8 October 2019 Critical Memo Re: Anti-Positivism & Critical Race Theory

Giroux’s Anti-Positivism and Critical Race Theory in American Schooling

Summary

Schooling and the Culture of Positivism, by Henry A. Giroux, details his perspective that positivism (as a normative pattern of thinking) is problematic to, and the cause of, theories that there has been a “death of history,” which he criticizes for being reductive and pessimistic. He believes that neo-Marxist and phenomenological theorists have so far neglected to examine how the role of positivism affects schooling. Giroux chooses to address the topic of America’s “loss of interest” in history because he believes it is a unique example of the problem of positivism that schools connect to larger society (2011, p. 20), as well as history being the ironic, singular location of the root of the ideology.

Giroux criticizes the presence of positivism in the hegemony of education for its “limited focus on objectivity, efficiency, and technique,” (2011, p. 20). Giroux traces positivism to the industrial era, claiming that progress in the 19th century and earlier was “linked to the development of moral self-improvement and self-discipline in the interest of building a better society, progress in the twentieth century ... became applicable only to the realm of material and technical growth” (2011, p. 23-24). He concludes that the consequence of cultural positivism is the loss of critical awareness of democratic values. A necessary solution is undermining the “narrow focus on mathematical utility” with educators at the forefront of such intense efforts to reaffirm democratic schooling.

Application

To Giroux, the death of history means the loss of critical keys to understanding the nation’s political, social, and moral location and that the institution of positivism in our school systems has contributed to easy and even enthusiastic acceptance of this assumption. He calls the process of this loss “historical amnesia,” referring to the cultural forgetting of crucial factors of success or failure in past generations. 

There is no doubt that Americans are experiencing a “loss of interest” in history, particularly an amnesia toward aspects of history that they experience with cognitive dissonance, uncritically and even unconsciously, such as racism. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is aware of the effects of cultural consciousness having a prevailing impact on the reception, application, and promulgation of their theory. One tenet of CRT states that “by experiencing racial domination, such groups perceive the system differently and are often uniquely place to understand its workings” (Gillborn and Ladson-Billings, 2018, p. 41). The use of human experience is, for one, an aspect of history and something discounted under positivist value systems.

A result of historical perspective in CRT is the interest-convergence principle as well as the recognition of historical amnesia as white liberal activists take symbolic moments of social progress at face value and then “move on.” In both cases the system of white supremacy remains rooted in every facet of society and may even be strengthened. CRT “shows how even apparently radical changes are reclaimed and often turned back over time” (Gillborn and Ladson-Billings, 2018, p. 41) and this critical historical awareness is one part of interacting with reality that is crucial in the classroom, especially among young learners, whose only opportunity to hear it may be from their educators. Devaluing history is an opportunity for white supremacy to go untraced in institutions of education. The intersection of these ideas promotes a basis for CRT perspectives to be included in critical pedagogy self-questioning for educators attempting to apply the theories to their classrooms and curricula.

Critical Analysis

As an educator, I intend to be critically aware of race, gender, ethnicity and other politicized aspects of identity in my classroom because it is the best way to prepare students from a variety of backgrounds for a realistic relationship with their own positions in society. People from marginalized backgrounds have a variety of unique but identifiable challenges that they will face. Many of these things are present in the right literature and readings that can be incorporated into an English class at a variety of levels, but simply exposing students to these texts is not enough to achieve their potential. Uprooting racist hegemony through critical interaction with history is something that Giroux cites to be a generationally gradual process, which means it requires vast and consistent pressure. This is a major challenge to be addressed when it comes to applying both CRT and Giroux’s Critical Pedagogy in the 21st century classroom, though I do not find it debilitating. 

Another challenge of the process is making sure it reaches all levels of society to have the greatest radius of influence. One level that I suspect may be neglected in this regard is the middle class / suburban school and its denizens, where teachers often assume a post-racial situtation or take for granted the privilege of a superficially non-racist community. For example, Utahns infrequently encounter black people in their schools and, while it may seem that students here have no racist tendencies, their inexperience with racial diversity contributes to the culture of ignorance and complacency in the face of racism and white supremacy. The case may be the same across the country, as so many communities are de facto segregated. In such schools, students may not be exposed to overt racism modeled by parental figures, but a privileged white status quo becomes the norm. Without understanding the mechanisms of society, rhetoric aimed to scapegoat and stereotype ethnic minorities is understandably effective. Implicitly learned, these beliefs become difficult to identify and critically exhume later on. 

Middle class white kids need to read about black people, Hispanic people, and poor people as much as ethnically, economically diverse or downtrodden students for the sake of developing empathy and compassion in a realistic, transferable context. The history of white people as the progenitors of racism is something that needs to be taught directly and with the additional explicit connection to modern politics. It is these students who, born into the culture of power, will have the greatest power to affect change and will hold the greatest power most consistently. One goal of educators working in such demographics could be a commitment CRT mindfulness in questioning their own teaching methods and the culture of their school to develop a means of enabling a depth of consciousness toward racial issues even among those who are not directly affected by them. Pursuing this theory in much the same way as Giroux suggests uprooting positivism might stem new methods of providing students the critical means to acquire a social consciousness. Present in curriculum choices, unit and lesson plans, can be a conscientious consideration of the needs of the community in realizing their own privilege. Instead of the narcissism of white guilt, such methods might produce a more organic and straightforward ethical aptitude among succeeding generations. 

When it comes to Giroux, my main critique would be that his ideas can get so complicated that it is difficult to imagine how exactly they would scale to the classroom. The accessibility of them is also limited; I had to research a lot of phrases he used that encapsulated whole philosophies, which were then implicitly referred to throughout. It took an hour to get a grip of his introduction which was only a couple pages long. If this pedagogy is going to have the reach that it aspires toward, I think that its theorists will need to be mindful of how young educators need entry points.

Resources

Gillborn, D. and Ladson-Billings, G. (2018). Critical race theory in education. Education and critical race theory. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Giroux, H. A. (2011). On critical pedagogy. Schooling and the culture of positivism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.