“Critical Pedagogy” has many versions today, as does “critical theory”.(1)  With important differences between critical theories and the variety of “critical pedagogies”, identifying the problems of current Critical Pedagogies becomes problematic, and the development of a positive utopian alternative Critical Pedagogy becomes impossible. For all their differences, all current versions of Critical Pedagogy function as part and parcel of normalizing education and its violence. In this article I suggest an alternative critical education as counter-education. Within counter-education no room exists for a positive Utopia, and it does not promise collective emancipation under present circumstances, but counter-education suggests possibilities for identifying, criticizing, and resisting violent practices of normalization, control, and reproduction practices in a system which uses human beings as its agents and victims. Counter-education opens possibilities for refusing to abandon human potential to become other than directed by the system and the realm of self-evidence. It enables a chance - which is to be struggled for again and again - to challenge normalizing education in all its version, including Critical Pedagogy. As I shall show, positive utopianism is the main weakness of current critical pedagogies that challenge the present philosophical, cultural, and social reality. Philosophical negativism, I argue, is a pre-condition for the development of a non-repressive Critical Pedagogy, which is essentially different from normalizing education. Current versions of Critical Pedagogy lack this negative dimension; all are united by a commitment to positive utopianism, even when explicitly denying it. With all their differences, today’s versions of Critical Pedagogy are all based of weak, controlled, and marginalized collectives for their common optimistic view of the possibilities of changing reality and securing unaothoritative emancipation, love and happiness: they  forget that the violence of self-evidence and power are the main obstacles to the human’s transcendence and realization of her/his potential autonomy. The possibility and the nature of a non-repressive pedagogy is at the heart of my project. Here I suggest an initial step: to explore the exact relation between the philosophical framework and the social tasks of Critical Pedagogy. I begin by concentrating on the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School as a historical and conceptual framework for developing a non-repressive Critical Pedagogy. I hope thereby to encourage a counter-education to hegemonic education and to oppose the dogmas and illusions of the hegemonic versions of Critical Pedagogy.
 

Critical Theory

The possibilities of the counter-education which here will be only briefly suggested and generally characterized are connected to central conceptions and philosophical orientations of critical philosophy, and more specifically to the project of the Frankfurt School thinkers. Their basic concept was the utopian; here I do not refer to a vision of a perfect future human order  but to its dual philosophical foundation, namely to the centrality of the transcendental dimension of their thought and their denotation of the category of potentiality as an essential element of the thing. According to this conception, the thing is not to be understood from itself. The given is to be evaluated in light of its potential, in light of the “not yet realized” that it incubates within itself. The realization and the blocking of these potentialities were understood in a dialectical historical and material context.

     Another central dimension is the Frankfurt School’s understanding of the connection between the utopian “hope principle” and the obligation to “the total otherness” from present reality.(2)  In this tradition, negation is not a pose but a philosophical stand and a methodology elaborated in the Frankfurt School’s concept of knowledge. This negation is inherent, in principle and in practice, philosophically and politically. This is the origin of the negation of the positivistic conception of knowledge that treats the “facts” of current reality as the  supreme yardstick for desirable scientific work.

     The Critical Theory thinkers saw themselves as committed to a struggle over the total transformation of present reality and not solely over its reconstruction.(3)  They emphasized human emancipation as the vital dimension (4)  of Critical Theory. This concern arose from the central ideals of Enlightenment, whose realization the Frankfurt School thinkers called for by means of technological possibilities whose absence had made them an abstract Utopia in the past.

     Historically, “Critical Pedagogy” was perceived as a realization of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School in schools. This can be shown by a thematic and historical reconstruction of the classical manifestations of Critical Pedagogy in the thought of Paulo Freire, Wolfgang Klafki, Michael Apple, Peter McLaren, Ira Shor, Carmen Luke, Jennifer Gore, and Henry Giroux. The Frankfurt School thinkers did not have a narrow “Critical Pedagogy” but all their work concerned education in the subjects of knowledge, autonomy, reflectivity and agency, transformation/production/reproduction, and representation of reality, namely education in the broader sense.(5)

     Some important questions arise in light of this understanding. First, can this philosophy be reduced to pedagogical theory and practice? Can it frame a didactic setting for use with the very young, the poorly educated, or non-Western cultures ignorant of the cultural tradition and social reality in which Critical Theory was formed? Even if the answers are positive, the principles of Critical Theory may not be implementable in present-day institutional schools, which are responsible for the cultural reproduction and normalization of the subject  which Critical Theory negates. If the answers to the questions are negative, then standard Critical Pedagogy has to be challenged by today’s Critical Theory, which rejects a Critical Pedagogy that is not a “negative pedagogy”.(6)  In any case, standard Critical Pedagogy is inappropriate for a defensible Critical Theory of today. Education in its narrower and broader sense has become a central philosophical issue. In an anti-philosophical era Philosophy is again appearing at the center of political and theoretical public and private spheres of life. Here I shall try to examine these issues by treating two main versions of Critical Pedagogy, one by Paulo Freire and the one by Henry Giroux.
 

Critical Pedagogy: Paulo Freire

The pedagogy of Paulo Freire is known as “Critical Pedagogy” and, like the pedagogy of Giroux, it also sees the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School as one of its main sources; others are radical theology and the ideology critique of Antonio Gramsci. Education, according to Freire, is about cultural action for emancipation.(7)  In Giroux’s language, Freire combines “the language of critique” with “the language of possibilities”.(8)  Freire emphasizes the concept of education as political practice in the control of  “language” and consciousness as part of and as a condition for the subjection of individuals and groups by the rulers. Freire examines education as an aspect of the relations between critique and domination. He educates against the ruling group’s claim that schools are centers for distributing relevant knowledge in an objective and neutral manner.

     According to Freire, the model characterizing normal pedagogy’s function is the bank. It is targeted to reproduce power relations that dominate current society and realize the hegemonic ideology in school. He asserts that normal pedagogy acomplishes this project while blocking possibilities for dialogue. In dialogue he sees equal, open, and critical intersubjectivity between students and their world, and between teachers and students and the space in which they are situated, as an alternative to power relations in the school and the apparatuses and hierarchies that constitute it.(9)  In Freire’s opinion, it is of vital importance to transform these powers, hierarchies, and procedures into counter-educational praxis, one which his Critical Pedagogy is committed to constituting. On this level, Freire’s understanding of Critical Theory and his Critical Pedagogy unite.

     Freire’s Critical Pedagogy did not grow out of mere principles but out of his direct involvement with Brazil’s poor farmers. He saw that their social and economic subservice and their lack of a  “voice” and of  competence to conceive reality critically and comprehensibly could not be separated from their inability to act correctly for change in their reality. In his second stage of development, Giroux made much use of Freire’s emphasis on communality, collective knowledge, and counter-education, which aims to challenge the silencing hegemonic education. Such an education guarantees the weakness and the silence of marginalized groups even when they comprise the majority of the population. Note that unlike Giroux, Freire still formulates his Critical Pedagogy in modernistic categories of class struggle.

     The postmodern and the multicultural discourses that influenced Giroux took a one-dimensional attitude towards power. They denoted the importance of deconstructing cultural reproduction and the centrality of relations of dominance to the “voices” of groups whose collective memory, knowledge, and identity were threatened or manipulated by power relations and knowledge conceptions that reflect and serve the hegemonic groups. Freire is not aware that this manipulation has two sides, negative and a positive. The negative side allows the realization of violence by guaranteeing possibilities for the successful functioning of a normalized human being and creating possibilities for men and women to become more productive in “their” realm of self-evidence. Their normality reflects and serves this self-evidence by partly constituting the human subject as well as the thinking self. Giroux easily extracted from Freire’s Critical Pedagogy the elements denoting the importance of acknowledging and respecting the knowledge and identity of marginalized groups and individuals. In fact, this orientation and its telos are in contrast to the central concepts of postmodern educators on the one hand and Critical Theories of Adorno, Horkheimer, and even Habermas on the other. But many similar conceptions and attitudes are present as well.

     The aim of Freire’s Critical Pedagogy is to testore to marginalized groups their stolen “voice”, to enable them to recognize identify, and give their name the things in the world. The similarity to postmodern critiques is already evident in his acknowledgment that to correctly coin a word is nothing less than to change the world.(10)  However, to identify this conception with the postmodern stand is a over-hasty because the centrality of language in Freire‘s thought relates to his concept of “truth” and a class struggle that will allow the marginalized and repressed an authentic “voice”,(11)  as if their self-evident knowledge is less false than that which their oppressors hold as valid. Implicitly, Freire contends that the interests of all oppressed people are the same, and that one general theory exists for deciphering repressive reality and for developing the potentials absorbed in their collective memory. An alternative critique of language which does not claim to empower the marginalized and the controlled to conceive and articulate their knowledge and needs on the one hand, and is not devoted to their emancipation on the other, is mere “verbalism”, according to Freire.(12)

     The purpose or common cause of the educator and the educated, the leader and the followers, in a dialogue between equal partners is called here “praxis”. Praxis in education aims to bridge the gap between theory and transformational action that effectively transforms human existence. This concept of transformation contrasts with educational concept of Critical Theory. Here learning and education are basically the individual’s responsibility and possibility, and are always an ontological issue while epistemologically concretized in the given historical social context. They are conditioned by an individual’s competence to transcend the “father image”, prejudices, habits, and external power relations that constitute the collective in order to attain full personal and human growth.(10)  According to Freire, this personal development is conditioned by critical acknowledgment and should occur as part of the entire community’s revolutionary practice. Only there can successful educational praxis realize its dialogical essence. The dialogue is an authentic encounter between one person and another, an educator and her/his fellow who wants to be dialogically educated, and the encounter should be erotic or not realized at all. “Love” is presented as the center andn the essence of dialogue.(14)

     Freire’s Critical Pedagogy is foundationalist and positivist, in contrast to his explicit negation of this orientation. It is a synthesis between dogmatic idealism and vulgar collectivism meant to sound the authentic voice of the collective, within which the dialogue is supposed to become aware of itself and of the world. The educational links of this synthesis contain a tension between its mystic-terroristic and its reflective-emancipatory dimensions. In Freire’s attitude towards Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, the terroristic potential contained in the mystic conception of the emancipated “group”, “people”, or “class” knowledge is revealed within the concept of a dialogue. Freire introduces Che Guevara as an ideal model for anti-violent dialogue between partners in the desirable praxis. Che Guevara used a structurally similar rhetoric to that of Ernst Juenger and National Socialist ideologues on the creative power of war, blood, and sweat in the constitution of a new man, the real “proletar” in South  America. Freire gives this as an example of the liberation of the oppressed within the framework of new “love” relations which allow to speak the silenced “voice”.(15)

     His uncritical understanding of power/knowledge relations draws him to observe the de-colonization process in Africa and elsewhere (undoubtedly a progressive development in itself) as suitable contexts for national realization of Critical Pedagogy.(16)  This is not mere naivity but a readjustment of the terroristic element of his Critical Pedagogy revealed earlier in his understanding of “Che” as an educator in his alliance with the national systematic oppression of “liberated” Third World countries. I do not claim that there is no need to support local struggles for democracy, equality, and developmenting such countries or that it is impossible for them to be regarded as inferior or undemocratic in principle. My claim does not refer even to a specific country, since it is possible that in some cases a Third World country will develop a flourishing democracy. However, for historical reasons, such as Western imperialism, local power structures, cultural traditions, and conceptual apparatuses, Western-style democracy is not likely to be realized in most of them. My argument refers to Freire’s failure in the crucial theoretical and political element of the concept of dialogue and the relation between knowledge and power, consciousness and violence, as presented by Hegel, Marx, Adorno, and Foucault. That is why his emancipatory Eros sides implicitly with the anti-critical tradition of dogmatic revolutionary Christianity and voluntaristic revolutionary models of the anarchists, National Socialism, and South America’s guerrillas. These are contrasted with the explicit devotion of his Critical Pedagogy to dialogue, non-functionalist Critical Thinking, as well as spiritual maturity.

     Like the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory, Freire’s project is also indebted to the negation of present reality. However, from the totality of reality and its power games it attempts to expropriate knowledge of repressive groups as possesing special validity; from the totality governed by power to save a certain “authentic will” and consciousness which are devoted to an erotic praxis. Within Critical Pedagogy they are supposed to be freed from the dynamics and internal logic of reality implicitly, in the name of the superiority of the essence of being. In contrast to the Critical Theory’s concept of love, (17)  this kind of love is immanently violent, even in the sense of political terror and the control of collective and individual consciousness. Its interest in dialogue is not erotic and transcendent but is what Plato called “popular Eros” (Plato 1927, 344), as manifested by Alcibiades, the great disciple and lover of Socrates. It is not surprising that Alcibiades became a traitor to his fatherland and even to those with whom he sided. Alcibiades’ political acts of betrayal are but a manifestation of his treachery against “the heavenly Eros,”(18)  flaunting the earthly superiority of “the popular Eros”(19)  and rejecting the struggle for spiritual maturity and transcendence. Freire acts as if he were Alcibiades, finding himself a Socrates who agrees to teach him “the truth”. As in the case of Alcibiades, this “popular Eros” functions as an impetus to a political power game, seeking its expansion through philosophical education and entrance into a dialogue that promises warm and easy love, after being disappointed in transforming “heavenly Eros” into a positive political power/knowledge alternative.

     My argument about Freire’s project is that non-critical and automatic preference for the self-evident knowledge of the oppressed to that of the oppressors is dangerous. The self-evidence of “the people” or a social or cultural group, even when developed to reflectivity by a grand leader-educator, is not without a terroristic potential. On the one hand, the idea is that the educational leader is responsible for the success of the project, while by the same token he (not she) has to be a total lover and be totally loved. This is within the framework of a praxis whose starting point is the self-evidence of the group and earthly politics. This opens the gate to totalitarianism as earthly heaven. These poles, with violence as their secret connection, are manifested in other poles in the system, as personified in the identification of Freire with Che Guevara or Fidel Castro and his own acceptance by his followers as a guru who encourages the groups and creates the horizon of their dialogues.

     It seems to me that the thinkers of both the first generation of the Frankfurt School, such as Adorno and Horkheimer, and of its second generation, such as Juergen Habermas and Karl Otto Apel, acknowledged the danger of this kind of education. They understood the difference between negation of social conditions alien to ideals of  solidarity, understanding, and transcendence and the positive utopia of “love”. The later was a false promise in effect produced a kind of “dialogue” reproducing the inner logic of existing power relations; it prevented transcendence and struggle for autonomy of the individual. Such an education blocks the possibility of counter-education, which is conditioned by an alternative critique. Counter-education as a starting point for a non-repressive critique does not rush into easy optimism, positive utopianism, and “love”  of the kind that Freire promised. Within the framework of such a positive utopia, education constitutes itself either on the self-evidence of the group or on that of the leader-educator. That is why this kind of Critical Pedagogy is immanently endangered by overflowing into verbalism, dogmatism, or violence. Since Freire is careful to exclude the third option, his Critical Pedagogy is practically realized within the horizons of verbalism and dogmatism, which constantly threaten the project with unreflective acceptance of the false consciousness and knowledge of the repressed groups, who are unprepared for reflection on the dialogical process in which they are involved. Freire challenges this threat not within radical philosophical education but within political half-conservatism.(20)

     There are also important emancipatory elements in the anti-elitism of Freire’s and his followers’ Critical Pedagogy. The fall into the perils of violence is not inevitable in this project, even if it is immanent to the system. This version of Critical Pedagogy is of much value for groups and classes in the Third World and for marginalized and controlled groups in the Western world. To a certain degree, this pedagogy even incubates potential refusal of and resistance to the inner logic of capitalism and current technological progress, but because of its central problems it will never develop into anything more than a futile revolt standing on precarious foundations for counter-totalitarianism.

     The importance and the futility of this project are exemplified, for example, by one of Freire’s best-known American disciples, Ira Shor. Shor describes his experience in trying to criticize the self-evident knowledge of students at a communal college where one of America’s greatest myths - the hamburger - was questioned.(21)  However,lacking Critical Theory’s “elitist” general theory, even the greatest achievement of this version of Critical Pedagogy is drawn into the order which it intended to rebel against. Lacking the need and the possibility of conceptualizing and articulating the critical “experience”, this critique is compelled to become another commodity needed in American colleges so as to be successful in the present order of things.
 

Critical Pedagogy: Henry Giroux

Henry Giroux’s project might serve as another example of a Critical Pedagogy based on  the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory. Giroux is quite explicit, justifying this connection by the revolutionary potential of Critical Theory.(22)  The Critical Pedagogy that he formulated highlighted the optimistic dimension of the Frankfurt School’s revolutionary stand, and he developed it to meet the needs of his version of Critical Pedagogy. In the Frankfurt School the optimistic revolutionary dimension was developed mainly by Herbert Marcuse. Even in the 1930s, when Critical Theory had ambitions of stimulating a change in political reality in addition to a theoretical shift in social and cultural critique, this dimension was dialectically set in a framework that had a competing, pessimistic, dimension.(23)  Giroux’s characterizations of Critical Theory are better suited to characterize his own theory than to reconstruct Critical Theory - even in its first stage of
development.(24)

   In the 1970s and 1980s, Henry Giroux formulated a Critical Pedagogy that synthesized  the more progressive elements of John Dewey’s philosophy and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. The emancipatory ambition of this Critical Pedagogy exceeded that of Dewey’s philosophy of education. In Theory and Resistance in Education (1983), Giroux describes his project as a pedagogical realization of Herbert Marcuse’s philosophical project. This Critical Pedagogy is indebted to the politicization of teachers and students and their empowerment as radical intellectuals who change their school as part of a general struggle over essential social change.(25)  The important point here is that Giroux referred to and developed Marcuse’s Critical Theory solely in its positive utopian dimension. This positive-utopian dimension was drawn into his system in isolation from the other, pessimistic, dimension in Marcusian philosophy. To my mind understanding the dialectics between them is vital for a fruitful interpretation and development of Marcuse’s work and its implementation in different fields of knowledge and life.

     Marcuse’s positive utopianism manifests itself on two levels. On the first level, his positive utopianism is realized by his characterizations of future society and the possible realization of human potentialities and their development.(26)  This dimension is vital for the realization and justification of the “total refusal” and its concretization in specific historical situations. Political radicalism and anti-positivistic obligation, in the art of conceiving socio-cultural reality as a precondition for critique and transformative action, were incubated in Giroux’s pedagogy, but not in an unproblematic manner. However, even in the new stage of his pedagogy’s development, while influenced by the feminist and postmodernist discourses he retained to this Marcusian positive utopianism.

     The Marcusian utopianism that was the impetus to his “grand refusal” of the present reality was committed to constructing a “totally different” reality,(27)  and he therefore rejected a “mere revolution”.(28)  The Marcusian telos pointed to a new human being and a new world where life is “art” and work is “play”.(29)  Here the “reality principle” loses its superiority over the “pleasure principle”, and the dichotomy between the realm of must and the realm of freedom is overcome, as is the separation between subject and object, between sense and world.(30)

     These aspects of Marcuse’s positive utopianism are missing in Giroux’s positive utopianism, and this makes his philosophical consistency very problematic, if indeed it is at all possible. He did not offer an alternative to or further development of Marcuse’s political radicalism or to his philosophical coherence, which rendered the task of implementing Marcuse’s Critical Theory in the field of schooling practically impossible. Noteworthy is his neglect of  the element of transcendence in Marcuse’s philosophy. In contrast to his repeated declarations, in his work he developed Dewey’s conception of “democracy as a way of life”(31)  more than Marcuse’s idea of “life as a work of art”. Marcuse followed the messianic/revolutionary tradition while Giroux, in his first stage of development, was more a radical pursuing the progressive middle-class tradition in America that applies the jargon of German Critical Theory to a different, namely liberal, orientation. This was so even prior to Giroux’s second stage of development, when he explicitly distanced himself from Critical Theory (32)  and declared his special interest in postmodern and feminist discourses. Hence, even positive utopianism separated Marcuse and the most developed stage of the Critical Theory of Adorno and Horkheimer from what Marcuse and Giroux had in common. There is another which is no less important: Critical Theory’s philosophical pessimism was totally neglected by Giroux’s Critical Pedagogy, even in its Marcusian version.

     The positive Utopian dimension in Marcuse’s thought had another level which was neglected by Giroux. Marcuse saw in the present and future uprisings of oppositional forces of his time an ontological sign. Neither hope nor confidence that it possible to overthrow or even crack the present realm of self-evidence led him to praise the revolts of young students, feminists, and guerrillas in the Third World. His support can be explained by his understanding of these as heroic manifestations of the possibility to resist the constitution of a one-dimensional totality that controls world societies and false collective consciousness and psyche. Marcuse abandoned Marxian historicism, and theoretically was satisfied with the educational potential of preserving the revolutionary Eros for a future order of things when historical possibilities were again open. Then the myths of refusal and revolt as elements in the struggle for a true humanistic transformation of society would assume great importance.

     From here a non-fashioned education theory is constituted that anchors its utopianism in the transcendent (as well as in the acknowledgment of the impossibility of essential social transformation in the present reality) on the one hand, and in the imperative of a dialogical struggle on the realization of (potential) reasoned human autonomy on the other. This is a teleological project committed to universal emancipation. Its limits are the historical horizons, and it treats the local event at the end through its meaning in and contribution to the total transformation of present reality. This position leaves no room for rapid anti-hierarchical relations between the educator and those he/she is committed to liberate. Marcusian “education” is committed to counter-manipulations and rejection of a quick and hasty revelation or creation of truth or consensus within the dialogical framework of ecstatic revolutionaries. This is in contrast to Nicholas Burbules, Paulo Freire, Giroux, and other disciples of Critical Pedagogy’s concept of dialogue. The Marcusian latent philosophy of education is committed to Ephraim Lessing’s concept of Educating the Human Race in a historical process in which truth does not reveal itself fully and directly; educators with good intentions are manipulated in the service of humanistic education as a trans-historical process (33)
that is understood merely in its fullest unfolding, as a Hegelian or Marxian metanarrative. Adorno and Horkheimer represented a different philosophy of education from the view point of their philosophy’s commitment to a negative utopianism. Their transcendentalism was theoretically realized into an educational project denoting the absence of truth and negating the illusions and the over-optimistic and shallow encouragement of present and future revolutionaries, which uses standard theoretical manipulations and terror, manifesting the power of the purpose principle against which they intended to revolt.

     In the second stage in the development of his Critical Pedagogy, when he started to emphasize the jargon and the thematics of his theory as they relate to the conventions of current postmodernist and feminist discourses, Giroux criticized Adorno and Horkheimer for taking conservative stands, and implicitly for even holding a repressive philosophy; he felt that their conception of emancipation was grounded on a modernist ideology, which demanded universal emancipation and the realization of the autonomous ideal subject in the name of a theory based on the superiority of higher culture over popular culture.(34)

     From the 1980s Giroux constructed an original version of Critical Pedagogy that is even less of a “negative pedagogy”. It is a critique that challenges the ideals and fundamental concepts of Critical Theory because it is also committed to the negation of the current order of things. The elements of the new Critical Pedagogy that Giroux currently presents are committed to negating the ideal autonomous and reflective subject, as well as any “elitist” negative pedagogy. The Frankfurt School thinkers strove for a kind of education that would promote what Adorno called “Muendigkeit”, coming of age,(35)  a maturity that in present society would realize itself in critique, resistance, solidarity, and transformation. He saw this project as conditioned by the development of the knowledge of Western cultures, canonical works, and the possibility of acquiring intellectual power by men and women struggling for spiritual autonomy, the capacity for conceptualizing interests, potentialities, and his negation and political resistance of which the normalized person is deprived.(36)

     Giroux realizes and develops Critical Theory through schooling as a political arena with a major role in producting of discourses, meanings, and subjects, as well as in their control and their distribution. In the second stage of development, Giroux is strongly influenced by postmodernists such as Michel Foucault. In his projects he synthesizes elements from educational thinkers such as Nicholas Burbules, Paulo Freire, and Michael Apple, in suggesting the school for socio-cultural reproduction and distortion of dialogical possibilities in current Western societies. Giroux does not present a one-dimensional postmodern position,whereby dynamic symbolic interchange and cultural reproduction use individuals and groups solely in the interest of the system. He adresses progressive modern critical themes such as ideology critique which he presents as important practice for resistance  to the hegemony of the school system and its normalization practices.(37)  He also retains Critical Theory’s ambition of enhancing students’ reflective power and ability to reconstruct the socio-cultural context that blocks their abilities to create and realize their own meanings.(38)  But he  explicitly rejects the Enlightenment’s and Critical Theory’s concept of emancipation, and the essence of his pedagogy is to recognize the “other” in  his/her culture and the full implications of difference.(39)  Whereas Critical Theory recognized the “other” in its otherness, in its unfulfilled needs and untruthfulness, Giroux, in accordance with postmodern popular formulations, sees that “other” as the starting point of the non-repressive work of Critical Pedagogy,(40)  and negates modernistic “metanarratives” and general theories that could have serve as a framework for reasoned critique and dialogue to which he remains committed. This draws him into the difficulties that Burbules identifies as challenging all “postmodern” critical thinkers.(41)   Giroux’s educational theory becomes non-dialectical and optimistic in a manner that enables him to declare his crossing from the language of critique to the “language of possibilities”. Countrary to his assertions, he distances himself from the essentials of the Enlightenment’s emancipatory project, while staying faithful to some of its harmful characteristics: its positive utopianism, its hasty optimism, and its arrogance as to the possibility of liberating the repressed and constituting a better world within current reality. While criticizing functionalist-positivistic attitudes, he abandons philosophy for political success in his Critical Pedagogy. In his own words, “schooling for self and social empowerment is ethically prior to questions of epistemology...”.(42)

     Giroux constructs an original synthesis of the Enlightenment’s universalistic commitment to liberate the repressed and a rejection of the concepts as the universality of reason, the validity of a general theory, and resistance of constructions and dynamics that are to be reconstructed and negated, even if not defeated or domesticated. Today Giroux accepts the postmodern understanding of the plurality and inconsistancy of time fields, the different epistemological structure of different communities, and the legitimacy of political and epistemic difference; yet he still insists on the possibilities of emancipation here and now. Implicitly, in his thought these possibilities for emancipation are actual and universal, and his positive utopianism and his new epistemic assumptions are inconsistance. Here arise violent potentialities of his concept of dialogue between teachers and students. He has not found a theoretical solution to the conflict between the authority of the self-evidence knowledge, criteria, goals, and interests of individual students of repressed collectives and the principles of his own Critical Pedagogy. While paying tribute to the self-evident knowledge of popular culture and criticizing elitist culture and Critical Theory, his own theory is elitist, sophisticated, and far from the reflective reach of those normalized and manipulated by popular culture and other manifestations of culture industry.(43)  It is a typical representative of both feminist and “patriarchal” Critical Pedagogy.(44)

     Acknowledgment of difference as the foundation of  the “language of possibilities” may justify the optimism and positive utopianism of such a Critical Pedagogy. Yet it guarantees that this critique will not contemplate deeply and problematize the roots of existence and co-existence and question the possibilities of reality, but will realize its potential for philosophical violence and political terror. Giroux combines two salient elements that guarantee the political success of his Critical Postmodern Pedagogy. He ignores Critical Theory’s exposition of the systematic destruction of the individual’s potential for autonomy and reflectivity (45)  and neglects their exposition of the disappearance of Spirit (46)  and the exile of reason which was replaces by instrumental rationality. In his work Giroux combines these two neglections with negligence of a central postmodern position: the relation between knowledge and power. This last move allows him to disregard postmodern critique of “truth” claims of the intellectual as well as the emancipatory movement that “succeeds” in “liberating” individuals and collectives. The very concept of the “we”, the “community”, as a manifestation of the violence of education that constitutes the self-evidence and the identity of both the oppressors and the oppressed stays non-problematic and is presented uncritically in this Critical Pedagogy. Exactly where he could use postmodernist understandings to reformulate some problematic modernist elements in his pedagogical ambitions, Giroux uses some of the most dangerous concepts. His concept of dialogue and alternative relations between teachers as intellectuals and students is based on modernistic attitudes towards voluntarism and vitalism, but there is no defined concept of reason; this is philosophically and politically very dangerous.
 

The Common Ground of the Different Versions of Critical Pedagogy

In his current version of Critical Pedagogy, Giroux emphasizes the importance of differences among groups, persons, knowledge, and needs.(47)  Like thinkers of Feminist Critical Pedagogy and Post-Critical Feminist Pedagogy, Giroux denotes the centrality of repressive elements in modernistic emancipatory claims.(48)  These different educational projects have in common the avoid of challenging their own philosophical and political difficulties which affect their educational alternatives.(49)  They are commited to reconstruct or decipher the power relations that produce the subject, consciousness, identity, knowledge, and possibilities to act in and change reality. They demonstrate and challenge the production of marginality, impotency, and violence of individuals and groups, their control and activation for the sake of the present order of things. They all negate “neutral” positivistic and functionalist trends that prosper in Western societies and, with the help of formal and informal education, reproduce the present order. However, they all refuse philosophy and anything that hints of a “theory” or “elitism”. This is the background to their political and educational impotency, which leads to nothing but empty negativism and fruitless pessimism.(50)

     One of the philosophical and political weaknesses of the different versions of Critical Pedagogy is their positive utopianism and their commitment to optimism as a condition for a meaningful educational praxis. Optimism or “possibilities of emancipation” is presented as an argument for refusing a philosophical work as too “pessimistic”. For Giroux, for example, this is an argument strong enough to negate Adorno and Horkheimer’s late Critical Theory, while for Feminist Pedagogy “political interests” and “the efficiency of the concrete struggle” are enough to avoid theoretical challenges. Some feminists understand this anti-philosophical orientation as problematic, since they understand that today it is wrong to separate the struggle for liberating the consciousness and changing the social order of women and other oppressed groups from serious philosophical work.(51)

     I do not claim that all the theoretical and practical work of Critical Pedagogy is useless or wrong, let alone that we should prefer hegemonic educational ideologies. However, philosophy cannot supply an alternative. The philosophy I suggest is a political issue, and its educational implication demands vita activa rather than vita contemplativa. Such public activism, theoretical work, and educational praxis are not “postmodern”, “post-critical”, “feminist”, or “multicultural”. The educational philosophy presented here is a negative utopianism. The “grand refusal” and utopia that demand transcendence from the current realm of self-evidence are here combined into a politico-philosophical deed. This is educational praxis as counter-education. I will try to demonstrate some of its historical and conceptual characteristics and elaborate on the potentials of some of these educational alternatives.
 

Critical Theory’s Critique of Critical Pedagogy

In “The Future of Critical Theory” Horkheimer presented the dividing line between the first and the second stage of his intellectual evolution. In the first stage, Critical Theory was characterized by positive utopianism: belief in the possibility of the revolutionary constitution of “the good society”, whos establishment, Marx believed, would perfect human thinking not to say not to say human relations.(52)  In the second stage, Critical Theory presents a position matching central conceptions of postmodernism. On the basis of this position Critical Theory is mistakenly accused, and because of this the possibility of a non-naive and non-repressive Critical Pedagogy is denounced.(53)  In the second stage of its development, Critical Theory presents an explicit anti-revolutionary stand, according to which the revolutionary has succeeded in becoming an oppressor by the nature of “revolution”.(54)  The implications are clear of such a theory concerning the Freire’s Critical Pedagogy and his praise of Castro’s guerrillas who finally “got the upper hand”. Adorno and Horkheimer did not destinguish the Fascist project, the Marxist project, and  the so-called capitalist-democratic projects. Because in all of them they saw different versions of modern rationality, whose critique was their work.

     The concept of reason in Critical Theory is very different from that on which Critical Pedagogy is founded, so the concepts of freedom and liberation differ too. In some respects late Critical Theory is much closer to the concepts of reason held by Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Lyotard than to those held by Juergen Habermas, Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and Ira Shor. This issue is studied in The Dialectics of Enlightenment. The Critical Theory that was overlooked, by Critical Pedagogy’s supporters and their opponents, reconstructs historical evolution and the concrete social and cultural instrumentalization of reason as non-reversible developments. Within our Critical Theory, unless an unpredictable interference occurs, no good intentions and progressive talent of educators devoted to counter-education will be of much use in halting them. On the historical level, the instrumentalization of rationality is reconstructed as representing and serving the growing needs of technological progress and economic development. Instrumental reason becomes “a magic essence” and, is correctly described as the return of mythos. In such a reality, there is no room for positive utopianism or for a positive critical stand on the present order or its apparatuses and powers.(55)  The constitution of an order representing extreme and unchallenged rationality in such a context is irrational from traditional Objective Reason’s point of view.(56)  This rationality is realized by almost complete control of the psyche and consciousness of individuals and collectives. However, this does not mean that under such conditions there is no place for “pluralism” or false critical consciousness. From a Critical Theory point of view, this consciousness can be manifested in the naive emancipatory project of a “paternalist” Critical Pedagogy and in alternatives such as Feminist and Multiculturalist Pedagogies. The historical reconstruction of Instrumental Rationality’s victory has an ontological dimension of vital importance for the possibilities of the hermeneutics of the self and the possibilities of a new educational dialogue  based on sensitivity and understanding of “difference”.

     Already in its first stage the ontological dimension was central to Critical Theory in terms of the possibilities of emancipation and the success of counter-education in a reality where Instrumental Rationality celebrates its victory. It is manifested for example, in Walter Benjamin’s On the Critique of Violence,(57)  in which political violence is elaborated in the historical context where there is no place for redemption but where, at the same time, there is not the ultimate reality in history. The real is conceived within a framework in which history is just one of its moments. Therefore, political struggle, as one of history’s manifestations is not the place where central issues and possibilities are determined. These, and others, are tested ultimately in the framework of the collision between God’s power and the power of the mythos. Only in the Godly context is the ahistorical and “redemptive” dimension conceived not as a historical dimension but as part of overcoming history. Only here is it possible to seek “justice”, since it is basically a theological category.(58)  To my mind this is the starting point towards a Critical Pedagogy that is not dogmatic and hastily optimistic.

     For fully developed Critical Theory, the return of the myth within the framework of Instrumental Rationality is even worse today than its ancient version in its penetrating possibilities.(59)  The erosion of possibilities for the very existence of an autonomous subject, which Critical Theory thinkers understood as central to any alternative to present reality, is totally neglected by Critical Pedagogy’s thinkers. Perhaps they avoid this major element of Critical Theory in order not to challenge the kind of optimism on which their projects are implicitly grounded. This does not mean that Critical Theory’s thinkers have abandoned Utopia, or that one should ignore the educational meanings, some of which are quite close to some central conceptions and sensitivities of current postmodernism. However, one should realize that such a Critical Theory repudiates the central characteristics of Critical Pedagogy and its different alternatives. All three versions of Critical Pedagogy, albeit with different rhetoric, suffer the same weakness and for the same reason: Freire’s admiration of “Che” as an educator is to be understood at the same level as his admiration for African dictatorships as proper sites for possible national institutionalization of Critical Pedagogy. A latent terrorist potential is revealed here within his concept of “love” and “dialogue”, in which all hierarchies disappear. In the Critical Pedagogy developed by Giroux, McLaren, and Shor, the dangers of positive utopianism are manifested in a more sophisticated way. On the one hand, the modernistic commitment to reason, empowerment, and revolution is kept, and it cannot be sustained without a general theoretical and political framework. On the other hand, there is acceptance of postmodern anti-meta and general narrative, acceptance of an anti-Enlightenment critique of the Western concepts of subject, reason, and consensus, which is tantamount to negation of the traditional critical tradition.

     Politically and philosophically, this antinomy is in constant danger of being resolved by violence because of its collectivist and positive utopianist attitude. The same antinomy is seen within the framework of Feminist Critical Pedagogy and other current versions of Feminist Pedagogy. Since the claim for liberation is grounded on a dialectical acceptance of the equality of different identities and cultures, the very possibility of defending and developing the category of “feminism” or “woman” becomes an impossibility. As a result, the commitment to solidarity, as the possibility of developing and defending feminine identity and knowledge, is to be decided by symbolic and other manifestations of violence. None of the three models of Critical Pedagogy has succeeded in synthesizing the problematics of essentialism, foundationalism, and transcendence, as well as the recognition of the “other’s” suffering, rights, and potentialities with the preconditions and claims of a philosophy demanding human reflectivity and emancipation. All three versions lack Critical Theory, while neglecting the price of this disregard.

     This can be exemplified by the issue of dialogue as a manifestation of Critical Education. The Critical Pedagogies of Freire, Giroux, Shor, and Burbules are constituted on education for a critical dialogue between educators and educated that is committed to demolishing hierarchies and power relations,(60)  within which students are empowered (ideally) to the degree of being able to decipher the hidden codes, power relations, and manipulations that build and represent reality, knowledge, and identities. Basically, this concept of dialogue is part of the modernistic emancipatory project. The subject taking part in such an anti-violent dialogue is supposed to be rational and solidarian to the degree of being able to reconstruct reality and understand it within the process of the dialogue, even if the “understanding” here is not conceived as “objective truth” or a representation of “the thing in itself and for itself”. This conception consensus is deconstructed by postmodern critique and is negated by Critical Theory’s understanding of our historical situation. According to this argument, in our historical situation, even as an ideal, there is no place for such a subject whose assumed existence preconditions Critical Pedagogy’s concept of dialogue. That is one reason why Critical Theory has no room for such an optimistic emancipatory concept. In these versions of Critical Pedagogy even the hermeneutic dimension, to which praxis education is implicitly committed, is not represented as it is: a project whose foundations and practice are both within the framework of high culture as in the philosophy of Hans Gadamer, but as an open possibility of the given reality.

     Fully developed Critical Theory understood the realization of the Enlightenment in our era as a mass deception within the framework of the culture industry, in which the subject too is transformed into a commodity, including critical knowledge. The rationalization of all levels and dimensions of life and the progress of instruments and possibilities of controlling the subjects by the system (61)  brought to its peak the use of the subject a totally committed agent of reproduction of the realm of self-evidence. Under such conditions, it is impossible to escape the omnipotence of the system.(62)  The dynamics suitable for demolishing the ideal of the rational subject and its concrete possibilities are historically reconstructed here. On the theoretical level, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from the very beginning “the individual” is nothing but an illusion that normally serves to strengthen control people’s consciousness and to construct life possibilities maximizing their productivity in service of the system in which they are activated.(63) This productivity is conditioned by the degree of their normalization, which is the real aim of education. This two-level concept of Adorno and Horkheimer is in agreement with Benjamin’s two-level concept of time, revolution, and redemption.

     From this perspective, the consensus reached by the reflective subject taking part in the dialogue offered by Critical Pedagogy is naive, especially in light of its declared anti-intellectualism on the one hand and its pronounced glorification of “feelings”, “experience”, and self-evident knowledge of the group on the other. Critical Pedagogy, in its different versions, claims to inhere and overcome the foundationalism and transcendentalism of the Enlightenment’s emancipatory and  ethnocentric arrogance, as exemplified by ideology critique, psychoanalysis, or traditional metaphysics. Marginalized feminist knowledge, like the marginalized, neglected, and ridiculed knowledge of the Brazilian farmers, as presented by Freire or Weiler, is represented as legitimate and relevant knowledge, in contrast to its representation as the hegemonic instrument of representation and education. This knowledge is portrayed as a relevant, legitimate and superior alternative to hegemonic education and the knowledge this represents in the center. It is said to represent an identity that is desirable and promises to function “successfully”. However, neither the truth value of the marginalized collective memory nor knowledge is cardinal here. “Truth” is replaced by knowledge whose supreme criterion is its self-evidence, namely the potential productivity of its creative violence, while the dialogue in which adorers of “difference” take part is implicitly represented as one of the desired productions of this violence. My argument is that the marginalized and repressed self-evident knowledge has no superiority over the self-evident knowledge of the oppressors. Relying on the knowledge of the weak, controlled, and marginalized groups, their memory and their conscious interests, is no less naive and dangerous than relying on hegemonic knowledge. This is because the critique of Western transcendentalism, foundationalism, and ethnocentrism declines into uncritical acceptance of marginalized knowledge, which becomes foundationalistic and ethnocentric in presenting “the truth”, “the facts”, or “the real interests of the group” - even if conceived as valid only  for the group concerned. This position cannot avoid vulgar realism and naive positivism based on “facts” of self-evident knowledge ultimately
realized against the self-evidence of other groups.

     These conceptions are all historical, and do not take seriously the present Western system’s capacity for shaping all collective consciousness, not only the ruling group’s. The inner logic of the system is not relevant solely for the center. The system is to be understood as a complex of specific power relations and symbolic dynamics that contains and allows the potentials and limitations of groups and individuals, identities and interests, conceptual possibilities, and economic-technological realities. Within these limits, every element of the system is set, regulated, and activated, thereby receiving its “meaning” and aims. This is the case from the level of the different elements of the psyche to the level of the global sub-systems of production, mobilization, distribution, and conquest. It is made possible by the formation of social, economic, and technological circumstances, as well as by conscious and the psychic ones, which are all contained within the limits of the present order of things. On the one hand, the premises and practices of current standard Critical Pedagogy, by emphasizing the knowledge of marginalized people (not necessarily marginalized knowledge), might look like the realization of Foucault’s understanding of truth/power and the recognition that  “each society has its regimes of truth....that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true”.(64)  On the other hand, even from a Foucaultian perspective, the optimism of standard Critical Pedagogy neither recognizes nor challenges Foucault’s common ground with Critical Theory’s conceptions when he writes that “knowledge is also the field of coordination and subordination of statements in which concepts appear and are defined, applied and transformed...”.(65)  Deciphering these ways of constructing reality, identity, knowledge, and conceptual possibilities on a historical local and general level might release one from easy optimistic reliance on the vitalism that is implicitly understood to be contained in the alternative knowledge of the marginalized. A pedagogy that overemphasizes the importance of the effectiveness of revolutionary praxis and whose yardstick is power is not to be counted as part of Critical Education or Critical Pedagogy. A Critical Pedagogy that does not suffer from these weaknesses must present itself as an elaboration of the possibility of an alternative spirituality, and as part of an effort to transcend reality and the present realm of self-evidence.
 

The Educational Implications of Critical Theory

The educational implications of Critical Theory draw on its metaphysical level that connects it to the philosophical tradition of Anaximandrus, Heraclitus, Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault, as well as to the tradition from Democritus and Aristotle to Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud. Hence one can understand the strong link between Critical Theory and some central elements of postmodernism, as well as the basic contradiction between these two projects. Heidegger presented the human being struggling to realize his/her authenticity as a captive of the play of being, which, in the  advanced technological era, is hidden more than ever. But Heidegger did not deny the possibility of an essential turn, though not the one frequently called “revolution”. Technological progress is understood by Heidegger as the “spiritual fall of the earth”, and his critique pinpoints one of humanity’s manifestations of retreat from human “destination” through the drift of tekhne into modern technology and the context that makes this possible. The nihilism of Western science and technology, according to Heidegger, demands that one overlook the “meaning of being” and its concealment in the  technological and scientific “progress” that mocks the human being. For Adorno and Horkheimer, Instrumental Rationality’s characteristics are very close to Heidegger’s characterization of reason and technology.(66)  Yet Adorno and Horkheimer presented a general and systematic historical and contextual reconstruction of power apparatuses, symbolic dynamics, and manipulation instruments that constitute the conditions and the orientation of Westerners in the 20th century. Their reconstruction is historical and utopian, but not of the kind presented by orthodox Marxism or Critical Pedagogy’s thinkers. An important affinity may exist between Critical Theory and the postmodern discourse in understanding apparatuses of truth production as well as understanding the subject as an agent of the system and a manifestation of the system’s symbolic dynamics and power games; but they differ in treating the socio-cultural network.

     Foucault’s disclosure of power/knowledge relations, which are manifested institutionally and produce subjects to be researched, punished, taught, and administered,  and the reproduction of the system does not totally contradict Critical Theory. The critical reconstruction of the culture industry, for example, does not exclude Foucault’s research on clinics, prisons, schools, and hospitals, and the conclusions on the normalized subject and his/her possibilities for intellectual autonomy, “authenticity”, or “freedom” have much in common. Understanding instrumental rationality as a dimension that is not an emancipator, and does not promise equality and justice but greater control over human beings, is another central element common to Foucault, Adorno, and Horkheimer. Even the surrender of traditional categories such as “class”, estrangement, and  “ideology critique” within a revolutionary theory and praxis that promises liberation its common to these projects. The two concepts of power and signalization do not essentially differ. However, important differences do exist and they contain significant educational implications.
     The most notable difference between Critical Theory and postmodern discourse is Critical Theory’s comitment to the negation of the present order of things, to transcendence and human redemption essentially not conditioned by historical reality. This is so since its impetus is erotic and its “foundation” is a religious anti-metaphysical one. In the final analysis, it implies a negative utopianism, in which the only possible appearance of justice is in the presence of its absence, in the acknowledgment of the violence of its negation. Not to be misleading, Critical Theory cannot promise “liberation” but endless struggle over understanding, refusal, and resistance to the negation of dialogic existence. By contrast, Foucault’s project, like many other postmodern projects, is anti-utopian and anti-erotic, and abandons “spirit”, “justice”, and “truth” even as regulative ideas or negative theology. As I will try to show, emphasizing the importance of kaleidoscopic points of view and the contest among the different parameters to criticize reality, its evaluation, the action within it, and its transformation does not negate Critical Education and Critical Pedagogy as I understand them.

     Critical Theory is committed to universal emancipation, in the sense I have presented, needs not necessarily become dogmatic and negate the plurality of narratives and the acknowledgment of the life-or-death struggle of different narratives constituting the conceptual apparatuses and the consciousness of those enclosed within the horizons. Critical Theory has to acknowledge this plurality. However, this recognition must denote that it is not a mere plurality in which “everything goes”; such a plurality is possible and even necessary within the framework of a certain order that is to be reconstructed, criticized, and resisted.

     The universality of capitalist production and the omnipotent power of technological progress and its needs are the foundation for the concrete appearance of “difference” today. They are the substratum of the obligatory and “objective” meaning of the power of fashion and the efficiency of the symbolic violence of narratives, identities, and different educational apparatuses. Critical Education should acknowledge this violence in the following manner: On the level where differences are denoted, the epistemological possibilities are determined by the violence of fashion and by the aggressiveness of educational practices. On the universal level, technological progress and capitalist development, as well as the local system’s constructions, enjoy universal validity on the one hand and an omnipotent compulsory dimension on the other, as manifested in the motorized traffic roads, the roads on the Internet, or realized principles of the market economy. The dialectic between these two levels determines the possibilities and limitations of human beings, as well as the constitution of their concrete and most specific life possibilities. However, this is only a partial manifestation of the camouflaged game of being that hides itself from human beings, as Heidegger shows, or as a dimension of the storm that plays with “the angel of history”, as described by Walter Benjamin in his “theses on the philosophy of history”. This is but a manifestation of the  realm of self-evidence; within it, there is room for systems such as the one genuine Critical Pedagogy has to struggle against today.
 

The Possibility of a Non-Repressive Critical Pedagogy

The educational implications of this understanding can be presented on two levels. On the first, educational implications deviates from confronting the bottom depths of self-evidence and the systems that reflect every realm of self-evidence, the hiding games of the camouflaged being. Such an acknowledgment is not “pessimistic” or “optimistic”, even if historically it was elaborated within the framework of the history of philosophical pessimism.(67)  The possibilities of understanding the limits of dialogue and the real horizons in which obligatory power rules are of vital educational potential, even for the ideal of dialogue and the struggle over its conditions and possible realization. The struggle to understanding the ways in which the subject is produced, as well as knowledge, power, and the system’s context of their realization, transformation, and determination, is weakened if one refuses to acknowledge this obligation as an imperative and to strike the lowest depths. Non-repressive education might then be tested only on its surface. Normal Critical Pedagogy is part of this bottom depth.

     On the second level, human beings are called as individuals, and only as individuals, to decipher the current realm of self-evidence and to demystify the codes and the manipulations of the powers constituting their conceptual possibilities, their life conditions, and their concrete limitations, as well as their dialogical possibilities for struggle and change. On this level, the projects of Critical Theory and some postmodern and feminist thinkers might be partly united, at least in their sensitivities, as exemplified in the work of philosophers such as Seyla Benhabib and Charles Taylor and educational thinkers such as Carmen Luke and Henry Giroux. The development of Critical Theory should be the development of critical philosophy, namely the development of philosophy. It should be theoretically interdisciplinary and politically committed to be involved in society. However, it is wrong to reduce it to mere political work and wrong to judge it according to its educational effectiveness in political terms, as is common in Feminist Pedagogy and in the “paternalistic” versions of Critical Pedagogy. As counter-education it is essentially committed to negate prevailing power games and any kind of strategically-oriented theory and praxis, even when enacted in the name of emancipation. It refuses all versions of educational violence and as such it deserves the name counter-education. While refusing positive utopianism and violence it does not abandon the quest for transcendence and for “the totally different”. It has a Utopian axis, yet its Utopia is negative.

     The kind of Critical Theory presented here is liberated from the pretension of conventional Critical Theory to be “humanistic” or disconnected from the power games of capitalist symbolic dynamics and objective truths or facts of Instrumental Rationality. I say, clear as crystal: freed radical or critical schools will not be transformed into “a liberated zone”. In this sense, my disagreement is not limited to the naivety of Freire and the pretensions of Giroux, McLaren, Shor and their followers. Here my stand is closer to Foucault and Heidegger, who enlighten the all-penetrating presence of powers and conditions that constitute the human being, the conditions of his/her production, his/her possibilities and limitations. As a non-repressive version of Critical Pedagogy, counter-education should evolve out of this understanding into its struggle over the possibilities of non-repressive critical dialogue, not abstract refusal of the self-evidence, fashions, identities, and pedagogies that produce, distribute, and marginalize or execute these fashions, dynamics, and pedagogies, only in order to exchange them for others.

     This is where the Utopia presents itself, on which Western reason was traditionally dependent, and on which the humanistic dimensions that are to be protected are still dependent. Within this framework counter-education dwells, with the “hope principle” and the understanding that in principle it cannot be realized in this world as  refined, justified, and promising counter-violence. The anti-foundationalist concept of the counter-education presented here cannot suggest any counter-poison. It has no positive and evident alternative to false consciousness, such as “the memory” or “the knowledge” of women, minorities, or the marginalized and oppressed, as suggested in conventional Critical Pedagogy. The counter-education suggested here has no room for any one-dimensional positive alternative, or for any evident foundation for the critique as suggested in the Critical Pedagogy of Freire and Giroux. Even Foucault’s or Derrida’s  abandonment of “meaning”, “understanding”, and “dialogue” (68)  is negated for the sake of the struggle over the possibilities of a kind of praxis and dialogue that are concerned with the development of the partners and the change made by them in the conditions that prevent or deviate from critical dialogue. On this level, counter-education can offer no more than incomplete, local and painful successes of practical reason, even within the limits of current reality.

     The counter-education suggested here differs from the normalization practices of hegemonic education in its responsibility to increase the awareness of the strategies and tactics of producing, controlling, representing, and activating reality, knowledge, and subjects as part of a revolt against the current realm of self-evidence, the deception of being, and the forgetfulness of challenging its deception as part of deception, namely, as part of being human. Counter-education challenges self-evidence since, with Benjamin, it does not accept reality as having the last word. Understanding that there is no place for redemption within the framework of history - merely of  revolutions - should not prevent counter-education from working out general historiosophic and historiographic theories and concrete social practices. The same is true as for the reconstruction of the system’s efficiency: This does not necessarily imply the acknowledgment of the superiority of power apparatuses over the potential autonomy of the individual, or the superiority of the representation practices and symbolic dynamics over specific philosophical and political possibilities for emancipation. The system contains both (although the latter normally is seen just as a potential), and  is activated by the dialectics between them. In this sense, as a non-repressive Critical Pedagogy counter-education should educate to decipher reality, to reconstruct it, and to articulate its practices, possibilities, and limitations, and to act within and on behalf of the ideal dialogue. Here I do agree with Charles Taylor who defends, quite successfully, the possibility of practical reason within the framework of struggle for developing the reflective potential of human beings and their ability for articulation of their world as a realization of their reason.(69)

     Praxis education of this sort is conditioned by the possibility of developing people’s competence to demystify reality, decipher its codes, and critically reconstruct the demolished potential for human solidarity, cooperation, and the realization of their dialogical essence while acknowledging that in the current historical stage these two missions contradict each other. This acknowledgment might become a power for moral elevation, as in the Bildung tradition to which it critically refers. This transcendence can receive its meaning only within the framework in which a dialogue is immanent, and might change it and enable the self-realization of individuals as part of a solidarian partnership with other reflective politically-oriented human beings.(70)  Until the establishment of conditions that will give birth to such a dialogue - conditions that are beyond the present historical horizon - such a non-repressive critical pedagogy might be realized only for isolated individuals and cannot become a matter of collectives. This conception of praxis is very far from the one common in today’s standard versions of Critical Pedagogy; and it is committed and conditioned by spirituality, conceptual possibilities, and socio-cultural conditions that are described by standard Critical Pedagogy as “elitism”. However, just as each human being has no shortcuts, counter-education should try its way by acknowledging that such a spirit, such conceptual possibilities,  and such socio-cultural conditions are still a Utopia.

     The “elitism” of counter-education is indeed directed to demystify and negate any self-evident “knowledge”, but it should criticize any version of elitism, reconstruct its function and aims and, at the same time, strive for conditions under which everyone will be able to become part of the human dialogue. The negation of opposite ethnocentrism - of the oppressed - improves the efficiency of intellectual and psychic impotence of people, such as the education that constitutes false dialogues. Such a dialogue must begin from a defined starting point, from the concrete possibilities and limitations of individuals within the framework of the system in which they are imprisoned. In this sense, such dialogue needs some of the achievements of standard Critical Pedagogies, which have to be transformed and de-contextualized. Then, and only then, will the human subject be able to stand up, though not “liberated” and “authentic”, to confront the forgetfulness of being and the central questions and great and small difficulties of the given reality, which as a manifestation of the realm of self-evidence, are not to be changed, yet might be identified and negated. Critique is in this sense a prayer that cannot change the world, but allows transcendence from it. This is the only non-repressive form of hope possible in such an educational project.
 
 

Notes

(1) Henry Giroux, “Radical Pedagogy as a cultural politics: beyond the discourse of critique and anti-utopianism”, in Peter
McLaren (ed.), Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a Postmoden Era,
London and New York: Routledge 1995, pp. 29-57.

(2) Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 7 Frankfurt a.Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1985, s. 385-404.

(3) Herbert Marcuse, “Liberation from the Affluent Society”, in David Cooper (ed.), The Dialectic of
Liberation, London: Penguin Books 1971, p. 185.

(4) Max Horkheimer, Traditionelle und Kritische Theorie: Vier Aufsaetze, Frankfurt a.Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag
1977, s. 37.

(5) Gueter J. Freisenhahn, Kritische Theorie und Pedagogik: Horkheimer, Adorno, From, Marcuse, Berlin: Express Edition
1985, s. 1.

(6) Hellmut Becker, “Durch paedagogische Aufklaerung den Menschen helfen - Hellmut Becker ueber Kritische Theorie und Pedagogik”, Pedagogische Korrespondenz 8 (Winter 1990-91), s. 70.

(7) Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom, Cambridge: Harvard Educational Review 1974, p. 1.

(8) Henry Giroux, “Introduction: literacy and the pedagogy of political empoerment”, in Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation, Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey Publishers 1985, p. xii.

(9) Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word Reading the World, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
1987, p. 49.

(10)  Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Ramos Bergmann, New York: Herder and Herder 1968, p. 75.

(11) Ibid.

(12) Ibid.

(13) Theodor Adorno, Erziung zum Muendligkeit: Vortraege und Geschpreche mit Hellmut Becker 1956-1969,
Frankfurt a.Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag 1971, s. 144.

(14) Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 77-78.

(15) Ibid., p. 163-164.

(16) Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy, p. 154-157.

(17) Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926-1931 and 1950-1969, translated by Michael Shaw,
New York: The Sabury Press 1978, p. 127.

(18)  Plato, “Symposium”, in Irwing Edman (ed.), The Works of Plato, New York: The Modern Library 1927, p. 344.

(19) Ibid.

(20) Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education, p. 178.

(21) Ira Shor, Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1980, p. 163.

(22) Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition, Massachusets: Bergin & Garvey
1983, p. 19.

(23)  Max Horkheimer, Traditionelle und Kritische Theorie: Vier Aufsaetze, Grankfurt a.Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag
1977, p. 33.

(24) Giroux, ibid.

(25) Henry Giroux, “Radical pedagogy as cultural politics: Beyond the discourse of critique and anti-utopianism”, in
Peter McLaren (ed.), Critical Pedagogy and Pedatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a Postmodern Era, London and
New York: Routledge 1995, p. 30.

(26) Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Boston: Beacon
Press 1964.

(27) Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, London: Allen Lane 1972, p. 58.

(28) Herbert Marcuse, “Liberation from the Affluent Society”, p. 179.

(29) Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1956,
p. 176.

(30) Herbert Marcuse, “Culture and Revolution”, Herbert Marcuse Archive 406.00.

(31) Henry Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education, New York: Routledge and Kegan
Paul 1992, p. 12-13.

(32) Ibid., p. 47.

(33) Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, The Education of the Human Race, translated by M. Robinson, London Anthropological
Cub. C. 1927
Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 7 p. 253.

(34) Henry Giroux, Border Crossings, p. 183-184.

(35) Theodor Adorno, Erziung zum Muendligkeit: Vortraege und Geschpraeche mit Hellmut Becker 1956-1969, Frankfurt
a.Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag 1971.

(36) Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 8, Frankfurt a.Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1985, s. 450.

(37) Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition, Massachusetts: Bergin &
Garvey 1983, p. 157.

(38) Henry Giroux, Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling, Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1981, p. 81.

(39)  Henry Giroux, Border Crossings, p. 128.

(40)  Henry Giroux, “Radical pedagogy as cultural politics”, p. 50.

(41)  Nicholas Burbules and Susanne Rice, “Dialogue across differencess: Continuing the conversation", Harvard
Educational Theory 61: 4 (1991), pp. 397.
 

(42)  Henry Giroux, “Radical pedagogy as cultural politics”, p. 30.

(43) Gennifer Gore, Feminism and Critical Pedagogy, New York: Routledge 1992, p. 62.

(44) Peter McLaren 1988, “Schooling the postmodern body: Critical Pedagogy and the politics of Enfleshment”,
Journal of Education 1970: (1988), p. 71.
Ira Shor, Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1992, p. 57.
Kathleen Weiler, “Freire and a feminist pedagogy of difference”, Harvard Educational Review 61: 4 (1991), p. 450.

(45) Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline, p. 161.

(46) Ibid., p. 134.

(47) Henry Giroux, Border Crossings, p. 60

(48) Ibid., p. 56.

(49) Robert Young, A Critical Theory of Education: Habermas and our Children’s Future, New York: Harvester
Wheatsheaf 1989, p. 57.

(50) Ibid.

(51) Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, “Social criticism without philosophy: An encounter between feminism
and postmodernism”, in A. Ross (ed.), Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press 1989, p. 86.

(52) Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, New York: The Seabury Press 1974, p. 21.

(53) Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 7 1985, s. 415-418.

(54) Ibid., s. 418.

(55) Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, p. 26.

(56) Ibid., p. 159.

(57) Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt und Andere Aufsaetze, Frankfurt a.Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch
Verlag 1971.

(58) Ibid., p. 57.

(59) Theodor Adorno und Max Horkheimer, Dialektol der Aufklaerung, Frankfurt a.Main: Fischer 1985, s. 9.

(60) Nicholas Burbules, Dialogue in Teaching: Theory and Practice, New York: Teachers College Press 1993, p. 8.

(61) Mark Poster, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Research of a Context, Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, p. 67.

(62) Max Horkheimer, ibid., p. 95-96.

(63) Ibid., p. 141.

(64) Mischel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, translated by Colin
Gordon, New Kork: Pantheon 1980, p. 131.

(65) Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, translated by Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon 1972, p. 183.

(66) Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, The Frankfurt School and the History of Pessimism, Jerusalem: The Magness Press 1996, p. 183.

(67) Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 114-115.

(68) Ibid.

(69) Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers II, New York: Cambridge University
Press 1995, p. 151.

(70) Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 8 Frankfurt a.Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1988, s. 126.