The hope of a critical ethics: teachers and learners

Educational Theory

Volumn 54, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 263-279

  Blumenfeld Jones, Donald ^a  

^a ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 39549088059     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0013-2004.2004.00019.x     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Max Horkheimer, "Materialism and Morality," in Critical Theory: The Essential Readings, eds. David Ingram and Julia Simon-Ingram (New York: Paragon, 1986), 191.
2. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1st ed. (New York: Continuum, 1968).
3. Horkheimer, "Materialism and Morality," 176.
4. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988).
5. Horkheimer, "Materialism and Morality," 180.
6. The concept of dialectical thinking has been central to a critical project at least since G.W.F. Hegel and Marx. Dialectical thinking is defined as holding two opposed ideas to be true simultaneously. Thus, Marx could write that capitalism was the best of systems (for its inventive response to new issues) and the worst of systems (for its oppressive inequities) and mean both equally. Such dialectical thinking is central to any critical analysis.
7. Horkheimer, "Materialism and Morality," 177.
8. For further clarification of these ideas, see Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure," New Left Review 82 (1973): 3-16.
9. The term "politics of invitation" is taken from a review of Macedo's and Bartholeme's book The Dance with Bigotry. Donald Blumenfeld-Jones, "Review of Dancing with Bigotry: Beyond the Politics of Tolerance," Education Review, 〈http://edrev.asu. edu/reviews/rev100.htm〉 (last accessed 28 April 2004).
10. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 29, 35.
11. "Naturalistic" ethics refers to ethical principles derived from the way people act in the world. Ethical ideas are not autonomous from the history and traditions of people. To the degree that Freire relied on such real circumstances, including his equating of freedom with access to social resources, he was a naturalist. For more on naturalism, see Charles R. Pidgen, "Naturalism," in A Companion to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer (London: Blackwell, 1991), 421-431.
12. Freire quoted in Istva´n Me´sza´ros, Marx's Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Publishers, 1970), 40-41.
13. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
14. See also Richard H. Roberts, Hope and Its Hieroglyph: A Critical Decipherment of Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990).
15. Ju¨rgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
16. See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum/Crossroads, 1976);
17. and Max Horkheimer, "Selections from 'Traditional and Critical Theory,"' in Critical Theory: The Essential Readings, eds. Ingram and Simon-Ingram, 176-203.
18. Cynthia Brown, "Literacy in 30 Hours: Paulo Freire's Process in Northeast Brazil," in Freire in the Classroom, ed. Ira Shor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 215-231.
19. L.A. Reid, "The Concept of Aesthetic Experience," in The Development of Aesthetic Experience, ed. Malcolm Ross (New York: Pergamon, 1982), 19.
20. Martin Buber, "Education," in What Is Man? trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Anchor Books, 1954).
21. See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). In Ricoeur's analysis, ethics is steeped in feeling the Other as yourself in a way that brings the Other's experiences to bear on your own experiences.
22. Sharon Welch, Communities of Resistance and Solidarity: A Feminist Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1985).
23. For a discussion of how a teacher can legitimately use his or her authority to foster moral capacity without resorting to authoritarianism, see Donald S. Blumenfeld-Jones, "Teacher as Authority: A Model for Curriculum and Pedagogy," The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 12, no. 3 (1996): 36-43.
24. See also Richard DeGeorge's excellent study of authority, The Nature and Limits of Authority (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985). DeGeorge stipulates two forms of authority: epistemological authority (authority based on an individual's knowledge) and executive authority (authority assigned by an institution authorizing the individual to execute certain actions). Whichever authority a person possesses, he or she is authorized through certain institutional relationships, and possessing this authority allows the individual to wield it for various purposes.
25. Cleo Cherryholmes, Reading Pragmatism (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 28, 32.
26. Madeleine Grumet, "Restaging the Civil Ceremonies of Schooling," in A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation, eds. Maxine Greene, Janet L. Miller, and William Ayers (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998), 138.
27. Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 7.
28. See, for example, Nel Noddings, "On Community," Educational Theory 46, no. 3 (1996): 245-268;
29. and Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1998).
30. Walker, Moral Understandings, 10, emphasis in original.
31. Ibid., 7, 9.
32. Noddings, "On Community," 261.
33. Ibid. Noddings' description of autonomy as a traditional liberal ideal is ironic when applied to Horkheimer. Horkheimer would have balked at the "liberal" label because he understood liberal as synonymous with bourgeois and, thus, unacceptable. Still, while he called for the individual to understand his or her connection with the collective, his work does emphasize the autonomous individual.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. For examples of Levinas's work in this area, see Emmanuel Levinas, "Is Ontology Fundamental?" in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1996);
37. and "The Pact," in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 211-226. The essay "Is Ontology Fundamental?" will be cited as OF in the text for all subsequent references. For Olafson's exploration of these issues, see Frederick Olafson, Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Olafson uses Heidegger's notion of Mitsein (being in the world together with one another) as the key to conceptualizing a basis for ethics.
38. Ironically, while Levinas critiqued Heidegger, Olafson uses Heidegger to establish a perspective similar to that of Levinas. This irony is undercut by the fact that Olafson attends to a different part of Heidegger's work and admits that Heidegger did not do very much with the notion of Mitsein. While Olafson draws heavily upon Heidegger's work, the ideas are very much his own
39. Shaun Gallagher, Hermeneutics and Education (New York: SUNY Press, 1992).
40. Levinas, "The Pact," 214.
41. Olafson, Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics, 4.
42. Ibid., 7.