theory for education

GRED DIMITRIADIS AND GEORGE KAMERELIS

New York:  Routledge, 2006

Theory for Education offers 23 short chapters about social, political, educational, psychological, and economic theorists. Most of the theorists covered by the book are outside the field of education. Yet each theorist has had an impact on educational thought or should be mined for possibilities according to the authors. Each chapter gives biographical information and key terms. The book is neatly divided into two sections. The first shorter one includes Dewey, Freud, Marx, and Saussure. The larger second section covers a range of theorists who led inquiry in the social sciences and humanities including postcolonialism, feminism, linguistic theory, structuralism, poststructuralism, race theory, anthropology, political theory, psychoanalysis, and psychology as well as critical pedagogy. Chapters provide a clearly written yet often intricate discussion of particular aspects of the theorists. Each chapter offers a bibliography of the theorist’s writing and essential uses of the work in education.

As the authors stress in the introduction the artificial divide often made in education between theory and practice does a disservice to both. Practices, including teaching practices, are animated by underlying assumptions, values, ideologies, and visions. Theory allows people to critically comprehend what lies beneath what we do and provides the basis for rethinking, denaturalizing, and revaluing the ideas and ideals that guide practical activity. As well, theoretical activity has practical effects. When we theorize the world and our experience we understand things differently and act differently. The present moment could not be more hostile to theory in the field of education. Reform trends push for the removal of teacher autonomy and teaching as an intellectual activity while nebulous and undefined terms such as "achievement" stand in for a demand that students learn by consuming and regurgitating the expert knowledge bestowed from above. There are clear political implications of the present hostility to theory throughout education. Theory stands to encourage thought, questioning, investigation, and possibly the reflective action encouraged by many of the theorists the book covers, like Freire and Gramsci, Foucault and Spivak, Said, and Bourdieu. Such thought is good for a vibrant democratic culture characterized by a contestatory public sphere. However, such thought is anathema to the neoliberal goals of much of current public school reform including high stakes standardized tests, standardization of curriculum, and direct instruction, -- namely, the project of de-skilling and de-professionalizing teachers and preparing students to be docile workers poorly habituated to questioning why things are the ways they are.

The authors suggest that Theory for Education lends itself to student study as well as to professors brushing up. It would be an ideal companion volume in educational foundations courses for reading select theorists. But the book should also be read by educational policy wonks in think tanks and by the U.S. Department of Education and by the Walton Family Fund and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation who need to grasp that the national interest is best served by teachers and students at all levels who are developing critical intellectual capacities that can be the basis for thoughtful action. At a historical moment seeing the shredding of civil liberties and constitutional freedoms and war for profit, a culture dominated by vapid consumerism and possessive individualism, and an ethical climate in which the acceptability of state sponsored torture marks the dangers of practicalism applied to all social life, there could be no more practical demand than the educational imperative for thinking that fosters self-critical citizenship and a self-critical society.