Class Consciousness and Teacher Education: The Socialist Challenge and The Historical Context

Abstract

This essay traces the emergence and decline of class-consciousness within the U.S. as it coincides with the historical developmental of capitalism. I begin this essay in the third period of capital’s historical development. Robinson (2008) characterizes this period of the development of global capitalism—the third period—as beginning in the 1870s and marked by the corporate form of capitalism and class struggle, and the subsequent emergence of widespread classconsciousness. As a result, this period is also the beginning of large-scale, compulsory common schooling, which the capitalist class eventually came to understand to be a necessary cost of production needed for social control. Marx’s historical work on the development of capital is crucial here as it laid the foundation for a tradition of revolutionary class-consciousness from Lenin, to Vygotsky, to Freire, respectively. Drawing on these insights regarding class-consciousness, I outline the debilitating tendencies of a Weberian conception of social class in U.S. teacher education programs and beyond situated in the current context of neo-colonialism/neoliberalism, that is, the most current period of global capitalism. In the final section I expand on the argument for a revolutionary education, not as a prescription, but as a place of departure for the vast diversity of global contexts within the everexpanding, ever-deepening social universe of capital. Within this context I argue that Joe L. Kincheloe’s idea of the epistemological bazaar and his postformal approach to educational psychology are particularly relevant (Malott, 2011a). That is, because the challenges for creating a 21 st century global socialism are so intense and immense (see for example, Callinicos, 2010),