Aporia of emancipatory education: the case of multicultural education
Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, Haifa University, Israel
Multicultural discourse is flourishing these days. Liberals, neo-Marxists, feminists, and post-colonialist critics alike are taking part in the formation of a new fashion. Part of this success is displayed in the discourse of Philosophy of education. Multicultural education has been accepted by many thinkers as a fine alternative to the traditional (Western) universalistic emancipation project, and as I understand, also as an alternative whose problematical nature has not received the deserved attention.
In the present paper, I would like to denote the aporia of multicultural education and suggest that the discourse of multicultural education is the last stage in Western colonialism. The enlightenment's project of universal emancipation, I will argue, is no less problematic. Nevertheless, the critical version of the universalistic project has many important potentials that multiculturalist ideology is lacking. The paper concludes with the recommendation to adjust the critical universalistic emancipation project to the new realities and to integrate into it some of the dimensions of muliticultural discourse about education.
In Prof. Bhikhu Parekh's article, "Education for a culturally plural society", typically in this kind of discourse, the questions of human life, as those of consciousness, social interest and power games are treated analytically, stripped of any connection with specific possibilities or the limitations of concrete reality. Human beings are treated as agents of "culture", who operate outside any social arena or ideological context, disconnected from power struggles, political obligations and limitations/possibilities. Generally speaking, quite surprisingly, multicultural discourse underestimates what I consider as the vital connection between subjects, powers and spirit. As a typical liberal advocate of multicultural education, Parekh gives a definition of what he calls "good education": "good education is to be evaluated by the criterion of constituting different possibilities that are culturally conditioned"(1). But until a consensus is reached, we have to ask, in order to construct an educational paradigm and pedagogical praxis on the way toward a consensus, to which of the cultures should one give the right to decide what is "good education" in a multicultural reality? To one of the cultures, to some of them, or to all of them? In Principle, different "cultures" might give different answers to this question. How then should one, in a multicultural reality, come to a decision , or even set the rules and parameters of the theoretical apparatus for addressing these questions if not by brutal or symbolic violence? Is it not the case that a non - or even an anti-multiculturalist praxis is the precondition for a pro-multiculturalist theoretical stand?
In order to save Parekh's liberal intentions concerning multiculturalism, we should consider the present situation as a valid substratum not for a multicultural education, but for an education which can present a multicultural challenge to the present reality; and a substratum for the acknowledgment of the legitimacy and desirability of a multicultural and pluralistic reality.
Referring to the possibility of different cultures coming to an agreement concerning moral dilemmas, Steven Lukes says that "there is no objective point of view or 'view from nowhere' such that all reasonable persons (from all cultural backgrounds) can be brought to agree on, say, how the dead should be honored, or indeed, whether they should be honored at all..."(2). Lukes also refers to Western rationality as a self-evident pre-condition for discursive multicultural interaction, and he sums his paper by admitting, like Rorty(3) that "in a certain sense, ethnocentrism is methodologically inevitable". If it is valid thus to say that there is no (nonviolent and contingent) point of view from which all reasonable persons can brought to agree on something, then it is an even stronger argument to suggest that some people are "unreasonable" - from a certain culture's point of view - and will not come to an agreement unless forced to do so by symbolic or naked violence. This argument can be found in the rhetoric of the strong defenders of multiculturalism and anti-universalism. A good example of this is David Couzens Hoy, who argues against the arch-universalist Juergen Habermas that to claim one's views are right or better than competing views borders on intolerance, disrespect, and ethnocentrism(5). Like other moderate pro-multicultural educators, Charles Taylor says that the syllabus ought to be enlarged beyond the traditional 'canon' of great works. He argues that it is only by such a strategy that hitherto excluded groups may be given "freedom and equality", namely, through a revision of the image they have in the hegemonious culture(6). This attitude serves and reflects the hegemonic interests in Western society, as implicitly admitted by Rorty when he justifies multiculturalism in the context of "less humiliation of blacks and brown, less condescension to women, and more safety for homosexuals, than anywhere else in US. society". This has to be understood, to my mind, as conecerened with the pacification of America's campuses and society, and it does not refer to philosophical problems such as whether universalism excludes pluralism, or whether multicultural dialogue is possible and desirable, nor to the political context of problematizing multiculturalism. But what is wrong with this?
Well, from a positivist point of view, there is really nothing wrong with it. According to my argument, this attitude pre-supposes the present order of things, like capitalist economy and certain given social power games, and does not refer to the concrete history behind them. In this point we can find a productive affinity between some conclusions of the early Frankfurt School thinkers and their critique of current Western society and Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault's understanding of society and the ways and forces that constitute its normality, rationality, consensus and norms. This issue is of special importance if we want to re-evaluate the current claim that universalism and particularism exclude each other. It enables us to problematize the simplistic division between universalism and pluralism, objectivism and relativism, pro-multiculturalism and anti-multiculturalism: postmodernists, feminists, and post-colonialists who favor the ideology of multicultural discourse disregard the affinity of their heroes (thinkers like Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault) to the critique of society of thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, their supposed rivals, the humanist defenders of the universalistic emancipatory project. The later were not committed to a simplistic objectivist-idealist-universalist stand; their ontology referred the concrete historical, social and cultural context as a theoretical locus of the realization of the universalistic emancipatory project which was understood as part of a social praxis. Framed in a critique of contemporary failures of irrational-rationality and its consensus and critics and in the frame of utopia, thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer were pro-pluralist human society and multicultural dialogue(7).
If one refers to the symbolic and to the economic-social manifestations of power and its ways of producing subjects, meanings and relevant parameters for co-existence (such as a multicultural one), than one is less enthusiastic for the prospects of multiculturalism. Moderate liberals and postmodernists alike are deconstructing the very foundation of the multiculturalist ideology they hold: namely, the real equal value of different cultures and the possibility of a free and equal dialogue between them. On the bottom line, pro-multiculturalists are no less ethnocentric than the representatives of universalistic emancipator education like Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas, while lacking their philosophical and social emancipatory potentials.
We have to differentiate between moderate multiculturalists and consistent ones and ask what is the foundation of moderate pro-multicultural education? From a consistent multicultural attitude, how should one justify the democratic attitude of, say, Michael Walzer, over other possible goals of education, like forming the man and woman who will sacrifice their lifves for their fuerer or their aitolla? Moderate pro-multicultural educators in a diverse society will justify their moderate acceptance of a dialogue between different cultures on the ground of contextualism. This position is supposed to be neithe arbitrary nor idealist and also freed from the traditional European immanent ethnocentrism of universalistic attitudes (such as that which they ascribe to thinkers like Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas.
This kind of contextualism grounds its attitudes on a supposed anti-foundationalist stand and constructs its criteria of evaluation on the consensuses and norms given in a certain society.
I question this contextualism, appealing to an argument that some consistent pro-multicultural educators urge against Western universalism, in order to challenge both weak and strong defenses of multicultural dialogue.
Against moderate multiculturalists, one has to argue that they base their stand on forced consensus, or on the hegemony of false consciousness and that the prospects of the dialogue they suggest will be determined by the power apparatuses which they fail to challenge and do not wont to evaluate or influence. They reject transcendentalism and foundationalism as part of their emancipation from traditional European ethnocentrism. But what is the value of their criteria? Parekh or Rorty, for instance, claim that issues debated in dialogue are decided “by the culture".(8) Implicitly, moderate defenders of multiculturalism mean by that the stronger culture, the winning culture, or the stronger force constructing the hegemonic repression of a certain culture. This can be seen when Rorty defends his preference of Western democracies over other cultural-political options. His argument is that in the West, there are more open options for change, for freedom and for new possibilities for rational dialogue. To my mind, the justification for this preference is ultimately not theoretical, but rhetorical and grounded on the quest for "feeling good" in one's ethnocentric circle. According to Rorty what is needed is a sort of intellectual analogue of civic virtue - tolerance, irony, and willingness to let spheres of culture flourish without worrying too much about their "common ground", their unification or what picture of man they "presuppose", as do Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas(9). But even so, Rorty would reject what I call consistent relativism and would criticize Feyerabend's anarchism, which refuses to decide between different beliefs and the anti-ethnocentric discourse: "If we continue this line of thought too long, we become what are sometimes called 'wet' liberals. We begin to lose any capacity for moral indignation, any capacity to feel contempt. Our sense of selfhood dissolves. We can no longer feel pride in being bourgeois liberals, in being part of a great tradition, a citizen of no mean culture. We have become so open-minded that our brains have fallen out"(10).
Moderate liberal multicultural educators neglect the power games of those apparatuses of constructing the concepts, consciousness and aspirations which form consensuses in the prevailing Western society. They do not evaluate the marginalized consciousness, histories and interests that now form reality and its yardsticks. They do so either because they are pragmatic anti-foundationalists and anti-transcendentalists or because they are not convinced by postmodern claims concerning the foundation of postmodern anti-ethnocentrism itself; This while calling for free dialogue whose aim is education for multiculturalism. This coalition is grounded on current consensus and norms(11), and this must mean on submission to prevailing power and violence, unless we are already in the utopian reality of free, open and rational Socratic dialogue between cultures and within each of the cultures. If this utopia is still unfulfilled, then the advocates of multiculturalism are in deep trouble regarding the very foundation of multiculturalism, since in its consistent version, the inner logic of the argument dissolves "culture", "self" and the very "identity" that they struggle to save/build.
The strong, or consistent, multiculturalists, like William Tierney, present to us a postmodern utopia: an alternative utopia of instability and a mutation - an unpredicted and unevaluated immanent fragmentation of reality. This affects essences in general and sexual identities as well. In his utopia he suggests sexual and cultural identities will be indefinite, non-monolithic.(12) In this situation, all cultures, communities and individuals are recognized as having the same value. This utopia presupposes a real Socratic dialogue inside cultures such as the Western one. Under the anarchic conditions of this utopia there is a chance of overcoming the class, cultural and sexual "otherness" of "others" who are oppressed by their Western, modernist objective/truth - seekers. The erotic educational mission of the new cosmopolitan citizens that Tierney presents to us will be constructed by agape(13).
The strong multiculturalism that is displayed here results in the self-constitution of citizens who will be unconstrained by any divergent "identity", any definite telos, or even any particular “meaning" whatsoever. This is the kind of emancipation that is implicit in the consistent multiculturalism: the tidiness of Eros to the gallop of Tantalus.
These implicit ideas and strivings manifest and realize themselves in great meta-narratives that Tierney, like other strong multiculturalists, is obliged to deconstruct. Here "anything goes", and there is no reason to attach a special importance to one meaning or value over others(14).
We have to ask both representatives of the multiculturalist coalition to distinguish between the question of a possible dialogue between cultures where one has already colonized the other and the question of a possible dialogue between cultures that are still "authentic" and foreign to each other to a certain degree. In the last case, even the conceptual apparatus and the yardsticks of relevant/irrelevant statements are foreign and cannot be of much help for developing mutual understanding and nonviolent consensus. How can a dialogue that is free, open and equal take place under these conditions? I will adress this question through a hypothetical example that should challenge the implicit assumptions and the explicit conclusions of the moderate pro-multiculturalists.
For this purpose, I will refer to Parekh’s example of a school that "could provide a multi-fate assembly, accommodate different dietary requirements, permit variations in dress", and so forth(15). Let us suppose, for a moment, that the school that Parekh is describing is really pluralistic and includes boys and girls who are Shiite Muslim students and others who are feminist Marxist students. Let us suppose that the feminist girls are dressed (especially in the summer) with minimalist shorts and so forth, and that as Marxist feminists they are obliged to liberate (or "liberate") the Shiite girls who are manipulated and sexually neutralised, according to their Muslim traditional culture. On the other hand, the Muslim students, are committed to their own Shiite missionary crusade, and they are obliged to educate all "ohers" to that final end at any cost ("the law of Allah is enforced by the sword"). Neither boys nor girls, Marxists nor Shiites are interested in a free, open, and equal educational discourse, but rather in educational "victory". Basically, their educational philosophy is a symbolic or direct violence as the preferred form of "dialogue" with other cultures. They are totally committed to anti-multicultural dialogue. One can also consider a softer and less extreme example, the kind of dialogue that is taking place between Salman Rushdie and the present hegemonic forces in Iranian culture.
One has to separate between pro-multiculturalism, multicultural education and education for multiculturalism. Taking multiculturalism seriously and being committed to the realization of universal multiculturalism is not an option open exclusively to anti-modernists and anti-universalists. It can also be part and parcel of a general humanist project. Following Hegel and Marx, one can argue that Universalism is a pre-condition for a true individualism and a peaceful multiculturalism.
Habermas' proposed universal pragmatics is based on the idea that language admits of rational reconstruction in universal terms, that "communicative competence" is implicitly universal; and, that it is these dimensions of language that make discourse possible between different partners. They can enter into this arena as and if they accept general rules for aliging the elements of speech situations in relation to the external world of objects and events. In frame of the Habermasian project, consensus is rationally motivated only if is freed of distortions and it is the result of the force of the argumentation. The "ideal speech situation" where this is realized is the orison of free realization of diversity and pluralism that is the aim of multicultural ideology. The Habermasian project provides an ideal of effective equality of opportunity for participants in a dialogue that presupposes "minimal ethics". Habermas is aware of the danger of ethnocentrism, but he holds on to the Kantian tradition, according to which the forms of moral-practical insight are universal and reason is universal, although it has many different appearances and "voices".
Habermas defends the utopia of real pluralist dialogue by defending vernunft (reason) and its universal validity. He does so while negating objectivism(16). In his critique of contextualists such as Rorty (who I call moderate multiculturalists), Habermas accuses them of ethnocentrism(17). Rorty is fast to agree with this argument in some ways. The multiculturalist dimension in Habermas' project is to be seen when he calls us to take"the expansion of our interpretive horizon seriously". In a way, he is a stronger multiculturalist than Rorty and the moderate multiculturalists, since he argues "that the unity of reason only remains perceptible in the plurality of its voices"(18). But can we be satisfied with linguistic emancipation, even if we combine the struggle for progressive and pluralistic dialogue with the struggle on the conditions for such a rational, free and open dialogue ? The work of thinkers so different as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Adorno and Horkheimer, and especially their critique of society and the culture industry suggests that after all, Habermas,and Rorty, Parekh and the other moderate multiculturalists are over-optimistic. In this respect, they are united in failing to take account of the mythos of present "reality". Multiculturalism is a utopia that can function as a regulative idea for the critique of present Western colonialism and its culture industry of which multiculturalist ideology is but a product.
The moderate version of multiculturalism is supposed to do justice to non-Western cultures and to marginalized Western voices, and by that same token, to benefit Western culture as well. This position is a creation of the West, a construct of late Western colonialism. A historical reconstruction of modernity will show us the interconnections between Western economic-political colonialism and cultural colonialism. In contrast to the liberal stand of moderate pro-multicultural educators, I claim that one should not separate the socio-political dimensions of the question of education from the cultural dimension, and that goes too for multicultural education and education for multiculturalism.
Historically, the supposed political de-colonization of the Third World is nothing but one of the apparatuses for strengthening Western economic and cultural use of the Third World: a hidden and indirect control that is based on Third World nations accepting capitalism and internalizing Western technological-economy codes, namely internalizing the repressive powers of instrumental rationality under disabling conditions. The destruction of their cultures, the negation of their traditional codes are accepted by the marginalized as a precondition to "success" under the logic of global capitalism. These cultures and codes are accepted only as long as they do not offend and when they can be used cosmetically, in the service of capitalist expansion and the requirements of technological progress and rational behavior. It means that such nations have to disappear or transform themselves into their opposite in order to survive under the new colonialist conditions. In practice, their representatives function as agents of instrumental rationality and Western colonialism, deserting their own culture and traditions without receiving the Western (technological) benefits of raising their standard of living and educational gains. From the point of view of instrumental rationality, as today's dominant cultural imperative in the West, it is of vital importance to change traditional colonial rhetoric, in order to foster technological "progress" and cultural colonization. The West gave up any attachment to or belief in transcendental positions and objectivist truths, becoming completely "neutral", and un-idealistic, and accepting only a performative principle as a valid yardstick for equality. In order to reproduce current socioeconomic and cultural conditions, this neutralism needs to accept and even enthhusiastically to adopt multicultural ideology. This is a new version of internationalism, very different from the cosmopolitanianism of the stoa or the traditional humanists or the marxin and liberal versions of enlightenment project of emancipation. But it shares with them the prior acceptance of the supposed superiority of the inner logic of Western culture and its hegemonic power/knowledge relations to other cultures.
Moderate multiculturalists cannot argue for a dialogue that will be open and free, as long as they insist on an equal value for each culture, its presumptions, interests and ways to realizing them. That is why people like Rorty and Parekh will insist on a rational discourse, but thus a discourse that is immanently a Western power game. In such a game, it is easy to exclude contributions of real "other" cultures as distortions to the discursive fair play. The strong (consistent) pro-multiculturalists like Tierney will, by contrast, insist that the dialogue be equal and give every culture and every "other" sub-culture, an equal chance to participate. Therefore, this version cannot articulate itself into an open, free and rational discourse, can’t realize itself as a dialogue but only rather as what I call discourse in the Hearaclitusian meaning of polemos, violent symbolic interaction that forms subjects and their subjectivity alike.
In neither case can we expect a Socratic dialogue. An education for cultivating multicultural discourse contains on the one hand, a negation of the commitment to universal liberation (as in the tradition of Western utopia), and on the other hand, a commitment that will reproduce inequalities and repression of cultures and people. From a utopian point of view, this is to be expected from any alternative to the Socratic dialogue that Horkheimer and Adorno presented in their late, pessimist works.
Dialogue between cultures can only realize itself within the universalistic enlightenment's project, I will argue. Under present conditions the capitalist organization of world economy and the prevailing progress of technology prevent the existence of un-repressed cultures and the very constitution of a dialogue. The humanist alternative is today a mere utopia. This utopia includes the vision of a possible self-constitution of autonomous subjects, the developing of traditions and cultures, and the development of a new quest for a dialogue that will not be aggressive, although it will concern disagreements and differences of interest. Habermas' "ideal speech situation" directs us to this utopian possibility as a driving force for criticizing our present possibilities. But Habermas is too optimistic as to the present possibilities for a dialogue. But even so, Habermas, like Gadamer, shows us that the quest for understanding and consensus, as the quest for solidarity, can be a universal orientation and at the same time an anti-idealist, non-objectivist, and non-foundationalist project. While the hermeneutic project of Gadamer and the reconstructivist-interpretive project of Habermas have in common the struggle for humanism, both of them are overly optimistic. At the same time, both of them reject postmodernism in too sweeping manner. I would suggest that re-reading Adorno and Horkheimer, accepting their pessimistic utopianism and their insistence on defending humanism through the quest for realizing Vernunft, opens the way to accepting some elements of postmodernism that are to be found also in the multicultural discourse. Without negating the utopia of universal realization of Vernunft, one can learn a lot from work such as Foucault. The Frankfurt School critique of society and Foucault's work can be synthesized in general theory and demand for universal emancipation. In paticular, we can see the reuniting of critique with skepticism in a context where the skeptic is viewed with suspicion by too many critical theorists. Philosophical Pessimism empowered with skepticism might be today's way of saving (negative) utopia. This (negative) utopia can be realized in an effort to reach a real dialogue even under present conditions. Under these conditions, there is no place for "multiculturalism" between different "cultures". But within the given situation, between marginalized, disabled and persecuted groups, there is a place for a common effort for building and developing identities and "voices" that will transcend and change that reality. Pessimistic utopianism I suggest must also confront the conservative attempt to avoid criticism and rework dominant traditions in light of the changing present.
The utopia of a future dialogue between cultures and people within cultures can survive only by negating false realizations of this utopia in present circumstances under the fashionable multiculturalistic flag or any other fashionble flag that will replace it. Future struggle for universal emancipation, consensus, and solidarity will probably make much use of the remains of this ideology.
Bibliography
1. Bhikhu Parekh, "Education for a culturally plural society", in Papers of the Conference of the Society of Education of Great Britain, March 31-April 2, (1995), p. 3
2. Steven Lukes, "Moral diversity and relativism", Journal of the Philosophy of Education, 29, no. 2, (1995), p. 176
3. Ibid., p. 179
4. Thomas McCarthy, "Philosophy and social practice", in Axel Hanneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer, (eds.), Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, Cambridge and London 1992, p. 257
5. David Couzes Hoy, and Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory, London 1995, p. 203
6. Charles Taylor, "The politics of recognition", in A. Gutmann, (ed.), Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, Princeton 1992, p. 66
7. Max Horkheimer, "Philosophie als Kulturkritik", Gesammelte Schriften, VII., Frankfurt a.M., 1985, p. 93
8. Bhikhu Parekh, Ibid., p. 7
9. Richard Rorty, Habermas and Modernity, Cambridge 1985, p. 168
10. Richard Rorty, Objectivism Relativism and Truth, Cambridge 1991, p. 203
11. Ibid., p. 208
12. William Tierney, Building Communities of Difference, London 1993, p. 63
13. Ibid., p. 62
14.N. Burbules, 7 S. Rice, "Dialogue across differences: continuing the conversation", Harvard Educational Review, 61, 4, (1991), p. 396
15. Parekh, Ibid.Ibid.
16. Juergen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, translated by W. Hohengarten, Massachusetts 1992, p. 139
17. Ibid., p. 137
18. Ibid., p. 117