In doing so, education has to be turned into an "instrument of political power," a way of reading against the conditions that produced a fascist past and are with us once again. In the current historical moment, a society of gated communities, walls and prisons has torn asunder any sense of shared community, making it more and more difficult to imagine a sense of collective identity rooted in compassion, empathy, justice and shared obligations to each other. Against this tattering of public space, it is crucial to cultivate a lofty vision that refuses to give up on the radical imagination and the willingness to fight for a world in which an emancipatory kind of struggle and politics is possible.
Such a politics must do more than exhibit outrage toward the regime of neoliberal fascism emerging in the United States and across the globe as a model for the future. It must also take seriously the notion that there is no democracy without a critical formative culture that can enable the critical power and modes of collective support necessary to sustain it. That is, it must develop a relationship between civic education and political agency, one in which the liberating capacities of language and politics are inextricably linked to the civic beliefs, public spaces and values that mark a democratic embrace of the social. This is especially urgent at a time when civic culture is being eradicated and commanding visions of an alternative future are disappearing. Politics must once again become educative and education must become central to politics.
As vehicle for social change, education registers the political, economic and cultural elements that can be used to reclaim a critical and democratic notion of community and the social relations and values that make such communities possible. The challenge to create a new and revitalized language of politics, the social and the common good can move from the abstract to the practical through the power of a mass social movement that recognizes the tactical importance of what Pierre Bourdieu describes in Acts of Resistance as "the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle" and resistance.
I am not suggesting that education or public pedagogy in the broadest sense is going to offer political guarantees in creating individuals and movements who can fight against the current attacks on democracy, but there will be no resistance without making education central to any political struggle. In his essay "On Politics" in The Sociological Imagination, the late sociologist C. Wright Mills captures the spirit of this sentiment in his comment on the value of the social sciences:
I do not believe that social science will 'save the world' although I see nothing at all wrong with 'trying to save the world' -- a phrase which I take here to mean the avoidance of war and the re-arrangement of human affairs in accordance with the ideals of human freedom and reason. Such knowledge as I have leads me to embrace rather pessimistic estimates of the chances. But even if that is where we now stand, still we must ask: if there are any ways out of the crises of our period by means of intellect, is it not up to the social scientist to state them?" It is on the level of human awareness that virtually all solutions to the great problems must now lie.
If progressives are going to redeem a democratic notion of the social, we need to build on activism that rethinks what it means to take on the challenge of changing how people relate to others and to the conditions that bear down on their lives. Such efforts speak to a notion of educational hope and the possibilities for nurturing modes of civic literacy and critical modes of learning and agency. It also points, as the late historian Tony Judt observed, to the need to forge a "language of justice and popular rights [and] a new rhetoric of public action." Revitalizing a progressive agenda can be addressed as part of a broader social movement capable of re-imagining a radical democracy in which public values matter, the ethical imagination flourishes, and justice is viewed as an ongoing struggle. In a time of dystopian nightmares, an alternative future is only possible if we can imagine the unimaginable and think otherwise in order to act otherwise. This is no longer an abstract hope but a radical necessity.
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