Big change question—Taking into account mainstream economic and political trends, can/should school have a role in developing authentic critical thinking?

Abstract

‘No Way’, said George Pell when, after the death of Pope John Paul II, a journalist asked if he would like to be the next Pope. ‘No ambitions at all’ (Gibson, 2005). But when he weighs in on the critical pedagogy debate Cardinal George Pell, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, clearly has ambitions broader than an average priest. Take literacy, for example. ‘While parents wonder why their children have never heard of the Romantic poets, Yeats or the Great War poets, and never ploughed through a Bronte, Orwell or Dickens novel’, Pell told a gathering of journalists attending a National Press Club luncheon in Canberra, ‘their children are engaged in analysing a variety of ‘‘texts’’ including films, magazines, advertisements and even road signs as part of critical literacy’ (Pell, 2005; Rowbotham, 2005). In contemporary debates about education, views like Pell’s are not unusual. In this paper, we will take them to be symptomatic of the conservative critique of teaching critical thinking. Pell’s problem is not just that what he calls ‘school-based post-modernism, proposes to make students into ‘‘agents of social change’’.’ It is the kind of social change he believes a critical pedagogy is designed to advocate, and this amounts to an attempt to undermine ‘[g]enerally accepted understandings of family, sexuality, maleness, femaleness, parenthood, and culture’. Any such understandings, he laments ‘are treated as ‘‘dominant discourses’’ that impose and legitimise injustice and intolerance. These dominant discourses are then undermined by a disproportionate focus on ‘‘texts’’ which normalise moral and social disorder’.