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Education is not just about
empowering people
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or practicing freedom.
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It's also, in some ways,
about killing the imagination
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and educating people
to adjust to conditions in which
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their own sense of agency
is basically limited. For instance,
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we often see pedagogies
that "teach to the test",
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we often see pedagogies
that are simply about accountability,
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objective standards,
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pedagogies that in no way
take into consideration
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the experience of students,
or speak to important social issues.
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They are pedagogies that,
in many ways, are designed
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to undercut the possibility
for students to be critical thinkers,
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critically conscious,
aware of their own cultural capital
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and its strengths,
and their place in the world.
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And I think it's rightly so
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to call them
"pedagogies of repression".
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The debate about education today,
with its emphasis on methods,
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represents a new kind
of pedagogical stupidity.
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It completely ignores
the most fundamental question
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of education,
"what is education for?",
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and the most fundamental struggle
in education:
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a struggle of our identities,
a struggle of our agency.
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Education, in the final analysis,
is about the production of agency.
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What kind of agency and narratives
are we going to produce
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that students can understand,
that enlarge their perspective
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on the world, on their relationship
to others and themselves?
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Methods? To begin with methods
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is to completely ignore, probably,
all the most fundamental questions
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about education: ideology, culture,
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power, authority...
How are these things constituted?
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What's the basis for knowledge?
On whose authority?
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Does it speak
to a particular kind of future?
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Because all education
is an introduction to the future.
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It's a struggle over the future
you want for young people,
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over the subjectivities
that will make that future possible,
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over notions of narrative
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that students can relate to
and understand,
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so they can see education
as fundamental to who they are.
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"Methods" doesn't do that.
Methods contain a kind of silence
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on the side of the worst forms
of repression,
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because they deny the very notion
that students are alive.
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They can be alive to themselves,
to particular forms of knowledge,
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particular social experiences
and particular values.
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The notion of neutrality,
and when it's raised in education,
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is the worst form of politics.
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In itself, it's a political issue,
a political question,
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because it's taking a value
around education
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in ways to hide
what education is really about.
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I've always viewed that position
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as the basis
for a kind of fascist politics,
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because it hides its code,
for not allowing people
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to understand the role
that education plays ideologically,
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the role it plays in producing
particular forms of knowledge,
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forms of power,
kinds of social values,
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notions of agency,
narratives about the world...
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It's impossible for education
to be neutral. There's no such thing.
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Those who argue
that education should be neutral
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are really arguing
for a version of education
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in which nobody is accountable,
in which the people who produce
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that form of education disappear,
because they're saying it's neutral.
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And so you can't identify
the ideological processes, politics,
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motive, power...
That's precisely what they want.
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I mean, look: power, at its worst,
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is invisible.
It makes itself invisible.
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And that the notion
that education is neutral
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is, to me, one way of people
who have dominant power
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making it invisible
and making propaganda of itself
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incapable of being seen.
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It seems to me that at the heart
of critical pedagogy
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is that... it's not a skill.
We're not talking about skills.
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We're talking
about critical consciousness.
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You know, conscientization.
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We're talking about creating
tools with which people can be
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not only critics,
but also cultural producers.
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What new technology offers,
particularly for young people,
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is the opportunity to operate outside
the traditional spheres of the media,
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particularly mainstream media,
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like they've never had
that opportunity before.
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At the same time, we also see
the way in which the new technologies
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have become enormously weaponized
to repress people:
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Google, Facebook...
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These are, increasingly,
technologies of surveillance.
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That's what they are.
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But there are enormous possibilities
for them to be used.
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We've seen them used
in progressive and radical ways.
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My theory about those technologies
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is that we have to judge them
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within the societies
that are using them
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according to very specific values.
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It's not that the technology alone
produces very specific relationships.
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They operate according to the values
that align with certain powers
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to put into play
how those things would be used.
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Selfies! Selfies are the mirror
or neoliberalism, right?
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But they don't have to be...
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Disabled people can project
modes of representation
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that dignify who they are.
It's a struggle. These technologies
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are part of a larger struggle
over cultural politics.
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In the beginning,
when these technologies emerged,
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there was a kind of romanticization
about them.
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"This is the new democracy!".
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They divorced those technologies
from questions of power,
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and the concentration of power,
and how it can absorb anything
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in a capitalist society,
particularly in a neoliberal society.
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I think that has to be challenged.
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With what we're seeing now,
you'd have to be pretty stupid
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to believe that Google is,
somehow, on the side of democracy,
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or to believe that Microsoft
really cares about social justice,
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or to believe that, in some way,
Twitter is a new form of literacy.
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Look, capitalism and democracy
are not the same thing.
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Let's begin there.
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You can't talk about democracy
if you're talking about capitalism.
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Capitalism is the antithesis
of democracy.
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Capitalism doesn't believe
in shared justice, shared power,
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shared responsibilities.
It believes in accumulated profits.
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That's very different, right?
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It seems to me that
a debate over democracy,
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particularly in terms of linking
three things, political rights,
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personal liberties
and economic rights...
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There's no democracy
that won't talk about economic rights.
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It doesn't exist.
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You can have a range of personal
and political individual freedoms,
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I'm delighted
with freedom of the press,
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and with the ability to go
and choose any religion I want,
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but not with the notion that anybody
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can either sleep at the Ritz
or sleep under a bridge.
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Sorry, doesn't work that way.
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No democracy is worthy of the name.
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I don't think any of them
are finally finished or completed.
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What democracy is,
and what I like about it,
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is the fact
that it represents an ideal
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in which no society is ever enough.
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The concept, at its best,
means it's unfinished.
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It's never fully completed.
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You always have to work at it.
It's always a site of struggle.
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Gramsci uses the term "interregnum".
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He says it's a period
when the old order is dying
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and new societies are emerging,
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and in the middle is that moment
of restlessness,
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that moment of uncertainty.
That moment, today,
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is increasingly dominated
by a fascist politics.
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It's dominated by right-wing groups,
hate groups,
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by people who hate immigrants,
who hate refugees,
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it's dominated by neo-Nazis,
by white nationalists,
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and we need to be aware
that the language of democracy
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has been undermined
by neoliberalism,
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by the hedge fund apparatus,
by the capitalists,
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and we haven't been able to recover.
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Now we talk
about "illiberal democracy".
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In Hungary, in Poland...
We say things like:
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"Democracy means you have security,
but you don't have freedom".
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You have to give up freedom
for security. Can you imagine?
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That's the degree
to which democracy has failed.
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You can't have a democracy
without informed citizens.
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That's why education has to be
at the centre
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of any discourse about democracy,
and it isn't.
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That's where the left has failed.
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It has failed to run education.
They failed because they believe
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that the most important structures
of domination are entirely economic,
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and not only those elements
that trade in beliefs, in persuasion,
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in pedagogy,
in changing consciousness,
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and motive identification.
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Uncertainties can be
a time of great anxiety,
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and a time of great possibility,
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a time to rethink
the language of politics,
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to rethink the language of struggle,
to rethink the language of solidarity.
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Power is not always about domination.
Not exclusively.
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It's also about resistance.
Young people have a lot of power.
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They can shut societies down.
They can block streets,
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engage in direct action,
educate their parents.
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They're a potent political force.
What they need to do
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is to recognise themselves as such,
and I think they need to act,
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because I think
that a discourse of anxiety
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should give way
to a discourse of critique,
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and a discourse of critique
should give way
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to a discourse of possibility,
and a discourse of possibility means
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that you can imagine a future
very different from the present.
