The Role of The Classroom in our Society
By Peter A. Pompa | October 27, 2020
I’ve been applying the insights and ideas from Ernest Becker’s work since I first came across The Denial of Death sometime in my early 20s and have used his books and ideas as a framework for looking at the world. Later, as my orbit around a fully-fledged career in education began to tighten into inevitability, I encountered Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which helped me see a clearer picture of the dynamics in the teacher/student relationship. Now, midway through a graduate program in education, and with the responsibilities of my career and future students ahead of me, I have started to use these two figures to recast the English Language Arts classroom both as a problem to work at and a mechanism for something beyond its own sake.
The mentality and narrative of imminent crisis and collapse in education—and the often breathless and dubious solutions that tend to follow—is not a novel one; its spot on our Wheel of National Concerns comes up every few generations. The global pandemic and mass protests and uprisings have revealed a number of fault lines running through the various parts of our society; we find ourselves having to ask new questions of our institutional structures and ways of thinking. My tools of inquiry will be the work and thought of Becker and Freire; in a sense, it will be a preservice teacher’s first step toward a “dialogue” between these two figures.
The Self and Society: Self-Esteem and Culture
We can recall from Becker’s work the idea of self-esteem as the vital currency of a naturally self-conscious and narcissistic animal that needs recognition as a creature of value in a world of meaning. Since this recognition cannot forever be derived from purely biological sources, it necessarily turns toward the symbolic realm of culture, which provides a source and a means in which to secure our self-esteem and stave off the anxiety that haunts each of us. It also gives us a set of somewhat dependable norms for predicting, interpreting, and ordering the actions and behaviors of others in this world; in short, “culture has to provide [us] with safety as well as self-esteem.”
But there is a paradox to culture that allows us to wall ourselves within the very boundaries we construct ostensibly for our own good: in order to “fit in” and “be socialized,” we have to follow the rules of the culture we’re in. “The result,” Becker writes, “is that people willingly propagate whole cultural systems that hold them in bondage, and since everyone plays the same hero-game, no one can see through the farce.”
School and Society
Throughout my graduate program, I have been thinking about the role of the school and the classroom in our society, and have been applying some of Becker’s ideas to my critique. My interpretation focuses on how these social spaces and entities affirm, deny, or otherwise engage with the values of the culture and society they are part of. An unavoidable question emerges: if the individual—the child/youth/student, in this case—requires recognition from a symbolic world (culture) for life-affirming meaning, and achieves this through socialization (compulsory schooling), what is the likely result when this socialization obscures or suppresses alternative avenues for self-esteem, instead reinforcing the pre-approved moral, economic, and technological training youth receive through schooling? I suspect that we’ll see the pathologies of our culture persist in the neuroses of our future generations.
This question has led me to view the classroom as something that utilizes a synthesis of cultural knowledge—one that can respond with recognition and empathy the common themes of human experience—to investigate and challenge the so-called certainties of the society we have constructed, certainties that have emerged as defenses against anxieties and fears that we all share as humans.
Conscientization and Synthesis
In my estimation, Becker had a twofold critique of education: if education is to be of any use in modern society, it has to provide a “genuine synthesis of knowledge…a genuine New View of the World”; and it has to come to terms with the tenuous reality of our cultural systems—that is, it has to acknowledge how these systems are fictitious and symbolic, and yet essential to each of us as meaning-making, meaning-seeking lifeforms. We can anticipate a conflict here: how can we explore these Big Issues when many of us think of —and thus treat—education and school as a process for social discipline, professional certification, and the accumulation of status and wealth? Consider what educator Paulo Freire wrote in his landmark text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
In order to present for the oppressed and subjugated a world of deceit designed to increase their alienation and passivity, the oppressors develop a series of methods precluding any presentation of the world as a problem and showing it rather as a fixed entity, as something given—something to which people, as mere spectators, must adapt.
Freire advocated the concept of conscientization—“learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against oppressive elements of reality”—in educational settings, and here we may have our first tool for investigating the hero-games we engage in. We might apply this to the Beckerian idea on the goal of education being a confrontation with the ultimate contradiction—the seemingly unavoidable fact that “each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death…Each historical society then, is either a hopeful mystification or a determined lie.” However, the full implications of this may be easier considered than accomplished; we may be able to perceive the contradictions that hold us in our oppressive patterns, but how can we overcome them without trading one mystical lie for another?
…if education is to be of any use in modern society, it has to provide a “genuine synthesis of knowledge…a genuine New View of the World”; and it has to come to terms with the tenuous reality of our cultural systems…
It’s worth noting that Freire embraced uncertainty in his pedagogy; he understood that sectarianists on both the left and right are threatened when their truths are questioned, regarding “anything that is not ‘his’ truth a lie” because “sectarianism mythicizes and thereby alienates.” However, the “radical” is able to take the final step, the one the sectarian cannot—they are “not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. These people are not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them.”
It’s this comfort in uncertainty that could allow for a way forward, closer to the synthesis Becker was seeking in his work. Freire’s notion of cultural synthesis, described in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, recognized that “the social structure, in order to be, must become; in other words, becoming is the way the social structure expresses ‘duration.’” Cultural synthesis, then, aims “at surmounting the antagonistic conditions of the social structure,” or what Becker might posit as recognizing and accepting the presence and validity of other cultural hero-games in a pluralistic society. Freire writes that “cultural synthesis is thus a mode of action for confronting culture itself, as the preserver of the very structures by which it was formed,” and here we can begin to imagine a method or means for conscientization in the classroom, and perhaps extend it to the society at large.
Conclusion
I’ve only started to sketch the connections between the ideas of Becker and Freire, and some necessary shortcuts have been taken. For now, we can begin to imagine a school, a classroom, and a pedagogy that starts to probe at the issues raised here. What would such a pedagogy look like? It would encourage interdisciplinary thinking and communication; it would be culturally responsive in viewing the diverse cultures of the world not just as something to celebrate, but as something absolutely necessary to each of us as humans; it would be able to explore the similarities of these cultures and recognize the common dreams and struggles that run through them; it would draw closer to an understanding of these cultures as transcendental fictions, and therefore acknowledge their power in shaping our society; it would construct an idea for social change that considers and tries to account for the irreducible fears in each of us, the ones that tie us together as a species.
Cultural synthesis, then, aims “at surmounting the antagonistic conditions of the social structure,” or what Becker might posit as recognizing and accepting the presence and validity of other cultural hero-games in a pluralistic society.
Grand theoretical rhetoric is the easy part—anyone can scribble a few ambitious words or lines of type. A reevaluation of both Becker and Freire’s work under this new light is in order, and this is a project I’m hoping to develop throughout the rest of my graduate program and into my career in the classroom. For now, we will have to recognize the irreconcilable differences between what is often transmitted overtly or covertly in our schools and classrooms and what is actually occurring in our communities and across the world, and admit that, if our paradoxical species is to remain viable, it may be fitting that a paradoxical solution is necessary—and even liberating.
Peter A. Pompa is a graduate student at Eastern Michigan University, where he is pursuing a master’s degree in teaching and education. A preservice English Language Arts teacher, he is interested in using the ELA classroom as a space to examine the relationship between stories and culture, and as a tool for student-centered inquiry.
Bibliography
Becker, E. (1967). Beyond alienation; a philosophy of education for the crisis of democracy. G. Braziller.
Becker, E. (1972). Birth and death of meaning: An interdisciplinary perspective on the problem of man. Free Press of Glencoe.
Becker, E. (1973). The Denial of Death. Free Press.
Becker, E. (1975). Escape from Evil. Free Press.
Fraser, J. W. (Ed.). (2014). The school in the United States: A documentary history (Third edition). Routledge.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed (30th anniversary ed). Continuum.
Glass, E. (2020). “Toward a software of the oppressed: a Freirean approach to surveillance capitalism.” In Kirylo, James D. (Ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (2020). Bloomsbury Academic.
Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling Society (1st ed.). Harper & Row.
Nasaw, D. (1979). Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States. Oxford University Press.
Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1st Vintage Books ed). Vintage Books.
Ravitch, D. (2014). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. Knopf.
Roberts, P. (2020). “Less Certain but No Less Committed: Paulo Freire and Simone de Beauvoir on Ethics and Education.” In Kirylo, James D. (Ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (2020). Bloomsbury Academic.
Scimecca, J. (1978). The Educational Theory of Ernest Becker. The Journal of Educational Thought (JET) / Revue De La Pensée Éducative, 12(2), 100-107