208 pages
ISBN-10: 1594515034
List price: $25

Decades ago Stanley Aronowitz warned of the dangers of a public education system increasingly defined through positivism and the steady undermining of the conditions for public education to prepare critical citizens for a substantive democracy and to prepare individuals for meaningful and thoughtful lives. Yet, as high stakes standardized testing, the standardization and instrumentalization of the curriculum, vocationalism, and the selling off of public education to the private sector has intensified to unpredicted levels in the years since, the progressive promises of public education have come to appear increasingly distant. Schooling, as Aronowitz points out has become nearly completely rationalized by economic values and the social and individual costs are high. Against Schooling is an exceptionally important intervention in the current policy and practice of education. This is a rare book that manages to both criticize the current field of education in a comprehensive and profound way while charting another heading for K-16 education. This is a must read.

Against Schooling is divided into three sections. The first elaborates on the need to comprehend the current crisis of public education in terms of class and labor and it establishes the distinction between schooling and education. The second provides a sustained discussion of higher education, its relationship to the public sphere, the transformations of academic work, and the need for a renewed labor education. The third discusses the importance of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire for a renewed vision for educational transformation grounded in human values. The sustained discussions of both K-12 and higher education make the book a particularly useful one for teacher education courses in foundations of education, educational leadership, and higher education.

The “against schooling” in Stanley Aronowitz’s new book refers to both the larger argument of his book and his own astounding personal history of learning. Aronowitz reveals that he is an autodidact having achieved the rank of professor without attending university classes. This personal history foregrounds crucial points that frame the book, the meaning and value of education must be understood in relation to education that goes on in the world, that class and cultural background are utterly central to the meaning of education, and that formal schooling is one site for meaningful education as Aronowitz understands it. The book makes a powerful argument for the rejuvenation of education understood through collective intellectual endeavors that draw on the enlightenment tradition and the history of ideas to forge public democratic culture. The book is a powerful argument for critical intellectual schooling and against the kinds of technical and instrumental schooling that have come to dominate educational policy, reform, curriculum and pedagogy. That is, it is against schooling conceived as the transmission of units of commodity by those who know to those who don’t; schooling understood through the positivist separation of knowledge and value; the anti-critical reforms such as heavy standardized testing, the standardization of curriculum, and anti-intellectual reduction of knowledge to prepackaged units to be “delivered” by teachers and “consumed” by students.

Aronowitz is renowned for his work as a critical sociologist with a focus on labor and as a sociologist of education. His prior education books include Education Under Siege (with Henry Giroux) and The Knowledge Factory. Like his prior books Against Schooling insists upon the need for education to be understood in relation to broader social, political, and economic forces and struggles. He approaches education from the political perspective of radical democracy though it is a version that eshews the form (Laclau and Mouffe) that treats class as merely an identity position. Aronowitz makes class and labor central to issues of education while at the same time refusing to repeat the theoretical errors of the Marxist past that he has astutely criticized in such books as The Crisis of Historical Materialism. He retains the central importance of class while rejecting economism, scientism, and the tendency of Marxism to subsume difference and culture under the banner of the “one true” struggle which is class. The retrograde reductionist Marxism has unfortunately been recently renewed by such educational Marxists as Peter McLaren, Dave Hill, and Glenn Rikowski among others who subjugate culture and politics to class leaving them incapable of theorizing the distinction between public and private life, culture as more than a mere reflection of an economic base. Aronowitz excels in this regard drawing on, among others, Hannah Arendt and Gyatri Spivak. The reductionist Marxist authors should take a lesson from Aronowitz’s sophisticated and nuanced work and especially his understanding of the relationships between political economy and culture and his serious attention to the history of labor struggle in education. Perhaps McLaren has already begun such a shift having enthusiastically endorsed the back of the book.

In the current context of resurgent conservatism in education Aronowitz is appealing to the education left in certain crucial ways. He views the purpose of public education to foster critical democratic culture and sees the high stakes standardized testing movement as a form of privatization and as anathema to critical education. For Aronowitz the progressive educational vision grounded in ideals of “access” and valuation of “experience” has largely failed to counter the rightist reforms. For Aronowitz the focus on “access” (the emphasis on graduation rates for example) becomes an accomplice in the exclusionary machinery of reproductive schooling that ultimately yet impossibly aims for economic inclusion in a capitalist economy. The focus on “experience” tends towards anti-criticality failing to recognize the need for experience to be theorized. He criticizes the ways that both Deweyanism and Freireanism have been erroneously turned into teaching methods and highlights how the fetish for methods results in depoliticized and anti-intellectual forms of education. (While a better version of Freire is championed Aronowitz shows the limits of Deweyan thought for its inability to comprehend class struggle). (The criticism of Deweyan pragmatism from Aronowitz is an important one that runs through his work – see the introduction to Horkheimer’s Critical Theory for the criticism of the positivism of pragmatism)

The breadth of Aronowitz’s knowledge is stunning as he draws from philosophy and critical sociology to argue for the left to create a new crop of students who can both interpret the world and act to change it. Aronowitz’s educational thought is largely grounded in critical theory, Freire, and Gramsci, as well as select cultural theory, Aronowitz contends that the left needs to recover intellectual traditions and view teachers as critical intellectuals rather than merely professionals or worse as technicians delivering the knowledge made by others. Aronowitz’s criticism could not be more important at the present moment as teachers unions, progressive educators, and activist movements largely lack an adequate way of conceptualizing the alternative to the current trends. Beholden to measuring educational quality through test scores many unions fail to embrace the intellectual traditions of humanism and critical scholarship that would be compatible with the struggles by their rank and file. Likewise activist opponents of rightist reforms need to theorize their positive values and reconceptualize the role of the teacher and student in a critical public democracy. The book makes clear that educators can no longer remain trapped in the economistic framing of educational values through quantifiable measures of “student achievement” and must reinvigorate the role of schools as sites for the making of complete intellectuals. For Aronowitz this means that the role of teachers needs to be understood through engaged intellectual work. He contends that, in part, this would require the transformation of teacher education programs to remove mindless courses in teaching methods and their replacement with substantial and advanced courses in social philosophy, critical sociology, and history.

There is far more here than can be addressed in a short review, but crucial topics that Aronowitz takes on include the need to recover the history of labor education, the crucial battle for higher education as intellectual labor and as a site and stake of struggle, the need for formal schooling to critically engage popular culture, the politics of difference, and the broader cultures outside of schooling in order to make schooling not merely relevant to public life but central to reconstituting democratic public life in more just ways. Anyone who cares about the value of education in a public democracy should read this book.

Recommended Further Reading

Bousquet, M. (2000). How the University Works. New York: New York University Press.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Gramsci, A. (1992). The Prison Notebooks. New York: Columbia University Press.

Giroux, H. (1988). Teachers as Intellectuals. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.