Class Analysis and the Emancipatory Potential of Education

Abstract

Recently, a range of educational theorists have explored and extended upon popular currents in political theory through articulating “open” and “unknowing” pedagogies. Such contributions represent a radical turn away from the presumed “universals” found in proclamations of justice and emancipation and, ultimately, the centering of class analysis. At the same time, inspired by and building upon Bourdieuian theory, another cluster of educational research has developed a nuanced understanding of the social, cultural, and educational mechanisms involved in class reproduction. In this essay, Jessica Gerrard offers a critical — though sympathetic — response to these dual trends. Bringing together theories of reproduction in conversation with theories of pedagogical possibility, Gerrard argues for a renewed understanding of working‐class relations to education that incorporates an understanding of working‐class action and struggle.

Rural Working-Class Males in Sweden and Reading: Processes for Re-appropriating Written Culture

“…Working-class children and youth have a historical and collective memory of marginalisation and subordination in schooling (Gerrard, 2013). What they instinctively know from their community history, family history, and ancestral history is that schools will fail them or succeed in pushing them into manual jobs (Reay, 2017;Willis, 1977).…”

Deep Critique: Critical Pedagogy, Marxism, and Feminist Standpoint Theory in the Corporate Classroom

“…As Best and Kellner (1998, 283) Post-modernisms (mid-and late-twentieth-century women's, antiracist, queer, and post-(and de-) colonial movements) greatest success has been to problematize: … the tenets of emancipatory authority in their experiences of exclusion and misrecognition in counter (as well as dominant) cultures. Wary of explanatory and exclusionary theories of social change that place authority solely in the hands of the working-class revolutionary subject, there is a ''retreat from class-based, anticapitalism struggles, and a move towards anti-system or more specifically, counter-cultural or identity-based struggles'' (Gerrard 2013, 188, quoting Cho 2008. Class has regained interest because the burden of the GFC has been bourn disproportionately by people with the least income and property rather than those who enjoyed pre-GFC profits.…”

All that is Solid Melts into Work: Self-Work, the ‘Learning Ethic’ and the work Ethic

“…To think critically about the function of education and learning in relation to the expansion of capital in contemporary society, therefore, involves reflecting upon how a general commitment to learning and education can mandate what are considered rational and irrational behaviours for students, parents and teachers; inscribes a commitment to be productive in order to consume; advances ideals of individual responsibility and independence at the same time as social dependence on the products and practices of educational institutions; can be both a tool of subordination and insubordination; and can create the parameters through which people can be excluded and included culturally, materially and socially. Correspondingly, problematizing the learning ethic suggests that to understand the potentiality of learning and education to fundamentally transform or contest gender, race, class and sexuality inequalities, is to move beyond ‘bracketing’ education in the cultural or social realm, and to understand it as an ever-interrelated facet of our social material and economic world (see Gerrard, 2013b). As a malleable, and thus politically agreeable practice, learning can be mobilized for a variety of intents and purposes giving it an unproblematized status in the social imaginary.…”