The Dialectic in the Classroom

A New Article on Critical Social Theory and Education

Good morning, everyone. I hope you’re enjoying the holiday season with the Solstice close at hand. The Winter Solstice represents hope, renewal, and the path from the darkness back to the light and life of spring; in my latest article for my friends at CounterPunch, I tap the work of philosopher and psychoanalyst Michael Thompson to build a conceptual challenge to the state’s system of education, to light a path up to a different way of thinking about and approaching education and cultural reproduction:

In dialectics, truth is associated with a process instead of being held as something fixed and objective one discovers. The goal is to begin to see reality not as a set of discrete facts, but as a complex of “interwoven tendencies.” Whereas the state’s schools teach obedience to various dogmas, a dialectical approach to education would instruct students to disrupt reified social concepts and categories, breaking them down into the component relationships from which they are composed. We can draw on the idea of emergence to help make sense of these relationships: the dialectic offers a way to think about the emergence of complex, unpredictable (and apparently non-deterministic) social patterns by analyzing them in terms of the conflicts and contradictions found within the overall system. By drilling down to these dynamics, we can develop a fuller and more accurate picture or model of the social ontological landscape; it takes seriously the role of power and structural inequalities in these tensions and dynamics. Rather than obscuring this role, the dialectic encourages students to probe the connections between social power and “the formation of our social world and the kinds of reality we experience.” Nothing in material reality is fixed in stasis, permanent, or unchanging. The world is in a state of ceaseless motion and change, right down to the elementary particles, themselves just ripples in energy fields.

Thank you for taking the time to read these words, if you have. Wishing you and yours a magical solstice, with brighter days and lighter spirits.

Dave