Irish Educational Studies

ISSN: 0332-3315 (Print) 1747-4965 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ries20

The problematic character of critical pedagogy

Kevin Williams & Patrick Williams

To cite this article: Kevin Williams & Patrick Williams (2016): The problematic character of
critical pedagogy, Irish Educational Studies, DOI: 10.1080/03323315.2016.1148232

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03323315.2016.1148232

Published online: 22 Mar 2016.

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 Irish Educational Studies, 2016

REVIEW ESSAY
The problematic character of critical pedagogy

Pedagogy, praxis and purpose in education, by C. M. Mulcahy, D. E. Mulcahy and D.

G. Mulcahy, New York, Routledge, 2015, 200 pp., £95 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-415-72445-6

This book has much to recommend it but it is the role of reviewers to challenge ques-
tionable arguments and this essay will focus on these, though not to the detriment of
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the positive aspects of the authors’ achievement. But first it is necessary to give readers
a sense of the argument by presenting a map of the volume’s contents. Divided into
four parts, the first is called ‘Autocratic Control and Subjugation’ and has two chap-
ters, ‘Evolving Aspirations from Local Community to Global Village’ and ‘Centrali-
zation and Control in Chester Finn and the Fordham Institute’. Part Two is entitled
‘Knowledge and Understanding’ and its two chapters are ‘General Education as Edu-
cation for Knowledge and Understanding’ and ‘Literacy as a Pathway to Knowledge
and Understanding’. Part Three has the title ‘Praxis: Autonomy, Democracy and
Transformation’ and its two chapters are ‘Toward a Pedagogy of Praxis: Progressive
Education and Critical Pedagogy’ and ‘Implementing a Pedagogy of Praxis: Beyond
Knowledge and Understanding’. Part Four, ‘The Vocation to Become More Fully
Human’, is very short and has only one chapter called ‘Pedagogy and Purpose’.

Vocational orientation exaggerated

In Part One the authors explain their well-founded suspicions of the motives of states
and private corporations in financing education and give multiple examples in support
of their view. Their analysis of education policy in the USA brings together in one
source a fascinating account of the policy initiatives under the administrations of
different US Presidents that teachers of Comparative Education could use in their
courses. It is a pity, though, that most of the examples in the volume are taken from
the USA and to an extent from the UK. From the point of view of an Irish reader
the neglect of the situation in this country is disappointing. Treatment of the achieve-
ment of the course of Civic, Social and Political Education (CSPE) and some of the
exciting developments within the Irish system – the initiative ‘Teaching and Learning
for the 21st Century’ (TL21), for example (see Williams and McDonald 2014), would
have added nuance to the arguments and could have tempered some of the negativity
towards public and private initiatives in education.
This is not to deny the authors’ claim that vocational purposes dominate the
thinking of policy-makers in education although, as Alison Wolf tartly explains,
this orientation of the school system remains a ‘great idea’ as long as it is designed
only ‘for other people’s children’ (2002, 56). One significant consequence of the
emphasis by policy-makers on the vocational dimension of schooling is that it
usually neglects entirely the educational value of work-related learning. This
 2 Review Essay

learning is capable of offering satisfaction in the way that work itself is capable of
yielding Arbeitsfreude (joy in work) or of being experienced as enjoyment rather
than as a chore, burden or disutility. The contrast between the Greek scholé and
the Latin otium, which mean leisure, and ascholía/negotium which mean work or
business, that is, the opposite of leisure, may not be marked in the lives of some
people. Reflection on the full import of the terms ‘employment’, ‘a career’ and,
above all, ‘a vocation’ shows the capacity of work to connect with the deepest
human aspirations. There is nothing anti-educational about a concern to prepare
young people for working life and this preparation fits well with what the
authors refer to as an education in ‘the ordinary activities’ of daily life or ‘the prac-
tical demands of everyday living’ (104).
The Mulcahys, however, probably exaggerate the extent to which direct economic
utility has determined the content of the school curriculum. They endorse the view
that ‘largely’ priority is conferred on ‘subject matter thought to sustain education for
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economic growth’ (137). Little of what is included on school curricula in Ireland and
the UK, for example, could be said to be of direct vocational utility, particularly in
the areas of the arts and humanities. Moreover, from a historical perspective attempts
to link educational provision and the development of capitalism, on account of a
need for literacy in the workplace, are not supported by the evidence (see Williams
2007). Apart from literacy, which was taught in schools, occupational skills tended to
be acquired not in schools but rather within the family or by apprenticeship.
An aspect of the school system that merits more attention from the authors is its
indirect vocational function as a sorting mechanism in respect of allocating to young
people their future occupational destinations. The facilitation of positional advantage,
that is, the labour market advantage conferred by the exchange value of education,
may well be an unavoidable consequence of schooling as an institution in almost any
society. Many of the negative effects of schooling, however, derive from the consequence
of its having an exchange value. These features underlie the ‘hidden curriculum’ of aca-
demic competitiveness that is supposed to be a major feature of school life today. The
reason why there is such an emphasis on achievement in the academic sphere is the
esteem attached to academic/professional work in society. But the intense concentration
by some pupils and their parents on academic success is not the direct fault of schools. If
access to medical courses, and other prestige-bearing courses, were based on perform-
ances in the Leaving Certificate Applied, we would see a transformation in the percep-
tion of the less academically oriented curriculum. But unless we have such a dramatic
reversal in the requirements for university entrance, the priorities of parents, their chil-
dren and teachers regarding school are unlikely to change. There is not much that can be
done about the high valuation placed by many people on the professions and the knowl-
edge that secures access to them, but educators should resist the provision of exaggerated
fine-tuning of their role in assessing pupil achievement. The recent broadening of the
grade bands for the Leaving Certificate is a welcome move away from making imposs-
ibly subtle distinctions between levels of performance.

The claims of liberal general education

This part of the volume is the most impressive and continues the work of Mulcahy’s
(1981) seminal analysis of the second level curriculum in Ireland and his most
recent tour de force, The Educated Person: Toward a New Paradigm for Liberal
 Review Essay 3

Education (2008), which is a work of extraordinary erudition and admirable sensitivity

to the real world of teaching and learning. Consistent with the arguments of these
books, the authors offer a comprehensive, insightful and generous-spirited account
of the purposes and content of a general education. The volume offers informed
and thoughtful appraisals of the work of many educational thinkers such as Martha
Nussbaum, Jane Martin Roland and Richard Pring and it also deals with the work
of important historical figures such as John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick.
The authors’ treatment of the teaching of literacy is full of concrete, fine detail and
makes for compelling reading.
To be welcomed also is the affirmation of the important role that practical learning
plays in the educational experience of young people – this appreciation of what the
authors describe so well as the ‘limitations of the word’ (68) has consistently featured
in D.G. Mulcahy’s work. The three authors share the rejection of the dominance of
propositional knowledge in the school curriculum that they trace in the work of
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Richard Pring and Jane Martin Roland (121–123). This dominance has the conse-
quence of denigrating practical learning in its different manifestations. Negative atti-
tudes towards practical pursuits derive from the Greek philosophical and educational
tradition, at the heart of which are both an identification of rationality with reasoning
and an underestimation of the rationality required by activities that require physical
interaction between the agent and the environment. The joy and pleasure to be
found in this interaction have little to do with mere toil and everything to do with
the personal enrichment that should characterize the comprehensive general edu-
cation that the authors quite rightly endorse (see also Williams 2007).

The project of critical pedagogy

The project of critical pedagogy that animates the second two parts of the volume does,
however, require critique. How do the authors understand critical pedagogy? Elaborated
from the fashionable ‘critical theory’, it is described as an ‘interpretive tool’ in

identifying and uncovering structures of power and knowledge production, the use of
power and knowledge production to maintain social stratification, and the manner in
which a particular culture may dominate the public sphere through its influence on
public policy, institutions, the media, and so on. (124)

There is connected to a claim that ‘what is to be taught is likely to be what those in

positions of influence and control decide what it should be’ and that subject matter
prescribed for study is ‘determined by the elite and in the interests of the elite and
powerful’ (137). The volume contains a section dealing with some criticisms of
aspects of the theory but the authors are uncritical of the project itself. As Williams
(2004) argues elsewhere this attitude seems to be endemic among advocates of critical
pedagogy. The reader gets a sense that the ways of implementing the pedagogy can be
a subject of discussion but the whole basis of the project represents received truth. It as
if the clarification of some fine points of sacramental theology could be relevant in a
debate with an unbeliever. In fairness the authors are more nuanced in their views than
are the usual missionaries for critical pedagogy. Unlike some critical pedagogues, the
authors cannot be accused of what Iago in Othello calls ‘bookish theoric’ and ‘(m)ere
prattle without practice’ (Act I, Sc i, lines 24 and 26). They include practical class-
 4 Review Essay

based illustrations of the process that they espouse – something that is not always
present in the highly theoretical pronouncements of writers on the subject.
What then are our reservations regarding the project of critical pedagogy? Its con-
ception of education is moralizing and it politicizes the activity of teaching to an unac-
ceptable degree. Its agenda-driven and reductionist approach to teaching has an
indoctrinatory dimension of which its proponents seem unaware. The conspiracy
theory that underpins critical pedagogy leads its defenders to underestimate the fertility
and flexibility of the literary canon and of the school curriculum. Furthermore, many
critical pedagogues fail to take sufficient account of the work of good teachers in reach-
ing the marginalized, although again in fairness the authors do not suffer from this
myopia. Supporters of the theory tend also to be naïve and romantic in respect of the
resistance of some children to learning, especially within an institutional framework.
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Moralizing and proselytism

There is something very moralizing about the discourse of critical pedagogy. It
prompts one to recall the comment of the narrator’s mother in Proust’s (2012) great
novel, In Search of Lost Time, ‘What virtues, Lord, Thou makest us abhor!’ (43).
The presence of a moralizing impulse also raises questions about the credentials of
the person doing the moralizing – though this is not in the least to impugn the bona
fides of the Mulcahys. An example of preached virtue is the ‘praxis’ promoted by
some fee charging schools in promotion of ‘social transformation’ though these
schools are the institutional bulwarks of privilege and the conduits to preserving the
status quo. When it comes to moral conduct Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is correct in
affirming that ‘action is eloquence’ (Act III, Sc. ii, line 92). Preached morality lends
itself to the proposing of attractive ideals of benevolence that have little purchase in
daily living. It is easy to be generous with other people’s money.
Moralizing also leads far too readily to proselytism on the part of theorists and tea-
chers. Benign motives do not justify proselytism in the classroom and, however good a
cause or justifiable a political stance, teachers are not entitled to use their privileged
position in order to promote a socio-political agenda. Commendable commitment
to the welfare of victims of poverty and oppression does not justify proselytizing
intent in the classroom. Based on particular interpretations of human events and prac-
tices, the radical political beliefs of critical pedagogy are significantly controversial.
There is a reasonable case to be made (although not one that we find persuasive)
that the results of the free market and colonialism have been largely beneficial to
humankind. After all, when people do have an opportunity to exercise choice in poli-
tics, it is notoriously the case that majorities tend to vote for right leaning politicians
and parties in most Western democracies.
There is another reason why it is not educationally acceptable to present radical
left-wing views to young learners as definitively true. Through their promotion of a
package of beliefs as being the ‘truth’, advocates of critical pedagogy are guilty of a
form of indoctrination. In fact critical pedagogues present learners with ‘absolute
fixed truths’ (150), the very process that these theorists condemn in respect of the tra-
ditional teaching. It is reprehensible for any teacher to present contestable claims in
the humanities or social sciences as ‘absolute fixed truths’. The imposition by the
teacher of a meta-narrative representing ‘truth’ in an area where truth is not absolute
is totally unacceptable. Much of the writing from the school of critical pedagogy seems
 Review Essay 5

to be of this character. It takes the form of an ideologically driven theory that is non-
falsifiable, that is, not susceptible of being rebutted by counter evidence. In rejecting
the authority of the establishment, critical pedagogues put a new authority in its place.
Few of its advocates seem to be familiar with theories of re-distribution of resources
through taxation or offer a defensible policy regarding the sources of the taxation
measures required by their policies. Seldom is there any analysis of the distinction
between being charitable and being just. These are complex and sensitive issues. The fol-
lowing is a summary of a fictional case-study that examines income-related themes in
the classroom designed by Williams (2014a) and which draws attention to their com-
plexity and sensitivity. The case-study was designed for student teachers to use with a
class of sixteen year olds who have entered senior cycle after completing the Junior Cer-
tificate. The students plan to celebrate their examination results with a meal in the local
restaurant, MacFries. A serious problem, however, arises. In support of their demand to
be allowed a pay increase a strike has been called by the young employees of MacFries.
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Half of the employees are immigrant workers and their pay is 50 cent an hour less than
workers in an equivalent multi-national chain restaurant. The pupils receive a request
from the strikers to support them by respecting the picket and boycotting the restaurant.
There is no other restaurant in the area that will suit because MacFries is very inexpen-
sive so unless they pass the picket the celebration will have to be cancelled. The strike
committee calls on the pupils to sign a petition in support of their demands. A
follow-up workshop models the kind of conversation that might be conducted in a class-
room. The conversation with the students can be quite passionate with participants
failing to listen to, and hear, one another as the scenario prompts the expression of
deep feelings about the politics of work and issues regarding income distribution,
reward for initiative and risk-taking, creation of employment and immigration are
well ventilated. Managing the competing narratives requires a nuanced and sensitive
response by the teacher. The dangers of imposing a single version of truth in teaching
about religion have been widely explored (see Williams 2014b) but the same dangers
arise in teaching controversial topics in politics. Students have to be enabled to
engage critically with their own beliefs and commitments in class and to engage in an
honest, personalized exploration of their own and others’ viewpoints.

The flexibility of the canon

The authors have a sceptical view of Western achievements in creating knowledge and
especially of its literary canon. They believe that ‘those marginalized by the dominant
culture are expected to assimilate to mainstream culture’ (104) and quote the words of
Ira Shor, a supporter of critical pedagogy whom they admire greatly, that the school
system is based on what has ‘been canonized narrowly as the best’ (104). This claim
is misguided and it is necessary to dwell in some detail on why this is so. In the first
place the literary canon could not reasonably be said to reflect class and colonial
repression. The dominant figures in French literature from the sixteenth to the twen-
tieth centuries – from Montaigne through Voltaire and Montesquieu to Camus, Sartre
and de Beauvoir – challenged the status quo in every respect, especially with regard to
Western notions of moral and cultural superiority. Central to the work of Montaigne,
Voltaire and Montesquieu is the theme of cultural perspectivisim, that is, showing that
the human point of view of moral and political life is relative to the individual’s own
culture. Each of the authors offers readers an invitation to engage in cultural
 6 Review Essay

decentring, namely, to stand to one side of their own culture and its presuppositions.
This is also the invitation offered by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, a tale that is
familiar to young people throughout the Western world from a young age. In fact,
from even before they go to school through encounters with simplified version of
Swift’s great novel, many children are alerted to notions of cultural perspectivism. It
may well be true, though hardly surprising, that the traditional curriculum in the
Western world draws on the culture of Western civilization but it is not true that
that liberal learning is ‘Eurocentric’ (103) in the sense of being an expression of occi-
dental superiority.
In this regard it is worth considering the Irish context in some detail. Many of the
classic texts that feature or have featured on the curriculum raise issues concerning
elitist and racist attitudes and enable teachers to challenge them. The following are
some examples. In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the issue of class is profiled vividly.
The hero’s denunciation of the common people as ‘the mutable, rank-scented many’
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is truly shocking (Act I Sc i, line 84). Even more trenchant is his tirade later in the play.

You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate

As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize

As the dead carcases of unburied men

That do corrupt my air – I banish you! (Act III, Sc iii 147–150)

The issue of anti-Semitism arises in The Merchant of Venice and that of racial preju-
dice in Othello. It is hard to envisage a more bitter invective against black people than
is uttered by Iago to Brabantio, father of Othello’s wife, Desdemona.

Your heart is burst – you have lost half your soul.

Even now, now, very now, an old black ram

Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise;

Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,

Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you. (Act I, Sc. i, lines 87–91) …
you’ll

have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse;

you’ll have your nephews neigh to you; you’ll have

coursers for cousins and gennets for germans. (Act I, Sc. I, lines 110–113) …
I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter

and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs. (Act I, Sc. I, lines 115–116)

Other texts commonly taught in Irish schools raise similar challenges concerning
Western civilization. Brian Friel’s play, Dancing at Lughnasa, subverts colonial stereo-
types through the actions of Father Jack, the main character, who identifies with his
congregation and, by appropriating its worldview, rejects Christianity. The nature of
 Review Essay 7

political life is searchingly explored in the novels Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies.
Teaching any of these texts requires the exploration of the most fundamental questions
about the organization of human society.
Where teachers have choice regarding the content of the curriculum, as in the new
syllabus for Junior Cycle English, many examples of contemporary literature, which
challenge Western mindsets, can be included. For instance, the novel The Map of
Love by Souief (2000) offers a telling insight into the colonial mentality. Souief
shows that it was at least in part because of ‘difficulties with language’ (399) that Egyp-
tians found it hard to articulate their resentment of British domination. To contest
British imperialism, she explains, it would be necessary to possess ‘not just the
ability to translate Arabic speech into English but to speak as the English themselves
would speak, for only then [would] the justice of what they say – divested of its disguis-
ing cloak of foreign idiom – be truly apparent’(399) to the British. Conversely, it is
important for Westerners like Friel’s Father Jack above to speak the language of
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non-Western peoples as an important expression of willingness to decentre from

their own culture.
One of Elizabeth Bishop’s most memorable poems, ‘Brazil, January 1, 1502’ also
challenges the Eurocentric world view. The poem powerfully captures the predatory
impulse that drove Western Europeans to Paulo Freire’s native country. Bishop com-
municates the excitement mixed with fear of the Europeans as they attempt to land in
Brazil.

Just so the Christians, hard as nails,

tiny as nails, and glinting,

in creaking armour, came and found it all,

not unfamiliar …
… corresponding, nevertheless, to an old dream of wealth and luxury …

Directly after Mass …

they ripped away into the hanging fabric,

each out to catch an Indian for himself– (Padel 2007, 105–106)

Pauline Stainer’s poem ‘The Slave Ship’ in the same collection is a response to the
same theme. Western sailors who, despite being present at ‘divine service’ and the ‘dis-
pensing of sacrament’, conduct similar awful plunder far from home (212).
Such texts are eligible to appear in the second level curriculum in Ireland. The flexi-
bility to choose texts was a feature of the Humanities Project developed by the Curri-
culum Unit of the City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee as far back as the
1970s and has long featured in the Leaving Certificate Applied and in its previous iter-
ations. In the Irish context it is simply untrue to claim that ‘what is to be taught is likely
to be what those in positions of influence and control decide what it should be’ and
that subject matter prescribed for study is ‘determined by the elite and in the interests
of the elite and powerful’ (137). Moreover, the subject matter of liberal education can
also be interpreted in an expansive way. Writing on the future of the American public
school Maxine Green (2005, 161–163) argues that it can interpreted broadly enough to
 8 Review Essay

include colonialist, female and working class voices as well as popular and folk arts.
These voices and expressions of culture can indeed have a place in the school curricu-
lum but this does not have to be at the expense of more traditional content which, as
has been argued, is replete with radical challenge. Yet there is a danger in conceiving
literary study too ideologically.

Reductionism in teaching: literature with an agenda

This is the danger of coming to instrumentalize literature and of ascribing to it extrin-
sic purposes. The Mulcahys accept the very good case made by F.R. Leavis that the
subject English has a wide educational remit (155) and the authors note the potential
of the subject to serve a role in history, social studies and citizenship education. Yet
ideas in literature are embodied in texts; they are not moralizing addenda. As Keats
observes, readers tend to reject poetry that has a ‘palpable design’ on them and ‘if
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we do not agree seems to put its hand’ into our ‘breeches’ pocket’ (quoted in Padel
2007, 17). This point applies to all literature and reflects an attitude that Colin
Thubron found in China, where as he explains, everything ‘politically and ethically
– is settled’ and where consequently works of fiction are conceived as romans à thèse
and serve as mere ‘instruments of education’ (Thubron 1988, 187). But the primary
purpose of teaching literature is to equip us to derive pleasure from our reading
although literary texts can also prompt us to review critically beliefs and attitudes
that we hold dear (see Williams 2013). The pre-eminent purpose is to nourish the
imagination and didactic intent may subvert the properly educational purposes of
teaching literature and reduce literary works to a means of purveying ‘truths’. The
didactic spirit of much critical pedagogy fails to respect the integrity of literary
works and the necessity to maintain a certain pedagogic detachment or distance in
teaching. By detachment or distance is meant the attitude that allows literature
speak to the learners in its own terms, unencumbered by any proselytizing intent or
ulterior purpose on the part of the teacher. Pedagogic tact rather than the theories
of critical pedagogy is required to avoid an instrumental and reductionist approach
and to ensure that the encounters that young people have with literary works are sen-
sitive to their complexity. To be sure, concern for the disadvantaged is admirable but in
teaching the priority must be to engage students in the joy, interest and excitement of
learning. The life-enhancing pleasure that can sometimes be a feature of any learning
needs to take precedence over any political goals that may be ascribed to the activity.
The political aims of critical pedagogy distract from the primary task of the educator.

The civic and cultural outreach of the curriculum

The school curriculum can also be more encompassing than the authors seem to
appreciate. The Mulcahys write of ‘the importance of becoming civically engaged’
and of learning ‘how to oppose injustices’ (164) but this is exactly what is envisaged
by the programme of CSPE in the Irish curriculum The programme is based on pro-
moting human rights and social responsibilities and is designed to equip young people
with a capacity to gain access to information, to negotiate structures and to acquire the
ability and the confidence to participate fully in democratic society through active
learning methods. In defining active citizenship, the Irish document draws on its Aus-
tralian equivalent.
 Review Essay 9

An active citizen … is someone who not only believes in the concept of a democratic
society but who is willing and able to translate that belief into action. Active citizenship
is a compound of knowledge, skills and attitudes: knowledge about how society works;
the skills needed to participate effectively; and a conviction that active participation is
the right of all citizens. (Government of Ireland/An Roinn Oideachais agus Eolaíochta/
Department of Education and Science 1996, 19)

Many schools also have long-standing and effective programmes of Development

Education. It is unfair to represent the school curriculum simply as an instrument
of repression by the political and economic establishment. Indeed CSPE and Develop-
ment Education reflect very accurately Freire’s conception of praxis – ‘reflection and
action upon the world in order to transform it’ (139).
It is not only at second level that class and cultural outreach is to be found. Current
programmes of teacher and medical education normally have modules that aim to cul-
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tivate sensitivity and responsiveness to class and cultural contexts. As most readers are
likely to be familiar with teacher education, we shall refer primarily to the latter. Start-
ing from the first semester of first year, students in the Medical School of the Royal
College of Surgeons in Ireland are introduced to the concept of cultural competence
that requires them to be responsive to, and to accommodate, the disparate cultures of
their potential future patients and colleagues. Modules delivered across the first two
semesters of this year are designed to enable future doctors to negotiate multicultural
contexts and to understand the influence on health of cultural and social factors and
to take them into account in their professional activity. The module dealing with cul-
tural competence (Clinical Competences/Early Patient Contact) includes the cultiva-
tion of an appropriate cultural humility in clinical practice. Students are also alerted
to the disproportionate prevalence of chronic illnesses among minority groups, and
the possible reasons for this. They are also given the opportunity to meet with
members of ethnic minorities and to discuss with these patients their interactions
with the healthcare system. In their assignments the students explore the cultural deter-
minants of health, positive and negative, and the effects of these on individual patients.
In another module (Health, Behaviour and Patient Safety), the students explore
unequal access to healthcare, and the concept of quality healthcare. This module,
inter alia, examines ways in which certain patients are failed by the healthcare
system, and highlights the importance of whistleblowing, as well as looking at the
psychological factors that contribute to failures in healthcare. The curriculum outlined
above reflects some aspects of one medical school’s programme of education in cultural
competence that is replicated in many other institutions. Clearly it would be mistaken
and unfair to characterize this approach to teaching as avehicle of cultural imperialism.

Critical pedagogy or imaginative teaching?

Theorists of critical pedagogy seem to believe that there is an insurmountable gap
between ‘“the real world”, the tangible world as distinct from the conceptual or
virtual world of academic subjects’ (101). The notion of a ‘real world’ is deeply proble-
matic from a philosophical point of view and should not be used without careful elab-
oration. Critical pedagogues are also opposed to boring didactic teaching where the
teacher ‘“empties” his or her knowledge into the students’ (148). No one would
endorse teaching as, in the words of Shor, ‘a scholastic monologue notable for
 10 Review Essay

remoteness of form and content’ (150), in the manner of grim instruction provided by
Mr McChoakumchild in Dickens’s Hard Times. Yet one must wonder if anyone who
believes that such teaching can be conducted in schools has ever actually taught in a
classroom. To be sure, no one can disagree with Shor that ‘academic language’ must be
related to ‘concrete experience’ (145). In a sense the good teacher has always been a
‘guide facilitating student learning’ rather than one intent on ‘handing knowledge
readymade’ to learners (147). In attacking imaginary enemies theorists of critical
pedagogy could be said to be tilting at windmills.
Certainly it is necessary to find a way of making the content of the traditional cur-
riculum accessible to young people from backgrounds of socio-economic disadvan-
tage. This is both in order to enable such young people to master the language of
high culture in which this culture finds expression and also to enable them effectively
to challenge the social order wherein conditions of social deprivation are tolerated.
Only by gaining access to the language of high status knowledge and discourse will
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the socially disadvantaged come to exercise political control in their societies. The
irony is that the Mulcahys are well aware that teaching can be designed to secure
knowledge and understanding without invoking the strategies of critical pedagogy
and that traditional approaches to teaching do not have to consist of what Freire
calls ‘banking education’ that is, ‘depositing lifeless knowledge lacking in authenticity
in the minds of the young’ (150). The authors accept that the traditional curriculum
can be taught using ‘a variety of pedagogical approaches’ (103) and that knowledge
can be ‘relayed to students’ in a form that ‘interests and enlivens them’ (149) and
also that ‘direct teaching or lecturing’ does not have to consist of boring expositions
to passive learners and ‘may indeed be beneficial’ (150). What the authors find
deficient in traditional teaching aimed at achieving knowledge and understanding is
that it is not ‘aimed at developing active engagement with the world’ (102). But not
all education is designed, as Freire proposes, to secure ‘action upon the world in
order to transform it’ (139). Education also has a remit to engender personal enrich-
ment. In other words its aim is to transform individuals’ understanding of the world
and of themselves. And this can be done by imaginative teaching that engages learners’
interest and indeed passion (see Williams 2007, 80–84).
For example, when John McGahern lost his job in a Dublin National school, he
found work in a London primary school in a poor area where he found the class differ-
ence in teaching very prominent. Most of the pupils whom he taught in Clontarf came
from middle class families and were motivated to learn, but those in London came
from families without any tradition of formal education and this made the job of
the teacher much harder. Nonetheless, he does show how it was possible to engage
the interest of young people by rooting his pedagogy in their worlds (Murphy et al.
1987, 135–136).

Through education some of the children began to sleep well for the first time … I
found that they didn’t value their surroundings or their lives and that it was
through endless questioning and chatting that you let them know that you found
their lives interesting. (136)

McGahern also alerted the pupils to the poetry of ‘the street cries’ that was ‘a kind of
literature that was available to them, but they didn’t recognise it as such’ (136). His
practice as a teacher in the 1960s involved therefore connecting with, and affirming,
 Review Essay 11

the life and community experience of slum children. His approach to teaching thus
reflected very much the spirit of Paulo Freire’s classic text The Pedagogy of the
Oppressed. McGahern drew on his own sympathetic imagination in his pedagogy
rather than on any complicated theories. Another important pedagogic lesson that
he learned from his experience was to value learning by heart. Thankfully unencum-
bered by educational ideologies, later he was to draw on his own intuition, experience
and common sense while teaching in London. He invited his pupils to learn poems by
heart and to perform them in class on Friday, thereby defying his school principal who
subscribed to the fashionable disparagement of ‘rote learning’ (134–135). In this way
the children acquired a store of poetry that might remain with them for years. The
experiences described by McGahern are not uncommon. To illustrate the possibilities
of imaginative and learner-centred approaches in difficult teaching environments, Wil-
liams (2014a, 2014b) refers to several examples from the work of Pádraig Hogan.
Hogan applies his metaphor of education as ‘cultural courtship’ to show how young
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people who are very negatively disposed towards classroom learning can be reached
(see Williams 2014a, 56–57, 2014b, 139–140).

Conclusion
But even the most resourceful teachers can be defeated by the challenges posed by some
learners. The authors and proponents of critical pedagogy in general underestimate the
potential resistance of such young people to educational activities. An essential feature
of the framework of learning within the school context is the adult-child and individual-
group character of the teacher–pupil relationship. This requires the exercise of an insti-
tutionally appropriate form of authority and the imposition of a certain control. The
resistance of a small minority of young people to the imposition of any form of
control can be inimical to the aspirations of teachers who are committed to teaching
these young people. The potential frustration of the impulse to educate, and to care
for, children was a theme in some of work of D.H. Lawrence, who himself had actually
been a teacher and so his insights into the reality of teaching and learning had a basis in
actual classroom experience (see Williams 2009). In some cases, where the resistance of
the pupils to school and to learning seems insurmountable, teaching may prove imposs-
ible. This can sometimes be the experience of student teachers and of teachers starting
their careers, and it is naïve to ignore this and to lead these young teachers to believe that
if only they used critical pedagogy dramatic change would ensue.
In making a concluding appraisal of Pedagogy, Praxis and Purpose in Education, it
should be emphasized that the volume offers much that is excellent. The critique of the
culture of control in education is incisive, the conceptualization of the character of a
general education is comprehensive, rich and generous, and the illustrations from the
practical world of teaching are very engaging. If the book had concentrated on the role
of imaginative teaching in realizing the purposes of education it would have been a
more valuable contribution to educational thought. The worldview of critical peda-
gogy canvassed in the volume does not provide the aims of education – these aims
are not to introduce young people to a fixed set of beliefs but rather are to enable
them to form their own views by critically appraising all views, including the theories
of critical pedagogy. The profile of these theories in the volume detracts from the merit
of its positive arguments and fails to do justice to the authors’ conspicuous erudition,
scholarship, wisdom and sensitivity to the real world of teaching and learning.
 12 Review Essay

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Kevin Williams
Research Fellow, Irish Centre for Poetry Studies
doctorkevinwilliams@gmail.com

Patrick Williams
Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland
© 2016, Kevin Williams and Patrick Williams
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03323315.2016.1148232