Critical Theory and Multicultural Education(Perspectives in Education)

Critical Theory

The roots of critical theory are most often traced to Hegelianism, the Western European Marxist tradition, and the Frankfurt school (developed by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and others) that took up Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's and Karl Marx's work when founding the Institute for Social Research (Das Institut für Sozialforschung) in 1923. Within the social sciences, critical theory is an emancipatory philosophy focused on historicizing, critiquing, and exposing human relationships of domination and subordination. As a process of critique and methodology, critical theory engages dialectical praxis—a process that involves placing opposing ideas in dialogue with each other to develop new ideas or situations. Dialectical thinking allows one to analyze a social object in its current state in comparison with its possibilities, moving between the sensuous concrete of the object and the abstract concepts involving the relations governing it. Praxis allows one to bring theory and practice, concrete and abstract, together toward creating something new. Thus, dialectical praxis allows one to examine the contradictions within which humankind exists—such as metaphorical and physical freedom and slavery—in an effort to liberate people from the ideas and activities that social institutions force on them. Such a process involves deconstructing the ways knowledge is produced, valued, and used to control people in our sociopolitical and economically stratified societies.

This methodology is best illustrated in Marx's analysis of class struggle in modern capitalism. Marx examines capitalism within its sociohistorical context to show how the exploitation of de-skilled workers—who are forced to sell their labor-power as a commodity to survive while engaging in repetitive tasks that capitalists pay the lowest possible wages for—results in the reification of workers who are treated as objects rather than human beings. The hierarchical power structure in which a small number of capitalists maintain hegemony over all others is made possible through the influences of a societal superstructure (cultural ideals, religion, art, education, etc.) that are controlled by society's economic base (means of production, distribution, and [Page 495]exchange in capitalism). In this sense, the cultural knowledge we are taught regarding how the world functions and what we should do in life is controlled primarily by the capitalist economic base structure, ensuring that the worker-majority will continue to be exploited by the capitalist-minority. By understanding the way capitalist society functions through a critical theory lens, Marx hoped that people would be able to join together against its dehumanizing ways to create a new, better world for all.

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