagemann 2000.)

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn’s ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemological: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they were used only sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe 2003 and Phillips 2009.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millennium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decision-making.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicians and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has become common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the US National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC 2002), that argued that this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work. Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on. This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: the constitution of warranting evidence, the nature of theories and of confirmation and explanation, etc. Nancy Cartwright’s important recent work on causation, evidence, and evidence-based policy adds layers of both philosophical sophistication and real world practical analysis to the central issues just discussed (Cartwright & Hardie 2012, Cartwright 2013; cf. Kvernbekk 2015 for an overview of the controversies regarding evidence in the education and philosophy of education literatures).

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world have their own intellectual traditions and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education in the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world there is such a diversity of approaches that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, both on the field as a whole and also on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules 1994; Chambliss 1996b; Curren 1998, 2018; Phillips 1985, 2010; Siegel 2007; Smeyers 1994), two “Encyclopedias” (Chambliss 1996a; Phillips 2014), a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish 2003), a “Companion” (Curren 2003), two “Handbooks” (Siegel 2009; Bailey, Barrow, Carr, & McCarthy 2010), a comprehensive anthology (Curren 2007), a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch & Gingell 1999), and a good textbook or two (Carr 2003; Noddings 2015). In addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift here (for another sampling see A. Rorty 1998, Stone 1994), and several international journals, including Theory and Research in Education , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Educational Theory , Studies in Philosophy and Education , and Educational Philosophy and Theory . Thus there is more than enough material available to keep the interested reader busy.

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• Hirst, Paul and R.S. Peters, 1970, The Logic of Education , London: Routledge.
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• –––, 2017, “Emotions Targeting Moral Exemplarity: Making Sense of the Logical Geography of Admiration, Emulation and Elevation”, Theory and Research in Education , 15(1): 20–37. doi:10.1177/1477878517695679
• Kvernbekk, Tone, 2015, Evidence-based Practice in Education: Functions of Evidence and Causal Presuppositions , London: Routledge.
• Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, 2000, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Educational Research , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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autonomy: personal | Dewey, John | feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics | feminist philosophy, interventions: liberal feminism | feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on autonomy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on disability | Foucault, Michel | Gadamer, Hans-Georg | liberalism | Locke, John | Lyotard, Jean François | -->ordinary language --> | Plato | postmodernism | Rawls, John | rights: of children | Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Acknowledgments

The authors and editors would like to thank Randall Curren for sending a number of constructive suggestions for the Summer 2018 update of this entry.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School

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• Theodor Adorno
• Walter Benjamin
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Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School by Diana Boros LAST REVIEWED: 15 January 2015 LAST MODIFIED: 15 January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756223-0161

“Critical Theory” in its proper noun form denotes the work of the Frankfurt School—the interdisciplinary group of thinkers who coalesced at the Institute for Social Research beginning in the 1930s in Frankfurt, Germany—and most often refers to the works of its most famous and prolific members: Theodor W. Adorno (b. 1903–d. 1969), Walter Benjamin (b. 1892–d. 1940), Eric Fromm (b. 1900–d. 1980), Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929–), Max Horkheimer (b. 1895–d. 1973), and Herbert Marcuse (b. 1898–d. 1979). As a school of thought, the Frankfurt School is often described generationally. Along with the five theorists mentioned above, barring Habermas, the first generation of critical theorists also included Otto Kirchheimer (b. 1905–d. 1965), Leo Lowenthal (b. 1900–d. 1993), Franz Leopold Neumann (b. 1900–d. 1954), and Friedrich Pollock (b. 1894–d. 1970). Jürgen Habermas joined the core group later, first as a student of Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1950s, and, a decade later, as a professor. He went on to advise a large number of third generation critical theorists. Critical theory is most well known within two main historical trajectories—that of literary criticism and that of social and political critique. However, the focus in this article is on critical social theory, and specifically on the work of the Frankfurt School. Broadly speaking, “critical theory” can include almost any form of theory that is focused on critique of given or prescribed conditions and on the seeking of liberation against these conditions. Critical theory as a philosophical school of thought was borne out of both a disillusionment with Enlightenment ideals, and an interpretation of Marxian thought (particularly the ideas of the early Marx) that articulates the philosophy in a humanist light, delivers it from its (they argued) outmoded understanding of capitalism’s oppression, and focuses on its fundamentally critical nature. Besides Marx, thinkers such as Kant, Schiller, and Hegel, as well as Nietzsche, Lukács, Weber, and Freud, inspired the critical perspective of the Frankfurt School. From the early work done at the institute before and after World War II to the later contributions of the 1960s and 1970s, the theorists of the Frankfurt School objected to the increasingly rapid advance of a free-market dogma that established its dominance in language, cultural tropes, societal ideals, and even emotional and intellectual self-assessment by the individual. Critical Theory relies primarily on a Hegelian-Marxian dialectical philosophy as a tool by which to examine the ideology of this encompassing system. The critical theorists aimed to develop an interdisciplinary critical theory of society that combined philosophy, social theory, political science, psychology, and aesthetics. They critiqued the conformity of public life, the mechanization of the “culture industry,” and the instrumental rationality that drove these characteristics of cultural life under advanced capitalism. To seek individual liberation to improve everyday life amidst these conditions, they argued in various ways for the rise of dialectical or negative thinking in order to resist the “false needs” created by late capitalism, to stress the importance of the sensual and the aesthetic as sources of knowledge, and to promote the need for a vibrantly democratic multidimensional public sphere.

The texts below offer a sampling of some of the most influential edited volumes on the Frankfurt School. Besides Habermas, some of the most prominent social and political-minded critical theorists writing today include Axel Honneth, Frederic Jameson, Douglas Kellner, Stephen Bronner, and Susan Buck-Morss, among others. For a broad introduction to the primary works of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory, it is helpful to begin with Bronner and Kellner 1989 and Arato and Gebhardt 1982 . After these works, see Buck-Morss 1977 , Geuss 1981 , Honneth 2009 , Nealon and Irr 2002 , Rush 2004 , Wiggershaus 1995 , and Wolin 2006 .

Arato, Andrew, and Eike Gebhardt, eds. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader . New York: Continuum, 1982.

This volume draws together essential works of the Frankfurt School, many of them otherwise not available in English. Arato and Gebhardt provide useful introductions to the three sections that make up this reader in which they discuss the importance of the works included in the volume as well as their historical significance. Paul Piccone writes the general introduction.

Bronner, Stephen, and Douglas Kellner, eds. Critical Theory and Society: A Reader . New York: Routledge, 1989.

This is a valuable collection of influential essays by the key members of the Frankfurt School. The volume is divided into five main sections, the selections are well chosen and many of them appear here in English for the first time. This volume is a provocative introduction to the foundations of Critical Theory. Bronner and Kellner write the introduction.

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute . New York: Free Press, 1977.

This is a lucid guide to understanding the origin and influences on Adorno’s negative dialectics. Buck-Morss not only highlights Adorno’s debt to Benjamin, but also places the theory into context by discussing the roles that other thinkers, from Kant to Lukács to Horkheimer, have played in shaping Adorno’s thought.

Geuss, Raymond. The Idea of a Critical Theory . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

This text offers an analytically succinct and informative critique of the claims of the Frankfurt School. Geuss pays particular attention to the cognitive, conformational, and epistemological aspects of critical theory. This is a useful introductory text to critical theory.

Honneth, Axel. Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory . Translated by James Ingram. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

This collection of essays, published in English for the first time, offer what Honneth considers to be the essential unifying and continuing justification for the critical social theory tradition: the distortion of reason in capitalist society.

Nealon, Jeffrey, and Caren Irr. Rethinking the Frankfurt School . New York: State University of New York Press, 2002.

This collection presents essays from a range of critical theory’s representatives, including Fredric Jameson and Douglas Kellner.

Rush, Fred, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521816602

This is a collection of essays from leading scholars on critical theory including Axel Honneth, Jay Bernstein, and Raymond Geuss.

Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance . Translated by Michael Robertson. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995.

This text gives a thorough account of the Frankfurt School’s history and importance with a keen eye toward the evolution of the school relative to external contexts.

Wolin, Richard. The Frankfurt School Revisited: And Other Essays on Politics and Society . New York: Routledge, 2006.

This collection of essays provides a fresh look at the importance of the Frankfurt School. The volume includes essays on Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Arendt, Heidegger, Weber, Jaspers, and Schmitt. Included also is a valuable account of Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism. Wolin wrote this following two excellent and relevant books: Heidegger’s Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) and The Seduction of Unreason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

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What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

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Education Week is the #1 source of high-quality news and insights on K-12 education. Sign up for our EdWeek Update newsletter to get stories like this delivered to your inbox daily.

Is “critical race theory” a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.

The topic has exploded in the public arena this spring—especially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom.

In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the government’s role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile.

School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.

Just what is critical race theory anyway?

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.

CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.

This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.

Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.

To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.

One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT , including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed.

(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)

Does critical race theory say all white people are racist? Isn’t that racist, too?

The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.

Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.

Here’s a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion famously concluded: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But during oral arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “It’s very hard for me to see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.”

All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.

What does any of this have to do with K-12 education?

Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they’ve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.

Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.

Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they don’t necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.

As one teacher-educator put it: “The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: ‘Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful?’ That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers.” Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.

An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence can’t coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their argument goes that efforts to change grading practice s or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard.

As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that “white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized”; that “achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness”; and that “the United States was founded on racism.”

Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that students—especially white students—will be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.

While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, it’s not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.

What is going on with these proposals to ban critical race theory in schools?

As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and have been proposed in various other statehouses.

The bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover.

Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racism—like the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spaces—be considered in violation of these laws?

It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.

It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.

As English teacher Mike Stein told Chalkbeat Tennessee about the new law : “History teachers can not adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. English teachers will have to avoid teaching almost any text by an African American author because many of them mention racism to various extents.”

The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and “action civics”—an approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.

How is this related to other debates over what’s taught in the classroom amid K-12 culture wars?

The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. CRT appears to be the latest salvo in this ongoing debate.

In the early and mid-20th century, the concern was about socialism or Marxism . The conservative American Legion, beginning in the 1930s, sought to rid schools of progressive-minded textbooks that encouraged students to consider economic inequality; two decades later the John Birch Society raised similar criticisms about school materials. As with CRT criticisms, the fear was that students would be somehow harmed by exposure to these ideas.

As the school-aged population became more diverse, these debates have been inflected through the lens of race and ethnic representation, including disagreements over multiculturalism and ethnic studies, the ongoing “canon wars” over which texts should make up the English curriculum, and the so-called “ebonics” debates over the status of Black vernacular English in schools.

In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the country’s history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the other—between its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994 attempt to set national history standards.

A current example that has fueled much of the recent round of CRT criticism is the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sought to put the history and effects of enslavement—as well as Black Americans’ contributions to democratic reforms—at the center of American history.

The culture wars are always, at some level, battled out within schools, historians say.

“It’s because they’re nervous about broad social things, but they’re talking in the language of school and school curriculum,” said one historian of education. “That’s the vocabulary, but the actual grammar is anxiety about shifting social power relations.”

Education Issues, Explained

The literature on critical race theory is vast. Here are some starting points to learn more about it, culturally relevant teaching, and the conservative backlash to CRT.

Brittany Aronson & Judson Laughter. “The Theory and Practice of Culturally Relevant Education: A Synthesis of Research Across Content Areas.” Review of Educational Research March 2016, Vol. 86 No. 1. (2016); Kimberlé Crenshaw, ed. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. The New Press. (1996); Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” American Educational Research Journal Vol. 32 No. 3. (1995); Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol 11. No. 1. (1998); Jonathan Butcher and Mike Gonzalez. “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America.” Heritage Foundation. (2020); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed. New York, NY: New York University Press. (2017); Shelly Brown-Jeffy & Jewell E. Cooper, “Toward a Conceptual Framework of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: An Overview of the Conceptual and Theoretical Literature.” Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2011.

A version of this article appeared in the June 02, 2021 edition of Education Week as What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

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The State of Critical Race Theory in Education

• Posted February 23, 2022
• By Jill Anderson
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Moral, Civic, and Ethical Education

When Gloria Ladson-Billings set out in the 1990s to adapt critical race theory from law to education, she couldn’t have predicted that it would become the focus of heated school debates today.

Over the past couple years, the scrutiny of critical race theory — a theory she pioneered to help explain racial inequities in education — has become heavily politicized in school communities and by legislators. Along the way, it has also been grossly misunderstood and used as a lump term about many things that are not actually critical race theory, Ladson-Billings says. 

“It's like if I hate it, it must be critical race theory,” Ladson-Billings says. “You know, that could be anything from any discussions about diversity or equity. And now it's spread into LGBTQA things. Talk about gender, then that's critical race theory. Social-emotional learning has now gotten lumped into it. And so it is fascinating to me how the term has been literally sucked of all of its meaning and has now become 'anything I don't like.'”

In this week’s Harvard EdCast, Ladson-Billings discusses how she pioneered critical race theory, the current politicization and tension around teaching about race in the classroom, and offers a path forward for educators eager to engage in work that deals with the truth about America’s history. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Jill Anderson:   I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast.

Gloria Ladson-Billings never imagined a day when the words critical race theory would make the daily news, be argued over at school board meetings, or targeted by legislators. She pioneered an adaptation of critical race theory from law to education back in the 1990s. She's an educational researcher focused on theory and pedagogy who at the time was looking for a better way to explain racial disparities in education.

Today the theory is widely misunderstood and being used as an umbrella term for anything tied to race and education. I wondered what Gloria sees as a path forward from here. First, I wanted to know what she was thinking in this moment of increased tension and politicization around critical race theory and education.

Well, if I go back and look at the strategy that's been employed to attack critical race theory, it actually is pretty brilliant from a strategic point of view. The first time that I think that general public really hears this is in September of '20 when then president and candidate Donald Trump, who incidentally is behind in the polls, says that we're not going to have it because it's going to destroy democracy. It's going to tear the country apart. I'm not going to fund any training that even mentions critical race theory.

And what's interesting, he says, "And anti-racism." Now he's now paired two things together that were not really paired together in the literature and in practice. But if you dig a little deeper, you will find on the Twitter feed of Christopher Rufo, who is from the Manhattan Institute, two really I think powerful tweets. One in which he says, "We're going to render this brand toxic." Essentially what we're going to do is make you think, whenever you hear anything negative, you will think critical race theory. And it will destroy all of the, quote, cultural insanities. I think that's his term that Americans despise. There's a lot to be unpacked there, which Americans? Who is he talking about? What are these cultural insanities? And then there's another tweet in which he says, "We have effectively frozen the brand." So anytime you think of anything crazy, you think critical race theory. So he's done this very effective job of rendering the term, in some ways without meaning. It's like if I hate it, it must be critical race theory.

You know, that could be anything from any discussions about diversity or equity. And now it's spread into LGBTQA things. Talk about gender, then that's critical race theory. Social emotional learning has now got lumped into it. And so it is fascinating to me how the term has been literally sucked of all of its meaning and has now become anything I don't like.

Jill Anderson:  Can you break it down? What is critical race theory? What isn't it?

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Let me be pretty elemental here. Critical race theory is a theoretical tool that began in legal studies, in law schools, in an attempt to explain racial inequity. It serves the same function in education. How do you explain the inequity of achievement, the racial inequity of achievement in our schools?

Now let's be clear. The nation has always had an explanation for inequity. Since 1619, it's always had a explanation. And indeed from 1619 to the mid 20th century, that explanation was biogenetic. Those people are just not smart enough. Those people are just not worthy enough. Those people are not moral enough.

In fact across the country, we had on college and university campuses, programs and departments in eugenics. If you went to the World's Fair or the World Expositions back in the turn of the 20th century, you could see exhibits with, quote, groups of people from the best group who was always white and typically blonde and blue eyed, to the worst group, which is typically a group of Africans, generally pygmies. So the idea is you can rank people. So we've always had an explanation for why we thought inequity exists.

Somewhere around the mid 20th century, 1950s, you'll get a switch that says, well, no, it's really not genetic it's that some groups haven't had an equal opportunity. That was a powerful explanation. So one of the things that you begin to see around mid 1950s is legislation and court decisions, Brown versus Board of Education. You start to see the Voters Rights Act. You see the Civil Rights Act. You see affirmative action going into the 1960s. And yeah, I think that's a pretty good, powerful explanatory model.

Except they all get rolled back. 1954, Brown v. Board of Education . How many of our kids are still in segregated schools in 2022? So that didn't hold. Affirmative action. The court's about to hear that, right? Because of actually the case that's coming out of Harvard. Voters rights. How many of our states have rolled back voters rights? You can't give a person a bottle of water who was waiting in line in Georgia. We're shrinking the window for when people can vote.

So all of the things that were a part of the equality of opportunity explanation have rolled away. Critical race theory's explanation for racial inequality is that it is baked into the way we have organized the society. It is not aberrant. It's not one of those things that we all clutch our pearls and say, "Oh my God, I can't believe that happened." It happens on a regular basis all the time. And so that's really one of the tenets that people are uncomfortable hearing. That it's not abnormal behavior in our society for people to react in racist ways.

Jill Anderson: My understanding is that critical race theory is not something that is taught in schools. This is an older, like graduate school level, understanding and learning in education, not something for K–12 kids, not something my kid's going to learn in elementary school.

Gloria Ladson-Billings: You're exactly right. It is not. First of all, kids in K12 don't need theory. They need some very practical hands-on experiences. So no, it's not taught in K12 schools. I never even taught it as a professor at the University of Wisconsin. I didn't even teach it to my undergraduates. They had no use for it. My undergraduates were going to be teachers. So what would they do with it? I only taught it in graduate courses. And I have students who will tell you, "I talked with Professor Ladson-billings about using critical race theory for my research," and she looked at what I was doing and said, "It doesn't apply. Don't use it."

So I haven't been this sort of proselytizer. I've said to students, if what you're looking at needs an explanation for the inequality, you have a lot of theories that you can choose from. You can choose from feminist theory. That often looks at inequality across gender. You could look at Marx's theory. That looks at inequality across class. There are lots of theories to explain inequality. Critical race theory is trying to explain it across race and its intersections.

Jill Anderson:  We're seeing this lump definition falling under critical race theory, where it could be anything. It could be anti-racism, diversity and equity, multicultural education, anti-racism, cultural [inaudible 00:09:15]. All of it's being lumped together. It's not all the same thing.

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Well, and in some ways it's proving the point of the critical race theorists, right? That it's kind normal. It's going to keep coming up because that's the way you see the world. I mean, here's an interesting lumping together that I think people have just bought whole cloth. That somehow Nikole Hannah-Jones' 1619 is critical race theory. No, it's not.

No. It. Is. Not. It is a journalist's attempt to pull together strands of a date that we tend to gloss over and say, here are all the things were happening and how the things that happened at this time influenced who we became. It's really interesting that people have jumped on that. And there is another book that came out, and it also came out of a newspaper special from the Hartford Courant years ago called Complicity. That book is set in New England and it talks about how the North essentially kept slavery going.

And when it was published by the Hartford Courant, Connecticut, and particularly Hartford said, we want a copy of this in every one of our middle and high schools to look out at what our role has been. Because the way we typically tell you our history is to say, the noble and good North and then the backward and racist South. Well, no, the entire country was engaged in the slave trade. And it benefited folks across the nation.

That particular special issue, which got turned into a book hasn't raised an eyebrow. But here comes Nikole Hannah-Jones. And initially, of course, she won a Pulitzer for it and people were celebrating her. But it's gotten lumped into this discussion that essentially says you cannot have a conversation about race.

What I find the most egregious about this situation is we are taking books out of classrooms, which is very anti-democratic. It is not, quote, the American way. And so you're saying that kids can't read the story of Ruby Bridges. It's okay for Ruby Bridges at six years old to have to have been escorted by federal marshals and have racial epithets spewed at her. It's just not okay for a six year old today to know that happened to her. I mean, one of the rationales for not talking about race, I don't even say critical race theory, but not talking about race in the classroom is we don't want white children to feel bad.

My response is, well great, but what were you guys in the 1950s and sixties when I was in school. Because I had to sit there in a mostly white classroom in Philadelphia and read Huckleberry Finn , with Mark Twain with a very liberal use of the n-word. And most of my classmates just snickering. I'd take it. I'd read it. It didn't make me feel good. I had to read Robinson Crusoe . I had to read Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind . I had to read Heart Of Darkness .

All of these books which we have canonized, are books of their time. And they often make us feel a particular kind way about who we are in this society. But all of a sudden one group is protected. We can't let white children feel bad about what they read.

Jill Anderson: I was reading your most recent book, Critical Race Theory in Education, a Scholars Journey , and I was struck by when you started to do this work and this research, and adapt it from law back in the early 1990s. You talked about presenting this for the first time, or one of the first times. And there was obviously a group excited by it, a group annoyed by it. I look at what's happening now and I see parents and educators. Some are excited by a movement to teach children more openly and honestly about race. And then there's going to be those who are annoyed by it. You've been navigating these two sides your whole life, your whole career. So what do you tell educators who are eager, and open, and want to do this work, but they're afraid of the opposition?

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  Well, I think there's a difference between essentially forcing one's ideas and agenda on students, and having kids develop the criticality that they will need to participate in democracy. And whenever we have pitched battles, we've been talking about race, but we've had the same kind of conversation around the environment, right? That you cannot be in coal country telling people that coal is bad, because people are making their living off of that coal. So we've been down this road before.

What I suggest to teachers is, number one, they have to have good relationships with the parents and community that they are serving, and they need to be transparent. I've taught US History for eighth graders and 11th graders before going into academe, and we've had to deal with hard questions. But there's a degree to which the community has always trusted that I had their students' best interests at heart, that I want them to be successful, that I want them to be able to make good decisions as citizens.

That's the bigger mission, I think, of education. That we are not just preparing people to go into the workplace. We are preparing people to go into voting booths, and to participate in healthy debate. The problem I'm having with critical race theory is I'm having a debate with people who don't know what we're debating. You know, I told one interview, I said, "It's like debating a toddler over bedtime. That's not a good debate." You can't win that debate. The toddler doesn't understand the concept. It's just that I don't want to do it.

I will say following the news coverage that I don't believe that all of these people out there are parents. I believe that there is a large number of operatives whose job it is to gin up sentiment against any forward movement and progress around racial equality, and equity, and diversity.

You know, to me, what should be incensing people was what they saw in Charlottesville, with those people, with those Tiki torches. What should be incensing people is what they saw January 6th. People lost their lives in both of those incidents. Nobody's lost their lives in a critical race theory discussion. You know?

I'm someone who believes that debate is healthy. And in fact debate is the only thing that you can have in a true democracy. The minute you start shutting off debate, the minute you say that's not even discussable, then you're moving towards totalitarianism. You know? That's what happened in the former Soviet Union and probably now in Russia. That's what has happened in regimes that say, no other idea is permitted, is discussable. And that's not a road that I think we should be walking here.

Jill Anderson: I feel like we're getting lost in the terminology, which we've talked about. And for school leaders, I wonder if the conversation needs to start with local districts in their communities debunking, or demystifying, or telling the truth about what critical race theory is, that kids aren't learning it in the schools. That that's not what it's about. Does it not even matter at this point because people are always going to be resistant to the things that you just even mentioned?

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  I'm a bit of a sports junkie, so I'll use a sports metaphor here. I'm just someone who would rather play offense than defense. I think if you get into this debate, you are on the defensive from the start. For me, I want to be on the offense. I want to say, as a school district, here are our core values. Here's what we stand for. Many, many years ago when I began my academic career, I started it at Santa Clara University, which is a private Catholic Jesuit university. And students would sometimes bristle at the discussions we would have about race and ethnicity, and diversity and equality.

And I'd always pull out the university's mission statement. And I'd say, "You see these words right here around social justice? That's where I am with this work. I don't know what they're doing at the business school on social justice, but I can tell you that the university has essentially made a commitment it to this particular issue. Now we can debate whether or not you agree with me, but I haven't pulled this out of thin air."

So if I'm a school superintendent, I want to say, "Here are core values that we have." I'm reminded of many years ago. I was supervising a student teacher. It was a second grade. And she had a little boy in a classroom and they were doing something for Martin Luther King. It might have been just coloring in a picture of him with some iconic statement. And this one little boy put a big X on it. And she said, "Why did you do that?" And his response was, "We don't believe in Martin Luther King in my house." So she said, "Wow, okay, well, why not?" And he really couldn't articulate. She says, "Well, tell me, who's your friend in this classroom?" And one of the first names out of his mouth was a little Black boy.

And she said, "Do you know that he's a lot like Martin Luther King? You know, he's a little boy. He's Black." She was worried about where this was headed and didn't know what to do as a student teacher, because she's not officially licensed to teach at this point. And I shared with her our strategy. I said, "Why don't you talk with your cooperating teacher about what happens and see what she says. If she doesn't seem to want to do anything, casually mention, don't go marching to the principal's office. But when you have a chance to interact with the principal, you might say something I had the strangest encounter the other day and then share it." Well, she did that.

The principal called the parents in and said, "Your child is not in trouble, but here's what you need to know about who we are and what we stand for."

Jill Anderson:  Wow.

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  You know? And so again, it wasn't like let's have a big school board meeting. Let's string up somebody for saying something. It wasn't tearing this child down. But it was reiterating, here are our core values. I think schools can stand on this. They can say, "This is what we stand for. This is who we are." They don't ever have to mention the word critical race theory.

The retrenchment we are seeing in some states, I think it was a textbook that they were going to use in Texas that essentially described enslaved people as workers. That's just wrong. That's absolutely wrong. And I can tell you that if we don't teach our children the truth, what happens when they show up in classes at the college level and they are exposed to the truth, they are incensed. They are angry and they cannot understand, why are we telling these lies?

We don't have to make up lies about the American story. It is a story of both triumph and defeat. It is a story of both valor and, some cases, shame. Slavery actually happened. We trafficked with human beings, and there's a consequence to that. But it doesn't mean we didn't get past it. It doesn't mean we didn't fight a war over it, and decide that's not who we want to be.

Jill Anderson:  What's the path forward? What can we do to make sure that students are supported and learning about their own history so that they are prepared to go out into a diverse global society?

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  I'm perhaps an unrepentant optimist, because I think that these young people are not fooled by this. You know, when they started, quote, passing bans and saying, "We can't have this and we won't have this," I said, "Nobody who's doing this understands anything about child and adolescent development." Because how do you get kids to do something? You tell them they can't do.

So I have had more outreach from young people asking me, tell me about this. What is this? These young people are burning up Google looking for what is this they're trying to keep from us? So I have a lot of faith in our youth that they are not going to allow us to censor that. Everything you tell them, they can't read, those are the books they go look for. You know, I have not seen a spate in reading like this in a very long time.

So I think it's interesting that people don't even understand something as basic as child development and adolescent development. But I do think that the engagement of young people, which we literally saw in the midst of the pandemic and the post George Floyd, the incredible access to information that young people have will save us. You know, it's almost like people feel like this is their last bastion and they're not going to let people take whatever privilege they see themselves having away from them. It's not sustainable. Young people will not stand for it.

Jill Anderson:  Well, I love that. And it's such a great note to end on because it feels good to think that there is a path forward, because right now things are looking very scary. Thank you so much.

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  Well, you're quite welcome. And I will tell you, again sports metaphor, I'm an, again, unrepentant 76ers fan. I realize you're in Massachusetts with those Celtics. But trust me, the 76ers. Okay? One of my favorite former 76ers is Allen Iverson and he has a wonderful line, I believe when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. He said, "My haters have made me great."

Well, I will tell you that I had conceived of that book on critical race theory well before Donald Trump made his statement in September of 2020. And I thought, "Okay, here's another book which will sell a modest number of copies to academics." The book is flying off the shelves. Y'all keep talking about it. You're just making me great.

Jill Anderson:  Maybe it will start the revolution that we need.

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Well, thank you so much.

Jill Anderson:  Thank you. Gloria Ladson-billings is a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is the author of many books, including the recent Critical Race Theory in Education, a Scholar's Journey . I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.

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