Critical Theory as Metatheory of Education

Abstract

Critical theory of education can be understood as essentially a specific kind of philosophical project, in which the question of the conditions of the possibility of knowledge is taken as at once conceptual and social. Whereas pedagogy or educational theory focuses on the actual acquisition of knowledge and inculcation of certain desired or desirable dispositions (i.e., the conditions for teaching and learning), a philosophical or “critical” project is to examine the conditions of possibility for such a systematic knowledge as that which educational theories claim for themselves. In other words, the aim is to examine the very premises upon which educational theory and practice are based. While educational theories, however abstract, belong broadly to the empirical sciences and, more specifically, the social sciences, the critical project is “metatheoretical,” to the extent that it addresses the very principles that constitute any theory of education as a science or program of systematic study. Critical theory of education goes beyond the practical disciplines concerned with methods for achieving particular aims (such as psychological theories, for instance) and seeks theoretical grounding in a thorough critique of the tacit assumptions, aims, and methods of all educational ideals and practices. This tradition of ideology critique, stemming from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, addresses the function of teaching and learning as consequent upon the social nature of the ostensible knowledge, understanding, and/or dispositions that are to be attained. All the data assembled and interpreted in empirical social science must be critically theorized. The strict methodologies and regulated experiments of empirical study of social phenomena can never replace critical reflection, for the simple reason that all observation already assumes a theoretical framework, itself the result of certain historical conditions, which can and ought to be made explicit, critiqued, and normatively assessed, that is, evaluated from the perspective of human agency and emancipation. In this respect, “critical theory” is always already “metatheoretical” in the sense that it is theorizing about theory as much as of practice. Behaviorist theoretical frameworks for the study of education, for instance, and the models issuing from them, which have long exercised a powerful influence on the curriculum field, were in part adapted from Taylorism (the scientific management movement of the 1920s). The task of critical theory here then would be to subject behaviorism as both theory and a practice to critical reflective analysis.