Politics and Transformation: Critical Approaches toward Political Aspects of Education

The current situation in education in the United States of America (USA), with an emphasis on high-stakes testing and privatization, calls for a counter-discourse revealing what is sacrificed by these educational policies and what forms of education are needed to prepare future teachers to engage their students in effecting social justice. We draw upon Adorno's ideas of self-reflection and debarbarization and Foucault's analysis of parrhesia (truth-telling) for formation of souls as the framework for this theoretical discussion on critical approaches to the political in education. University students arrive already ‘formed’ by the polarizing neo-conservatism of their communities. For students to be re-formed they need to be faced by truth-telling at both theoretical and practical levels. Those who teach need to emphasize that education involves an inner activity of reflection and care adopted for oneself. Using examples of cross-cultural teleconferencing and service-learning with subcultures, we suggest that perspective-altering care for self and others supplemented by the development of autonomy and reflection can help undo the rhetoric of animosity and confusion abundant in our culture and help students uncover transformative dialogic practices. The authors suggest this be fostered by classroom practices that open the adamantine closures of lives subsumed by our ‘disciplined’ (Foucault), ‘administered’ (Adorno) society.