The Politics of Educational Theory

Abstract

In the transition to advanced capitalism, public schooling developed as the concrete counterpart and successor to the mythic legacy of the 19th century Western frontier. As the Western lost its innocence to the logic of capitalist industrialization and expansionism, the public school became the birthplace for unfettered social and economic opportunities. With state supported education, ideology became the order of the day. The folklore of capitalism was revitalized, education became the frontier.' The assumptions that fueled this mythic vision of schooling have exercised a powerful influence on traditional and liberal views of education. Schools were presumed neutral institutions that provided equal opportunities for all students to pursue social and economic mobility. As a result of this assumption, individual initiative and intellectual labor became the most important categories by which to analyze the success or failure of different groups of students who made the sojourn through American schools. Social stability and moral order, rather than domination and emancipation, became the central concerns for analyzing the relationship between schools and the wider society. The mythic vision of schooling was reinforced by the assumption that public education was the most important vehicle to promote economic growth and to ensure economic equality.2 Within the last few decades, the view of American education as the new frontier has come under increasing attack by a chorus of educational critics. Changing material and ideological conditions sparked such criticism and have helped sustain it. Dissatisfaction with the role and meaning of American education erupted strongly amidst the political events of the 1960s and early 1970s. In addition, the emerging objective contradictions of the last decade contributed to a crisis ideologically. Beliefs and values used to legitimate the dominant society began to lose their sustaining power, particularly in those social science disciplines that serve to butress what might be called American hegemonic ideologies. A number of social theorists turned away from functionalist and empiricist models of social inquiry and attempted to reconstruct alternative views of education by drawing on diverse continental philosophies such as symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, existentialism, and various forms of neo-Marxist thought.3 Against the landscape of developing crises in American education, which included severe financial cutbacks, shrinking job markets, and massive teacher layoffs, educational critics found