LECTURE №13
Innovative Educational Technologies in Higher Education System.
Theme: Innovative Educational Technologies in
Higher Education System.
v
Testing communication style.
v Communication Styles of Nurse
Practitioners.
Every
individual needs to communicate in one or the other way. It takes many forms
such as writing, speaking and listening. Communication is the life blood of
every organization and its effective use helps build a proper chain of
authority and improve relationships in the organization.
Communication is a process of transferring information from one entity to another. Communication
processes are sign-mediated interactions between at least two agents which
share a repertoire of signs
and semiotic rules.
Communication is commonly defined as "the imparting or
interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or
signs". Although there is such a thing as one-way communication,
communication can be perceived better as a two-way process in
which there is an exchange and progression of thoughts, feelings or ideas (energy) towards a mutually accepted
goal or direction (information).
Communication
is a process whereby information is enclosed in a package and is channeled and
imparted by a sender to a receiver via some medium. The receiver then decodes
the message and gives the sender a feedback. All forms of communication require
a sender, a message, and a receiver. Communication requires that all parties
have an area of communicative commonality. There are auditory means, such as speech, song, and tone
of voice, and there are nonverbal means, such as body language, sign language, paralanguage, touch, eye contact,
and writing.
Two literatures have shaped much of the writing in the educational
foundations over the past two decades: Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy.
Each has its textual reference points, its favored authors, and its desired
audiences. Each invokes the term "critical" as a valued educational
goal: urging teachers to help students become more skeptical toward commonly
accepted truisms. Each says, in its own way, "Do not let yourself be deceived." And each has sought to reach and
influence particular groups of educators, at all levels of schooling, through
workshops, lectures, and pedagogical texts. They share a passion and sense of
urgency about the need for more critically oriented classrooms. Yet with very
few exceptions these literatures do not discuss one another. Is this because
they propose conflicting visions of what "critical" thought entails?
Are their approaches to pedagogy incompatible? Might there be moments of
insight that each can offer the other? Do they perhaps share common
limitations, which through comparison become more apparent? Are there other
ways to think about becoming "critical" that stand outside these
traditions, but which hold educational significance? These are the questions
motivating this essay.
We will begin by contrasting Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy in
terms of their conception of what it means to be "critical." We will
suggest some important similarities, and differences, in how they frame this
topic. Each tradition has to some extent criticized the other; and each has
been criticized, sometimes along similar lines, by other perspectives,
especially feminist and poststructural perspectives.
These lines of reciprocal and external criticism, in turn, lead us to suggest
some different ways to think about "criticality."
At a broad level, Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy share some
common concerns. They both imagine a general population in society who are to some extent deficient in the abilities or
dispositions that would allow them to discern certain kinds of inaccuracies,
distortions, and even falsehoods. They share a concern with how these
inaccuracies, distortions, and falsehoods limit freedom, though this concern is
more explicit in the Critical Pedagogy tradition, which sees society as
fundamentally divided by relations of unequal power. Critical Pedagogues are
specifically concerned with the influences of educational knowledge, and of
cultural formations generally, that perpetuate or
legitimate an unjust status quo; fostering a critical capacity in citizens is a
way of enabling them to resist such power effects. Critical Pedagogues take
sides, on behalf of those groups who are disenfranchised from social, economic,
and political possibilities. Many Critical Thinking authors would cite similar
concerns, but regard them as subsidiary to the more inclusive problem of people
basing their life choices on unsubstantiated truth claims — a problem that is
nonpartisan in its nature or effects. For Critical Thinking advocates, all of
us need to be better critical thinkers, and there is often an implicit hope
that enhanced critical thinking could have a general humanizing
effect, across all social groups and classes. In this sense, both Critical
Thinking and Critical Pedagogy authors would argue that by helping to make
people more critical in thought and action, progressively minded educators can
help to free learners to see the world as it is and to act accordingly;
critical education can increase freedom and enlarge the scope of human
possibilities.
Yet, as one zooms in, further differences appear. The Critical Thinking
tradition concerns itself primarily with criteria of epistemic adequacy: to be
"critical" basically means to be more discerning in recognizing
faulty arguments, hasty generalizations, assertions lacking evidence, truth
claims based on unreliable authority, ambiguous or obscure concepts, and so
forth. For the Critical Thinker, people do not sufficiently analyze the reasons
by which they live, do not examine the assumptions,
commitments, and logic of daily life. As Richard Paul puts it, the basic
problem is irrational, illogical, and unexamined living. He believes that
people need to learn how to express and criticize the logic of arguments that
underpin our everyday activity: "The art of explicating, analyzing, and
assessing these ‘arguments’ and ‘logic’ is essential to leading an examined
life" (Paul 1990, 66). The prime tools of Critical Thinking are the skills
of formal and informal logic, conceptual analysis, and epistemology. The
primary preoccupation of Critical Thinking is to supplant sloppy or distorted
thinking with thinking based upon reliable procedures of inquiry. Where our
beliefs remain unexamined, we are not free; we act without thinking about why
we act, and thus do not exercise control over our own destinies. For the
Critical Thinking tradition, as Harvey Siegel states, critical thinking aims at
self-sufficiency, and "a self-sufficient person is a liberated
person...free from the unwarranted and undesirable control of unjustified
beliefs" (Siegel, 1988, 58).
The Critical Pedagogy tradition begins from a very different starting
point. It regards specific belief claims, not primarily as propositions to be
assessed for their truth content, but as parts of systems of belief and action
that have aggregate effects within the power structures of society. It asks
first about these systems of belief and action, who benefits? The
primary preoccupation of Critical Pedagogy is with social injustice and how to
transform inequitable, undemocratic, or oppressive institutions and social
relations. At some point, assessments of truth or conceptual slipperiness might
come into the discussion (different writers in the Critical Pedagogy tradition
differ in this respect), but they are in the service of demonstrating how
certain power effects occur, not in the service of pursuing Truth in some dispassioned sense (Burbules
1992/1995). Indeed, a crucial dimension of this approach is that certain
claims, even if they might be "true" or substantiated within
particular confines and assumptions, might nevertheless be partisan
in their effects. Assertions that African-Americans score lower on IQ tests,
for example, even if it is a "fact" that this particular population
does on average score lower on this particular set of tests, leaves significant
larger questions unaddressed, not the least of which is what effect such
assertions have on a general population that is not aware of the important
limits of these tests or the tenuous relation, at best, between "what IQ
tests measure" and "intelligence." Other important questions,
from this standpoint, include: Who is making these assertions? Why are they
being made at this point in time? Who funds such research? Who promulgates
these "findings"? Are they being raised to question African-American
intelligence or to demonstrate the bias of IQ tests? Such questions, from the
Critical Pedagogy perspective, are not external to, or separable from, the
import of also weighing the evidentiary base for such claims.
Now, the Critical Thinking response to this approach will be that these
are simply two different, perhaps both valuable, endeavors. It is one thing to
question the evidentiary base (or logic, or clarity, or coherence) of a
particular claim, and to find it wanting. This is one kind of critique,
adequate and worthwhile on its own terms. It is something else, something
separate, to question the motivation behind those who propound certain views,
their group interests, the effects of their claims on society, and so forth.
That sort of critique might also be worthwhile (we suspect that most Critical
Thinking authors would say that it is worthwhile), but it
depends on a different sort of analysis, with a different burden of argument —
one that philosophers may have less to contribute to than would historians or
sociologists, for example.
The response, in turn, from the Critical Pedagogy point of view is that
the two levels cannot be kept separate because the standards of epistemic
adequacy themselves (valid argument, supporting evidence, conceptual clarity,
and so on) and the particular ways in which these standards are invoked
and interpreted in particular settings inevitably involve the very
same considerations of who, where, when, and why that any other social belief
claims raise. Moreover, such considerations inevitably blur into and influence
epistemic matters in a narrower sense, such as how research questions are
defined, the methods of such research, and the qualifications of the
researchers and writers who produce such writings for public attention.
But neither the Critical Thinking nor the Critical Pedagogy tradition is
monolithic or homogeneous, and a closer examination of each reveals further
dimensions of these similarities and differences.
Critical Thinking
A concern with critical thinking in education, in the broad sense of
teaching students the rules of logic or how to assess evidence, is hardly new:
it is woven throughout the Western tradition of education, from the Greeks to
the Scholastics to the present day. Separate segments of the curriculum have
often been dedicated to such studies, especially at higher levels of schooling.
What the Critical Thinking movement has emphasized is the idea that specific
reasoning skills undergird the curriculum as a whole; that the purpose of
education generally is to foster critical thinking; and that the skills and
dispositions of critical thinking can and should infuse teaching and learning
at all levels of schooling. Critical thinking is linked to the idea of
rationality itself, and developing rationality is seen as a prime, if not the prime,
aim of education (see, for example, Siegel 1988).
The names most frequently associated with this tradition, at least in
the
To Critical Thinking, the critical person is something like a critical
consumer of information; he or she is driven to seek reasons and evidence. Part
of this is a matter of mastering certain skills of thought: learning to
diagnose invalid forms of argument, knowing how to make and defend
distinctions, and so on. Much of the literature in this area, especially early
on, seemed to be devoted to lists and taxonomies of what a "critical
thinker" should know and be able to do (Ennis 1962, 1980). More recently,
however, various authors in this tradition have come to recognize that teaching
content and skills is of minor import if learners do not also develop the
dispositions or inclination to look at the world through a critical lens. By
this, Critical Thinking means that the critical person has not only the
capacity (the skills) to seek reasons, truth, and evidence, but also that he or
she has the drive (disposition) to seek them. For instance, Ennis claims that a
critical person not only should seek reasons and try to be well informed, but
that he or she should have a tendency to do such things (Ennis 1987, 1996).
Siegel criticizes Ennis somewhat for seeing dispositions simply as what
animates the skills of critical thinking, because this fails to distinguish
sufficiently the critical thinker from critical thinking. For Siegel, a cluster
of dispositions (the "critical spirit") is more like a deep-seated
character trait, something like Scheffler’s notion of
"a love of truth and a contempt of lying"
(Siegel 1988; Scheffler 1991). It is part of critical
thinking itself. Paul also stresses this distinction between skills and
dispositions in his distinction between "weak-sense" and
"strong-sense" critical thinking. For Paul, the
"weak-sense" means that one has learned the skills and can
demonstrate them when asked to do so; the "strong-sense" means that
one has incorporated these skills into a way of living in which one’s own
assumptions are re-examined and questioned as well. According to Paul, a
critical thinker in the "strong sense" has a passionate drive for
"clarity, accuracy, and fairmindedness"
(Paul 1983, 23; see also Paul 1994).
This dispositional view of critical thinking has real advantages over
the skills-only view. But in important respects it is still limited. First, it
is not clear exactly what is entailed by making such dispositions part
of critical thinking. In our view it not only broadens the notion of
criticality beyond mere "logicality," but it necessarily requires a
greater attention to institutional contexts and social relations than Critical
Thinking authors have provided. Both the skills-based view and the
skills-plus-dispositions view are still focused on the individual person. But
it is only in the context of social relations that these dispositions or
character traits can be formed or expressed, and for this reason the practices
of critical thinking inherently involve bringing about certain
social conditions. Part of what it is to be a critical thinker is to be engaged
in certain kinds of conversations and relations with others; and the kinds of
social circumstances that promote or inhibit that must therefore be part of the
examination of what Critical Thinking is trying to achieve.
A second theme in the Critical Thinking literature has been the extent
to which critical thinking can be characterized as a set of generalized
abilities and dispositions, as opposed to content-specific abilities and
dispositions that are learned and expressed differently in different areas of
investigation. Can a general "Critical Thinking" course develop
abilities and dispositions that will then be applied in any of a range of
fields; or should such material be presented specifically in connection to the
questions and content of particular fields of study? Is a scientist who is a
critical thinker doing the same things as an historian who is a critical
thinker? When each evaluates "good evidence," are they truly thinking
about problems in similar ways, or are the differences in interpretation and
application dominant? This debate has set John McPeck,
the chief advocate of content-specificity, in opposition to a number of other
theorists in this area (Norris 1992; Talaska 1992).
This issue relates not only to the question of how we might teach critical
thinking, but also to how and whether one can test for a general facility in
critical thinking (Ennis 1984).
A third debate has addressed the question of the degree to which the
standards of critical thinking, and the conception of rationality that
underlies them, are culturally biased in favor of a particular masculine and/or
Western mode of thinking, one that implicitly devalues other "ways of
knowing." Theories of education that stress the primary importance of
logic, conceptual clarity, and rigorous adherence to scientific evidence have
been challenged by various advocates of cultural and gender diversity who
emphasize respect for alternative world views and styles of reasoning. Partly
in response to such criticisms, Richard Paul has developed a conception of
critical thinking that regards "sociocentrism"
as itself a sign of flawed thinking (Paul 1994). Paul believes that, because
critical thinking allows us to overcome the sway of our egocentric and sociocentric beliefs, it is "essential to our role as
moral agents and as potential shapers of our own nature and
destiny" (Paul 1990, 67). For Paul, and for some other Critical
Thinking authors as well, part of the method of critical thinking involves
fostering dialogue, in which thinking from the perspective of others is also
relevant to the assessment of truth claims; a too-hasty imposition of one’s own
standards of evidence might result not only in a premature rejection of
credible alternative points of view, but might also have the effect of
silencing the voices of those who (in the present context) need to be
encouraged as much as possible to speak for themselves. In this respect, we see
Paul introducing into the very definition of critical thinking some of the
sorts of social and contextual factors that Critical Pedagogy writers have
emphasized.
Critical Pedagogy
The idea of Critical Pedagogy begins with the neo-Marxian literature on
Critical Theory (Stanley 1992). The early Critical Theorists (most of whom were
associated with the Frankfurt School) believed that Marxism had underemphasized
the importance of cultural and media influences for the persistence of
capitalism; that maintaining conditions of ideological hegemony were important
for (in fact inseparable from) the legitimacy and smooth working of capitalist
economic relations. One obvious example would be in the growth of advertising
as both a spur to rising consumption and as a means of creating the image of
industries driven only by a desire to serve the needs of their customers. As
consumers, as workers, and as winners or losers in the marketplace of
employment, citizens in a capitalist society need both to know their
"rightful" place in the order of things and to be reconciled to that
destiny. Systems of education are among the institutions that foster and
reinforce such beliefs, through the rhetoric of meritocracy, through testing,
through tracking, through vocational training or college preparatory curricula,
and so forth (Bowles & Gintis 1976; Apple 1979; Popkewitz 1991).
Critical Pedagogy represents, in a phrase, the reaction of progressive
educators against such institutionalized functions. It is an effort to work
within educational institutions and other media to raise questions about
inequalities of power, about the false myths of opportunity and merit for many
students, and about the way belief systems become internalized to the point
where individuals and groups abandon the very aspiration to question or change
their lot in life. Some of the authors mostly strongly associated with this
tradition include Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Peter
McLaren, and Ira Shor. In the language of Critical
Pedagogy, the critical person is one who is empowered to seek justice, to seek
emancipation. Not only is the critical person adept at recognizing injustice
but, for Critical Pedagogy, that person is also moved to change it. Here
Critical Pedagogy wholeheartedly takes up Marx's Thesis XI on Feuerbach:
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the
point, however, is to change it" (Marx 1845/1977, 158).
This emphasis on change, and on collective action to achieve it, moves
the central concerns of Critical Pedagogy rather far from those of Critical
Thinking: the endeavor to teach others to think critically is less a matter of
fostering individual skills and dispositions, and more a consequence of
the pedagogical relations, between teachers and students and among
students, which promote it; furthermore, the object of thinking critically is
not only against demonstrably false beliefs, but also those that are
misleading, partisan, or implicated in the preservation of an unjust status
quo.
The author who has articulated these concerns most strongly is Paulo Freire, writing originally within the specific context of
promoting adult literacy within Latin American peasant communities, but whose
work has taken on an increasingly international interest and appeal in the past
three decades (Freire 1970a, 1970b, 1973, 1985;
McLaren & Lankshear 1993; McLaren & Leonard
1993). For Freire, Critical Pedagogy is concerned
with the development of conscienticizao,
usually translated as "critical consciousness." Freedom,
for Freire, begins with the recognition of a system
of oppressive relations, and one’s own place in that system. The task of
Critical Pedagogy is to bring members of an oppressed group to a critical
consciousness of their situation as a beginning point of their liberatory praxis. Change in
consciousness and concrete action are linked for Freire;
the greatest single barrier against the prospect of liberation is an ingrained,
fatalistic belief in the inevitability and necessity of an unjust status quo.
One important way in which Giroux develops this idea is in his
distinction between a "language of critique" and a "language of
possibility" (Giroux 1983, 1988). As he stresses, both are essential to
the pursuit of social justice. Giroux points to what he sees as the failure of
the radical critics of the new sociology of education because, in his view,
they offered a language of critique, but not a language of possibility. They
saw schools primarily as instruments for the reproduction of capitalist
relations and for the legitimation of dominant
ideologies, and thus were unable to construct a discourse for "counterhegemonic" practices in schools (Giroux 1988,
111-112). Giroux stresses the importance of developing a language of
possibility as part of what makes a person critical. As he puts it, the aim of
the critical educator should be "to raise ambitions, desires, and real
hope for those who wish to take seriously the issue of educational struggle and
social justice" (Giroux 1988, 177).
For both Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy,
"criticality" requires that one be moved to do something, whether
that something be seeking reasons or seeking social justice. For Critical
Thinking, it is not enough to know how to seek reasons, truth, and
understanding; one must also be impassioned to pursue them rigorously. For
Critical Pedagogy, that one can critically reflect and interpret the world is
not sufficient; one must also be willing and able to act to change that world.
From the standpoint of Critical Pedagogy the Critical Thinking tradition
assumes an overly direct connection between reasons and action. For instance,
when Ennis conceives Critical Thinking as "reasonable reflective thinking
focused on deciding what to believe or to do," the assumption is that
"deciding" usually leads relatively unproblematically
to the "doing" (Ennis 1987). The model of practical reasoning on
which this view depends assumes a relatively straightforward relation, in most
cases, between the force of reasons and action. But for Critical Pedagogy the
problems of overcoming oppressed thinking and demoralization are more complex
than this: changing thought and practice must occur together; they fuel one
another. For Freire, criticality requires praxis —
both reflection and action, both interpretation and change. As
he puts it, "Critical consciousness is brought about not through
intellectual effort alone but through praxis — through the
authentic union of action and reflection" (Freire
1970a, 48).
Critical Pedagogy would never find it sufficient to reform the habits of
thought of thinkers, however effectively, without challenging and transforming
the institutions, ideologies, and relations that engender distorted, oppressed
thinking in the first place — not as an additional act beyond the pedagogical
one, but as an inseparable part of it. For Critical Thinking, at most, the
development of more discerning thinkers might make them more likely to
undermine discreditable institutions, to challenge misleading authorities, and
so on — but this would be a separate consequence of the attainment of Critical
Thinking, not part of it.
A second central theme in Freire’s work, which
has fundamentally shaped the Critical Pedagogy tradition, is his particular
focus on "literacy." At the ground level, what motivated Freire’s original work was the attempt to develop an adult
literacy program, one in which developing the capacity to read was tied into
developing an enhanced sense of individual and collective self-esteem and
confidence. To be illiterate, for Freire, was not
only to lack the skills of reading and writing; it was to feel powerless and
dependent in a much more general way as well. The challenge to an adult literacy
campaign was not only to provide skills, but to address directly the
self-contempt and sense of powerlessness that he believed accompanied
illiteracy (Freire 1970b). Hence his approach to
fostering literacy combined the development of basic skills in reading and
writing; the development of a sense of confidence and efficacy, especially in
collective thought and action; and the desire to change, not only one’s self,
but the circumstances of one’s social group. The pedagogical method that he
thinks promote all of these is dialogue: "cultural action for
freedom is characterized by dialogue, and its preeminent purpose is to conscientize the people" (Freire
1970a, 47).
Richard Paul says similarly that "dialogical thinking" is
inherent to Critical Thinking (Paul 1990). However, there is more of a social
emphasis to dialogue within Critical Pedagogy: dialogue occurs between people,
not purely as a form of dialogical thought. Here again Critical Pedagogy
focuses more upon institutional settings and relations between individuals,
where Critical Thinking’s focus is more on the individuals themselves. In other
words, dialogue directly involves others, while one person’s development of
"dialogical thinking" may only indirectly involve others. Yet the work
of Vygotsky and others would argue that the
development of such capacities for individuals necessarily involves social
interactions as well. Paul addresses this point, but it does not play the
central role in his theory that it does for Freire
and other Critical Pedagogues — still, Paul appears to us to be somewhat of a
transitional figure between these two traditions.
The method of Critical Pedagogy for Freire
involves, to use his phrase, "reading the
world" as well as "reading the word" (Freire
& Macedo 1987). Part of developing a critical
consciousness, as noted above, is critiquing the social relations, social
institutions, and social traditions that create and maintain conditions of
oppression. For Freire, the teaching of literacy is a
primary form of cultural action, and as action it must "relate speaking
the word to transforming reality" (Freire
1970a, 4). To do this, Freire uses what he
calls codifications: representative images that both
"illustrate" the words or phrases students are learning to read, and
also represent problematic social conditions that become the focus of
collective dialogue (and, eventually, the object of strategies for potential
change). The process of decodification is
a kind of "reading" — a "reading" of social dynamics, of
forces of reaction or change, of why the world is as it is, and how it might be
made different. Decodification is the attempt to
"read the world" with the same kind of perspicacity with which one is
learning to "read the word."
In this important regard, Critical Pedagogy shares with Critical
Thinking the idea that there is something real about which
they can raise the consciousness of people. Both traditions believe that there
is something given, against which mistaken beliefs and distorted perceptions
can be tested. In both, there is a drive to bring people to recognize "the
way things are" (Freire 1970a, 17). In different
words, Critical Pedagogy and Critical Thinking arise from the same sentiment to
overcome ignorance, to test the distorted against the true, to ground effective
human action in an accurate sense of social reality. Of course, how each
movement talks about "the way things are" is quite different. For
Critical Thinking, this is about empirically demonstrable facts. For Critical
Pedagogy, on the other hand, this is about the intersubjective
attempt to formulate and agree upon a common understanding about
"structures of oppression" and "relations of domination."
As we have discussed, there is more to this process than simply determining the
"facts"; but, in the end, for Freire as for
any other Marxist tradition, this intersubjective
process is thought to be grounded in a set of objective conditions.
Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy
In the discussion so far, we have tried to emphasize some relations and contrasts
between the Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy traditions. To the extent
that they have addressed one another, the commentary has often been
antagonistic:
The most powerful, yet limited, definition of critical thinking comes
out of the positivist tradition in the applied sciences and suffers from what I
call the Internal Consistency position. According to the adherents of the
Internal Consistency position, critical thinking refers primarily to teaching
students how to analyze and develop reading and writing assignments from the
perspective of formal, logical patterns of consistency....While all of the
learning skills are important, their limitations as a whole lie in what is
excluded, and it is with respect to what is missing that the ideology of such
an approach is revealed (Giroux 1994, 200-201).
Although I hesitate to dignify Henry Giroux’s
article on citizenship with a reply, I find it hard to contain myself. The
article shows respect neither for logic nor for the English language....Giroux’s own bombastic, jargon-ridden rhetoric...is elitist
in the worst sense: it is designed to erect a barrier between the author and
any reader not already a member of the "critical" cult (Schrag 1988, 143).
There are other, more constructive engagements, however. Certain authors
within each tradition have seriously tried to engage the concerns of the other
— although, interestingly, the purpose of such investigations has usually been
to demonstrate that all of the truly beneficial qualities of the other tradition
can be reconciled with the best of one’s own, without any of the purported
drawbacks:
It should be clear that my aim is not to discredit the ideal of critical
thinking. Rather, I question whether the practices of
teaching critical thinking...as it has evolved into the practice of
teaching informal logic issufficient for
actualizing the ideal. I have argued that it is not sufficient, if
"critical thinking" includes the ability to decode the political
nature of events and institutions, and if it includes the ability to envision
alternative events and institutions (Kaplan 1991/1994, 217, emphasis added).
Postmodernism, or any other perspective which seriously endorses radical
or progressive social and educational change, requires an epistemology which
endorses truth and justification as viable theoretical notions. That is to say:
Postmodern advocacy of radical pedagogies (and politics) requires Old-Fashioned
Epistemology (Siegel 1993, 22).
From the perspective of Critical Thinking, Critical Pedagogy crosses a
threshold between teaching criticality and indoctrinating. Teaching students to
think critically must include allowing them to come to their own conclusions;
yet Critical Pedagogy seems to come dangerously close to prejudging what those
conclusions must be. Critical Pedagogy see this threshold problem conversely:
indoctrination is the case already; students must be brought to criticality,
and this can only be done by alerting them to the social conditions that have
brought this about. In short, we can restate the problem as follows: Critical
Thinking’s claim is, at heart, to teach how to think critically, not how to
think politically; for Critical Pedagogy, this is a false distinction.
For Critical Pedagogy, as we have discussed, self-emancipation is contingent
upon social emancipation. It is not only a difference between an emphasis on
the individual and an emphasis on society as a whole; both Critical Pedagogy
and Critical Thinking want "criticality" in both senses (Missimer 1989/1994; Hostetler 1991/1994). It is rather
that, for Critical Pedagogy, individual criticality is intimately linked to
social criticality, joining, in Giroux’s phrase,
"the conditions for social, and hence, self-emancipation" (Giroux
1988, 110). For Critical Thinking, the attainment of individual critical
thinking may, with success for enough people, lead to an
increase in critical thinking socially, but it does not depend upon it.
These traditions also explicitly differ from one another in the
different problems and contexts they regard as issues. Critical Thinking
assumes no set agenda of issues that must be addressed. To try to bring someone
to criticality necessarily precludes identifying any fixed set of questions
about particular social, moral, political, economic, and cultural issues, let
alone a fixed set of answers. As already noted, this is not to say that those
involved in the Critical Thinking movement do not think that social justice is
an important issue; nor to say that people such as Ennis, Paul, and Siegel do
not wish to see those sorts of issues addressed — in fact, they occasionally
assert quite explicitly that they do. It is rather that, as Critical Thinking
understands criticality, "impartiality" is a key virtue. They strive
not to push their students along certain lines, nor to impose certain values
(the fact/value distinction is a central thesis of the analytical tradition
that informs much of Critical Thinking). Socially relevant cases might be
pedagogically beneficial as the "raw material" on which to practice the
skills and dispositions of Critical Thinking, because they are salient for many
learners in a classroom. But they are not intrinsically important to Critical
Thinking itself; in many cases purely symbolic cases could be used to teach the
same elements (as in the use of symbols or empty X’s and Y’s to teach logic).
Hence, Critical Thinking tends to address issues in an item-by-item
fashion, not within a grand scheme with other issues. The issues themselves may
have relations to one another, and they may have connections to broader themes,
but those relations and connections are not the focus of investigation. What is
crucial to the issue at hand is the interplay of an immediate cluster of
evidence, reasons, and arguments. For Critical Thinking, what is important is
to describe the issue, give the various reasons for and against, and draw out
any assumptions (and only those) that have immediate and direct bearing on the
argument. This tends to produce a more analytical and less wholistic
mode of critique.
When Critical Pedagogy talks about power and the way in which it
structures social relations, it inevitably draws from a context, a larger
narrative, within which these issues are framed; and typically sees it as part
of the artificiality and abstractness of Critical Thinking that it does not
treat such matters as central. Critical Pedagogy looks to how an issue relates
to "deeper" explanations — deeper in the sense that they refer to the
basic functioning of power on institutional and societal levels. For Critical
Pedagogy, it makes no sense to talk about issues on a nonrelational,
item-by-item basis. Where Critical Thinking emphasizes the immediate reasons
and assumptions of an argument, Critical Pedagogy wants to draw in for
consideration factors that may appear at first of less immediate relevance.
We do not want to imply merely that Critical Pedagogy wants people to
get the "big picture" whereas Critical Thinking does not. Oftentimes,
their "big pictures" are simply going to be different. The important
point is why they are different, and the difference resides in the fact that
whereas Critical Thinking is quite reluctant to prescribe any particular
context for a discussion, Critical Pedagogy shows enthusiasm for a particular
one — one that tends to view social matters within a framework of struggles
over social justice, the workings of capitalism, and forms of cultural and
material oppression. As noted, this favoring of a particular narrative seems to
open Critical Pedagogy up to a charge of indoctrination by Critical Thinking:
that everything is up for questioning within Critical Pedagogy except the
categories and premises of Critical Pedagogy itself. But the Critical
Pedagogue’s counter to this is that Critical Thinking’s apparent
"openness" and impartiality simply enshrine many conventional
assumptions as presented by the popular media, traditional textbooks, etc., in
a manner that intentionally or not teaches political conformity; particular claims
are scrutinized critically, while a less visible set of social norms and
practices — including, notably, many particular to the structure and activities
of schooling itself — continue to operate invisibly in the background.
In short, each of these traditions regards the other as insufficiently critical;
each defines, in terms of its own discourse and priorities, key elements that
it believes the other neglects to address. Each wants to acknowledge a certain
value in the goals the other aspires to, but argues that its means are
inadequate to attain them. What is most interesting, from our standpoint, is
not which of these traditions is "better," but the fascinating way in
which each wants to claim sovereignty over the other; each claiming to include
all the truly beneficial insights of the other, and yet more — and, as we will
see, how each has been subject to criticisms that may make them appear more as
related rivals than as polar opposites.
Criticisms of Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy
It will not have been lost on many readers that when we listed the prime
authors in both the Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy traditions, all
listed were male. There are certainly significant women writing within each
tradition, but the chief spokespersons, and the most visible figures in the
debates between these traditions, have been men. Not surprisingly, then, both
traditions have been subject to criticisms, often from feminists, that their
ostensibly universal categories and issues in fact exclude the voices and
concerns of women and other groups.
In the case of Critical Thinking, as noted earlier, this has typically
taken the form of an attack on the "rationalistic" underpinnings of
its epistemology: that its logic is different from "women’s logic,"
that its reliance on empirical evidence excludes other sources of evidence or
forms of verification (experience, emotion, feeling) — in short, that its masculinist way of knowing is different from "women’s
ways of knowing" (for example, Belenky et al.
1986; Thayer-Bacon 1993). Other arguments do not denigrate the concerns of
Critical Thinking entirely, but simply want to relegate them to part of
what we want to accomplish educationally (Arnstine
1991; Garrison & Phelan 1990; Noddings 1984;
Warren 1994). Often these criticisms, posed by women with distinctive feminist
concerns in mind, also bring in a concern with Critical Thinking’s exclusion or
neglect of ways of thought of other racial or ethnic groups as well
— though the problems of "essentializing"
such groups, as if they "naturally" thought differently from white
men, has made some advocates cautious about overgeneralizing
these concerns.
Critical Pedagogy has been subject to similar, and occasionally
identical, criticisms. Claims that Critical Pedagogy is "rationalistic,"
that its purported reliance on "open dialogue" in fact masks a closed
and paternal conversation, that it excludes issues and
voices that other groups bring to educational encounters, have been asserted
with some force (Ellsworth 1989; Gore 1993). In this case, the sting of irony
is especially strong. After all, advocates of Critical Thinking would hardly
feel the accusation of being called "rationalistic" as much of an
insult; but for Critical Pedagogy, given its discourse of emancipation, to be
accused of being yet another medium of oppression is a sharp rebuke.
Are these criticisms justified? Certainly the advocates of these
traditions have tried to defend themselves against the accusation of being
"exclusionary" (Siegel 1996; Giroux 1992c). The arguments have been
long and vigorous, and we cannot recount them all here. But without dodging the
matter of taking sides, we would like to suggest a different way of looking at
the issue: Why is it that significant audiences see themselves
as excluded from each of these traditions? Are they simply misled; are they
ignorant or ill-willed; are they unwilling to listen to or accept the
reasonable case that advocates of Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy put
forth in response to their objections — or is the very existence of
disenfranchised and alienated audiences a reason for concern, a sign that
Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy do not, and perhaps cannot, achieve the
sort of breadth, inclusiveness, and universal liberation they each, in their
own way, promise? We find it impossible to avoid such a conclusion: that if the
continued and well-intended defense and rearticulation
of the reasons for a Critical Thinking or a Critical Pedagogy approach cannot
themselves succeed in persuading those who are skeptical toward them, then this
is prima facie evidence that something stands beyond them —
that their aspirations toward a universal liberation, whether a liberation of
the intellect first and foremost, or a liberation of a political consciousness
and praxis, patently do not touch all of the felt concerns and needs of certain
audiences, and that a renewed call for "more of the same," as if this
might eventually win others over, simply pushes such audiences further away.
For this reason and others we do not want to see an "erasure"
of Critical Thinking by Critical Pedagogy, or vice versa. Though each, from its
own perspective, claims sovereignty over the other, and purports to have the
more encompassing view, we prefer to regard the tension between them as
beneficial. If one values a "critical" perspective at all, then part
of that should entail critique from the most challenging points of view.
Critical Thinking needs to be questioned from the standpoint of social
accountability; it needs to be asked what difference it makes to people’s real
lives; it needs to be challenged when it becomes overly artificial and
abstract; and it needs to be interrogated about the social and institutional
features that promote or inhibit the "critical spirit," for if such
dispositions are central to Critical Thinking, then the conditions that
suppress them cannot be altered or influenced by the teaching of
epistemological rigor alone (Burbules 1992, 1995).
At the same time, Critical Pedagogy needs to be questioned from the
standpoint of Critical Thinking: about what its implicit standards of truth and
evidence are; about the extent to which inquiry, whether individual or
collective, should be unbounded by particular political presuppositions; about
how far it is and is not willing to go in seeing learners question the
authority of their teachers (when the teachers are advocating the correct
"critical" positions); about how open-ended and decentered
the process of dialogue actually is — or whether it is simply a more egalitarian
and humane way of steering students toward certain foregone conclusions.
And finally, both of these traditions need to be challenged by
perspectives that can plausibly claim that other voices and concerns are not
addressed by their promises. Claims of universalism are especially suspect in a
world of increasingly self-conscious diversity; and whether or not one adopts
the full range of "postmodern" criticisms of rationality and
modernity, it cannot be denied that these are criticisms that must be met, not
pushed off by simply reasserting the promise and hope that "you may not be
included or feel included yet, but our theoretical categories and
assumptions can indeed accommodate you without fundamental modification."
The responses to such a defense are easily predictable, and understandable.
One of the most useful critical angles toward both the Critical Thinking
and Critical Pedagogy traditions has been a poststructural
examination of how they exist within a historical context as discursive systems
with particular social effects (Cherryholmes 1988:
Gore 1993). The contemporary challenge to "metanarratives"
is sometimes misunderstood as a simple rejection of any theory at all, a total rejection on anti-epistemological grounds; but
this is not the key point. The challenge of such criticisms is to examine the
effects of metanarratives as ways of framing the
world; in this case, how claims of universality, or impartiality, or
inclusiveness, or objectivity, variously characterize different positions
within the Critical Thinking or Critical Pedagogy schools of thought. Their
very claims to sovereignty, one might say, are more revealing
about them (and from this perspective makes them more deeply akin) than
any particular positions or claims they put forth. It is partly for this reason
that we welcome their unreconciled disputes; it
reminds us of something important about their limitations.
Here, gradually, we have tried to introduce a different way of thinking
about criticality, one that stands outside the traditions of Critical Thinking
and Critical Pedagogy, without taking sides between them, but regarding each as
having a range of benefit and a range of limitation. The very tension between
them teaches us something, in a way that eliminating either or seeing one gain hegemony would ultimately dissolve. Important
feminist, multiculturalist, and generally
postmodernist rejections of both Critical Thinking and
Critical Pedagogy, which we have only been able to sketch here, are of more
recent provenance in educational discourse — but about them we would say
the same. There is something about the preservation of such sustained
differences that yields new insights, something that is lost when the tension
is erased by one perspective gaining (or claiming) dominance. But the tension
is also erased by the pursuit of a liberal "compromise"; or by the
dream of an Hegelian "synthesis" that can reconcile the opposites; or
by a Deweyan attempt to show that the apparent
dichotomy is not real; or by a presumption of incommensurability that makes the
sides decide it is no longer worth engaging one another. All of
these are ways of making the agonistic engagement go away. We prefer to think
in terms of a criticality that is procedural: What are the
conditions that give rise to critical thinking, that promote a sharp reflection
on one’s own presuppositions, that allow for a fresh rethinking of the
conventional, that fosterthinking in new
ways?
Toward an Alternate Criticality
The starting point of this alternative is reflecting upon criticality as
a practice — what is involved in actually thinking critically,
what are the conditions that tend to foster such thinking, and so on. Here we
can only draw the outlines of some of these elements, each of which merits
extended discussion.
First, criticality does involve certain abilities and skills, including
but not limited to the skills of Critical Thinking. These skills have a
definite domain of usefulness, but learning them should include not only an
appreciation for what they can do, but an appreciation for what they cannot do.
For example, methods of analysis, across different disciplines from the
scientific to the philosophic, involve removing the object of study from its
usual context in order (1) to focus study upon it and it only and (2) to be
able to parse it into component elements. This is true of all sorts of
analysis, whether the analysis of an organism, a chemical analysis, or an
analysis of a concept. There is value to doing this, but also a limit, since
removing a thing from its usual context changes it by eliminating the network
of relations that give rise to it, interact with it, and partly define it. If
any amount of wholism is true, then such decontextualizing and/or dissecting into components loses something of the original.
In addition to these logical and analytical skills, we would emphasize
that criticality also involves the ability to think outside a framework of
conventional understandings; it means to think anew, to think
differently. This view of criticality goes far beyond the preoccupation
with not being deceived. There might be worse things than being mistaken; there
may be greater dangers in being only trivially or banally "true."
Ignorance is one kind of impotence; an inability or unwillingness to move beyond
or question conventional understandings is another. This is a point that links
in some respects with Freire’s desire to move beyond
an "intransitive consciousness," and with Giroux’s
call for a "language of possibility." But even in these cases there
is a givenness to what a
"critical" understanding should look like that threatens to become
its own kind of constraint. Freire’s metaphor for
learning to read is "decodification," a
revealing word because it implies a fixed relation of symbol to meaning and
reveals an assumption usually latent within Critical Pedagogy: that the purpose
of critical thinking is to discern a world, a real world of relations,
structures, and social dynamics, that has been obscured by the distortions of
ideology. Learning to "decode" means to find the
actual, hidden meaning of things. It is a revealing choice of words, as
opposed to, say, "interpretation," which also suggests finding a
meaning, but which could also mean creating a meaning, or
seeking out several alternative meanings. This latter view could not assume
that "critical" literacy and dialogue would necessarily converge on
any single understanding of the world. Yet it is a crucial aspect of Critical
Pedagogy that dialogue does converge upon a set of understandings tied to a
capacity to act toward social change — and social change of a particular type.
Multiple, unreconciled interpretations, by contrast,
might yield other sorts of benefits — those of fecundity and
variety over those of solidarity.
Much more needs to be said about how it is possible to think anew, to
think otherwise. But what we wish to stress here is that this is a kind of
criticality, too, a breaking away from convention and cant. Part of what is
necessary for this to happen is an openness to, and a
comfort with, thinking in the midst of deeply challenging alternatives. One
obvious condition here is that such alternatives exist and that they be engaged
with sufficient respect to be considered imaginatively — even when (especially
when) they do not fit in neatly with the categories with which one is familiar.
This is why, as noted earlier, the tensions between radically
conflicting views are themselves valuable; and why the etic
perspective is as potentially informative as the emic.
Difference is a condition of criticality, when it is encountered in a context
that allows for translations or communication across differences; when it is
taken seriously, and not distanced as exotic or quaint; and when one does not
use the excuse of "incommensurability" as a reason to abandon
dialogue (Burbules & Rice 1991; Burbules 1993, forthcoming).
Rather than the simple epistemic view of "ideology" as
distortion or misrepresentation, we find it useful here to reflect on Douglas Kellner’s discussion of the "life cycle" of an
ideology (Kellner 1978). An ideology is not a simple
proposition, or even a set of propositions, whose truth value can be tested
against the world. Ideologies have the appeal and persistence that they do
because they actually do account for a set of social
experiences and concerns. No thorough approach to ideology-critique should deny
the very real appeal that ideologies hold for people — an appeal that is as
much affective as cognitive. To deny that appeal is to adopt a very simplistic
view of human naivetй, and to assume that it
will be easier to displace ideologies than it actually is. Both the Critical
Thinking and Critical Pedagogy traditions often make this mistake, we believe.
As Kellner puts it, ideologies often have an original
appeal as an "ism," as a radically new, fresh, challenging
perspective on social and political concerns. Over time, the selfsame
ideologies become "hegemonic," not because they change, but
because circumstances change while the ideology becomes more and more concerned
with its own preservation. What causes this decline into reification
and stasis is precisely the absence of reflexiveness
within ideological thought, the inability to recognize its own origins and
limitations, and the lack of opportunities for thinking differently. In the
sense we are discussing it here, criticality is the opposite of the hegemonic.
This argument suggests, then, that one important aspect of criticality
is an ability to reflect on one’s own views and assumptions as themselves
features of a particular cultural and historical formation. Such a reflection
does not automatically lead to relativism or a conclusion that all views are
equally valid; but it does make it more difficult to imagine universality or
finality for any particular set of views. Most important, it regards one’s
views as perpetually open to challenge, as choices entailing a responsibility
toward the effects of one’s arguments on others. This sort of critical
reflection is quite difficult to exercise entirely on one’s own; we are enabled
to do it through our conversations with others, especially others not like us.
Almost by definition, it is difficult to see the limitations and lacunae in our
own understandings; hence maintaining both the social conditions in which such
conversations can occur (conditions of plurality, tolerance, and respect) as
well as the personal and interpersonal capacities, and willingness, to
engage in such conversations, becomes a central dimension of criticality — it
is not simply a matter of individual abilities or dispositions. The Critical
Pedagogy tradition has stressed some of these same concerns.
Yet at a still deeper level, the work of Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler,
and others, challenges us with a further aspect of criticality: the ability to
question and doubt even our own presuppositions — the ones without which
we literally do not know how to think and act (Burbules
1995). This seemingly paradoxical sort of questioning is often part of
the process by which radically new thinking begins: by an aporia; by a doubt that we do not know (yet) how to move
beyond; by imagining what it might mean to think without some of the very
things that make our (current) thinking meaningful. Here, we have moved into a
sense of criticality well beyond the categories of both Critical Thinking and
Critical Pedagogy; to the extent that these traditions of thought and practice
have become programmatic, become "movements" of a sort, they may be
less able — and less motivated — to pull up their own roots for examination.
Their very success as influential areas of scholarship and teaching seems to
have required a certain insistence about particular ways of thinking and
acting. Can a deeper criticality be maintained under such circumstances? Or is
it threatened by the desire to win over converts?
The perspective of viewing criticality as a practice helps us to see
that criticality is a way of being as well as a way of thinking, a relation to
others as well as an intellectual capacity. To take one concrete instance, the
critical thinker must relish, or at least tolerate, the sense of moving against
the grain of convention — this isn’t separate from criticality or a
"motivation" for it; it is part of what it means to be
critical, and not everyone (even those who can master certain logical or
analytical skills) can or will occupy that position. To take another example,
in order for fallibilism to mean anything, a person
must be willing to admit to being wrong. We know that some
people possess this virtue and others do not; we also know that certain
circumstances and relations encourage the exercise of such virtues and others
do not. Once we unravel these mysteries, we will see that fostering such
virtues will involve much more than Critical Thinking instruction typically
imagines. Here Critical Pedagogy may be closer to the position we are
proposing, as it begins with the premise of social context,
the barriers that inhibit critical thought, and the need to learn
through activity.
Furthermore, as soon as one starts examining just what the conditions of
criticality are, it becomes readily apparent that it is not a purely individual
trait. It may involve some individual virtues, but only as they are formed,
expressed, and influenced in actual social circumstances. Institutions and
social relations may foster criticality or suppress it. Because criticality is
a function of collective questioning, criticism, and creativity, it is always social
in character, partly because relations to others influence the individual, and
partly because certain of these activities (particularly thinking in new ways)
arise from an interaction with challenging alternative views (Burbules 1993).
These conditions, then, of personal character, of challenging and
supportive social relations, of communicative opportunities, of contexts of
difference that present us with the possibility of thinking otherwise, are
interdependent circumstances. They are the conditions that allow the
development and exercise of criticality as we have sketched it in this essay.
They are, of course, educational conditions. Criticality is a
practice, a mark of what we do, of who we are, and not only how we think.
Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy, and their feminist, multiculturalist, and postmodern critics, apprehend parts
of this conception of criticality. Yet, we find, the deepest insights into
understanding what criticality is come from the unreconciled
tensions amongst them — because it is in remaining open to such challenges
without seeking to dissipate them that criticality reveals its value as a way
of life.
UP
to now we have used the term Socialism as though it were identical with the
teachings of Marx and Engels, founders of scientific socialism. Marx and
Engels, however, called themselves communists; it is therefore important that
at the very outset we state precisely what socialism means and what is its
distinction from communism. A proper understanding of these two terms is
imperative in the light of the confusion in usage that prevails today. For
example,
In the days of Marx
and Engels, the term Socialist had been used by Robert Owen and others and had
come to mean ideas and plans for a new society put forth by declassed elements
of the upper classes. These socialists were utopians who, regardless of their
specific plans, had certain basic characteristics in common. According to them,
socialism consisted of a grand plan conceived in the brain of the utopian
genius. The plan was to be realized by means of peaceful, rational discussion.
All the utopians were firm believers in the power of reason to change the
world, and all they wanted was the opportunity to persuade others of the
justice and reasonableness of their position. All their plans were static,
completed blueprints, eternal and immutable.(*1) None
of them understood the meaning of history or of evolution.
None of these
dreamers relied upon the working class. They had no conception of the class
struggle, but rather appealed to the wealthy to help them to ameliorate the lot
of the poor, either, as Robert Owen, for philanthropic reasons, or, as
Saint-Simon and Fourier, as a reaction from the terror of the French
Revolution. None of these men conceived of the new social order as being a
product of violence. They hated the insurrections of the mob and rabble led by
communists. The movement was to be led entirely from the top and not from the
bottom.
All of these people
were extremely critical of the capitalist order, being opposed to competition, and wanting to terminate the privileges of the
industrialists. Against all forms of anarchy and chaos, the utopians sought
refuge from the existing interminable clash to secure eternal harmony within
society, harmony of the social order with nature. To usher in the new utopia,
they worked out schemes of mutual co-operation and mutual aid of a more or less
authoritarian nature. These aspects of the utopians gave them the name
Socialists. (*2)
The plans of social
inventors like Owens, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and others, could easily have
become the ideology of reactionary collectivists, and, indeed, they do form the
prototypes of the plans of twentieth century fascism. However, in those days,
capitalism had no need of such schemes. The industrialists were thinking, not
of crushing the labor movement, but of using the poor for their own political
advantage and bringing peace and order to society not by authoritarian utopias
but by the anarchy of capitalism. Thus the critical doctrines of the utopians
could be taken up only by the victims of capitalism who gave to them certain
interpretations which made them the precursors of scientific socialism.
It was imperative
that Marx and Engels, who proceeded in an entirely different manner, should
separate themselves from this utopian planfulness. If
the utopians called themselves Socialists, Marx and Engels called themselves
Communists and put out their Communist Manifesto, forming their Communist
League, etc. Marx and Engels created a movement and relied upon the working
class to carry forward the traditions of the peasant war, of the Paris Commune
in the French Revolution, and of Baboeuf and the
other communists. Insurrection, class struggle, the proletariat, these were the
factors of Marxist political theory, rather than any pale philanthropic and
timid scheme of "harmony."
Before Marxism
arises, the disciples of Robert Owen, Fourier, Saint- Simon, and such elements,
color the movements of the working class. The adherents of Saint-Simon, for
example, were against exploitation, against private property, and against
capitalism, as then extant. They favored a tax on land and producers'
co-operatives. The Saint-Simonians always thought of
society with a capital "S" and regarded all the members of the nation
as included in one collective organization. Thus it is that the terms
"Socialism" and "Social Democracy" came to be taken over by
the workers who fought many battles under this name.
The Marxist could
not ignore this situation and when, in
Of course, the fact
that the name Socialism was chosen to designate the vague gropings
of the proletariat in itself showed how immature and confused the working class
was. Nevertheless, as Marx himself had declared, the workers had to learn from
their own experiences; they would not accept learned dissertations imposed upon
them by some intellectual. It was necessary for Marx to penetrate that
movement, to work within it, and to nurture there the seeds of Marxism that
would eventually win over the labor elements to scientific socialism.
Thus it was that by
the '60's of the last century, Marx was willing to accept the term Socialism,
since it no longer represented the old blueprint plans of the utopian, and
Friedrich Engels could write his book, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.
After the death of
Marx and with the rise of the Second International, the term Socialism took
complete possession of the field and became synonymous with communism. This was
all the easier since socialism had always been understood as a future
transition stage of society leading to communism, as the first or lower stage
of communism. However, it soon became plain that the abandonment of the term
"Communism" had in reality covered the abandonment of the
revolutionary class struggle. After the debacle of the World War, the
revolutionary socialists split away from the others, under Lenin, and retook
the name Communist.
Thus we see that,
even when used exactly, the term Socialism can have three distinct meanings.
First, it can mean a future system of society characterized, as described by
Marx, by the fact that capitalism, with its markets, commodities, values,
prices, exchange, surplus value, capital, money, competition, etc., is no more;
instead, there is a conscious, planful society where
production is for use on such an enormously improved technical plane that there
will be plenty for all. This society will be a stage between capitalism and
communism and will retain some remnants of the former in the mental make-up of
the individual. The State, however, will have withered away, together with
religion, recognized as the opium of the people. Socialism will gradually give
way to communism.
Another meaning of
the term Socialism has to do with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat that
initiates socialism. The Soviet Union, for example, is legitimately called the
"Socialist" Republic, not because the stage of society known as
socialism exists in Russia, but rather because the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat existing in Russia has abolished to a very considerable extent
private ownership of the means of production and has laid the basis for the extinction
of capitalism, leading to socialism. This was the usage of Lenin. Under Stalin,
the theory has been stretched to mean that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
itself is socialism, that socialism is compatible with an army, with a State,
with class struggles, with markets, wages, etc. We shall take this up later. It
is well, however, to note that under Lenin, socialism could mean not only a
future state of society as laid down by Marx, but also could be a designation
of a transition regime --- Dictatorship of the Proletariat-leading to
socialism.
The third meaning
of the term Socialism is to signify the program of the Socialist parties as
distinct from that of the Communist. In short, here socialism is opposed to
communism. In the present chapter we shall use socialism in this last sense of
the term, namely, to mean the program and practice of the Socialist parties as
separate from and in conflict with those of the Communist.
It is true that the
Socialist parties agree with the Communist that socialism, as a stage of
society, is the end of their striving. It is also true that very often the
Socialist parties fervidly maintain their adherence to the doctrines of Marx,
claiming only to interpret them in another direction. In fact, the literary
heirs of Marx and Engels, like Karl Kautsky, Eduard
Bernstein, and others, became leaders, not of a "Communist" movement
but of the "Socialists." Today, however, what we must stress is not
the agreement in ultimate goal that the socialists have in common with the
communists, but rather the struggles between them that have led to the breaking
up of the labor movement and to tremendous convulsions all over the world.
If at present we
see some signs of the mitigation of these splits and a tendency for socialists
and communists to come together, it is only because the blows of fascism have
compelled them to unite on the one hand, while, on the other, the large
Communist parties connected with Russia have so degenerated towards the
socialist position as practically to be indistinguishable from their erstwhile
enemies. We must not, however, confuse "united front" with
"unity" and the fact that the socialists and communists are willing
to unite on a common field of action does not necessarily mean that they will
not fight each other to the death under other circumstances.
The earliest of the
utopians of the nineteenth century from the point of view of influence was
Saint-Simon, a French nobleman who, at an early age, had volunteered to fight
in the American Revolution, but had later become frightened by the effects of
the French Revolution. To Saint-Simon,"Progress
is achieved in one of two ways, by revolution or dictatorship, and dictatorship
was preferable to revolution." (*3) Revolution was an anachronism that
would become unnecessary were society changed. Denouncing the sovereignty of
the people, Saint-Simon went so far as to propose an alliance between the
Bourbons and the industrial classes in order to achieve his plan for preventing
revolution; he asked the King to declare himself the chief of the kingdom and
to adopt his plan by royal ordinance. Thus the plans of Saint-Simon were
anti-revolutionary and anti-democratic from the very beginning.
What Saint-Simon
desired was an industrial State directed by modern science. (*4)
"Saint-Simon's creed can best be described as 'industrialism' plus a
slight admixture of Socialism. . . ." (*5) He advocated the abolition of
the landed idle class and the limitation of society to two classes only, the
learned and the industrial. (*6) Standing armies and war should be abolished.
(*7) The good of society was attained by the satisfaction of its physical and
moral wants. The object of government was to apply knowledge and wealth to that
end. To Saint-Simon, liberty was not an end or even a means to an end. It was a
result, the result of man's progressive mastery of nature; man freed himself
through society. Tremendously impressed by the power of industry, Saint-Simon
believed it was necessary to harness industry and its technical progress to the
social order to obtain a better social system. Thus, in his plans there were to
be no parasites; his was to be a regime where industry dominated.
Saint-Simon
invented an industrial parliament of three chambers, the first, a chamber of
invention; the second, of examination; the third, of execution. The First
Chamber was to have three hundred engineers, poets, scholars, musicians, and
such, of whom two hundred were to be engineers. This body would initiate all
legislation. The Second Chamber was also to contain three hundred, of which one
hundred were to be mathematical physicists, one hundred metaphysicians, and one
hundred physicians. This Chamber was to examine the laws. The Third Chamber was
to be composed of the "captains of industry," a term which
Saint-Simon was the first to coin. This body alone was to execute the laws.
Thus, the industrialist was to have the power of administration entirely in his
hands.
Labor was the
highest duty of a citizen and only the worker could govern society.
Saint-Simon, however, included the industrialist as part of labor and drew no
distinction between him and his employed worker. Indeed, at this time in
The opinions of
Saint-Simon, so violently a reaction against the anarchical Liberalism of the
French Revolution, easily are revealed as merely a rationalization of the
system of French affairs which Napoleon attempted to develop. We have here, as
under Napoleon, great praise for industry, a theory of government of talents,
an idealization of work without talk, a theory of the necessity of religion and
of the ubiquity of the government, a denunciation of the old regime and a
criticism of laissez faire Liberalism, with control in the hands of the
dictator, the agent of industry. Some of these plans of Saint-Simon are even
today being taken over by fascist groups in
If Saint-Simon
became a respectable figure in the eyes of the workers, it was not so much
because of his theories, but rather owing to the work of his disciples, the
Saint-Simonians, who, made up of petty-bourgeois
elements, heavily stressed their critique of anarchical industrial society and
thus played into the hands of working-class and middle-class elements who were
moving in a progressive and radical direction. As we have seen, Saint- Simon
had great influence over Auguste Comte, founder of
sociology, and the Saint-Simonians were able to
influence some of the intellectuals on the continent and in England, especially
John Stuart Mill and Carlyle.
Later to achieve
recognition was the work of Charles Fourier. One may say that Fourier and
Saint-Simon together constitute one whole, each being regarded as the
complement of the other. "Saint-Simonism
represented the principle of authority, of centralization; while Fourier made
all possible provision for local and individual freedom. With Saint- Simonism the State is the starting point, the normal and
dominant power; in Fourier the like position is held by a local body
corresponding to the commune, which he called the phalange. (*8)
Fourier's starting
point in his criticism of the present order of things was not the injustice of
the distribution of social wealth, or the suffering of the poor, but rather the
anarchic wastefulness of modern production and the repellent condition of
labor. Fourier does not address himself to the sentiments of man, but to their
material interests. "His battle-cry is not 'justice,' but 'order,' and the
general prosperity and happiness of mankind is but an incident of the universal
harmony of his system, not its primal aim." (*9) As
Under Fourier's
true order of society there would be established universal wealth and
prosperity, universal knowledge and intelligence, attractive industry,
permanent peace and social concord, unity of all interests, universal
co-operation and association, practical liberty in all relations, social
equality of the race, universal health and vigor, passional
harmony and social unity. (*11) Fourier stressed above all two important
principles: first, industrial activity could be made really attractive;
secondly, the solidarity of the human race. Fourier, like most Frenchmen,
wanted social science to be a social science.
Fourier obtained
his principles of harmony from a grand study supposedly embodying the entire
universe. His theory included four movements, social, animal, organic, and
material, and in all of these different worlds one law prevailed, the law of
attraction, which is the idea of God. (*12) "God, in requiring of any of
his creatures the performance of a work or function, employs no other lever or
agent than Attraction; he never resorts to coercion, constraint or violence in
any form; he governs the Universe by this power alone; he impels all beings to fulfil their Destiny from the pleasure, the charm, the
delight, he connects with it, and not from fear of pain or punishment."
(*13)
Far more than
Saint-Simon, Fourier attempted to work out the laws of evolution, and insisted
that even under the Harmonic Order there would still be differences of opinion,
contrasts of character and personal antipathies, the abolition of which would
destroy the very spice of life. These individual clashes, far from leading to
discord, would stimulate a competition for the mutual good. However, here
again, thanks to the utopian colonies of his disciples and to his own penchant
for meticulously closed systems, what remains of Fourierism
is not a theory of evolution but some schematic blue-print in which Fourier
predicts that in due time wild animals will associate with man as soon as man
overcomes his vices, that the light from the Aurora Borealis will be
transformed into dew that will make the North Pole have the climate of sunny
Italy and the oceans taste like lemonade. (*14)
According to
Fourier, the trouble with industry was that it was neither attractive nor
effective. It was his task to lay down a theory of how to make industry
attractive and to secure a regime of harmony. To accomplish this, industry must
be organized on the basis of a study of human passions. All must be productive
laborers, organized in Commune co-operatives where the individual can develop
freely. The Communes are to have local autonomy. The State is to be reduced to
nothing.
By no means was
Fourier a communist. He was vehemently opposed to the schemes of Robert Owen.
In his organized Commune known as the Phalanx, no community of property
existed; private capital was retained, as well as the right of inheritance. All
those within the Phalanx were to labor and, of the proceeds of their labor,
five-twelfths were to go to the laborer, four-twelfths to capital, and three-twelfths
to the talented ones (management), of whom, no doubt, Fourier was to be the
leader. (*15) Thus, capital was to be made a permanent institution, but in such
a guise as to make Fourier's new industrialism a weapon against red revolution.
While the Saint-Simonians believed in nationalization
of property, the Fourierists were associationists,
more individualistic in character, and insisting that the individual should not
be merged in the mass but must be safeguarded by means of small autonomous
groups. Federation would be entirely voluntary; all unity would be prompted
from within rather than imposed from without.
From one angle,
Fourier was thus connected with Proudhon. From another angle, Fourier became a
starting point for the theories of those who later were to espouse guild
socialism. While Saint Simon thought in terms of national economy, Fourier
thought in terms of a garden city where, with his Phalanstery
carefully ordered and regulated, (*16) the distinction between industry and
agriculture was to be wiped out and within the city there was to be an intimate
correlation of both. Fourier, therefore, is a reaction against the heaped up
monuments of stone that make up a modern city; as he feared revolution, so did
he fear
The features of
Fourier's utopia appealed mightily to reformers in
From early times,
colonists had come to
In the early
nineteenth century, those addicted to utopian plans of such a nature were
mostly Germans and later, French. In the 1820'S, utopianism took the form of
adherence to the views of Robert Owen, who came to this country to establish
his utopian colonies and had great influence here, being invited several times
to speak privately before the members of the Congress of the United States, the
President, and other important officials. Upon the failure of Owenism, the utopian reformers, 1840-1850, eagerly went
towards Fourierism, yielding, from 1848 on, to the
utopian plans of Cabet.
The Fourierists were able to win a number of talented admirers.
(*19) In 1814,
The third utopian
of importance in the early nineteenth century was Robert Owen, whose chief
theoretical contribution was the plan for the formation of producers'
co-operatives taking in all the industries of a locality organized in a
thoroughly centralized communist manner. The vital principle of the new
industrialism must be co-operation; competition was to be no more.
"In
this above all else Owen's significance lies. It is the idea that unifies all his varied
activities. Whether he is pleading for a Factory Act to protect the helpless
servants of the new machines, or for a universal system of liberating
education, or for trade unions, or for his own scheme of co-operative
communities, the dominant idea in his mind is the need for the social control of
the new productive power. (*21)
Unlike Fourier and
Saint-Simon, Robert Owen did not represent a reaction from the violence of the
French Revolution as such. His opinion was that politics wasn't of any great
importance, since it was but a result of economic relations. The thing to do
was to change the economic relations and the social environment. A typical
Englishman, Owen believed that man owed his character entirely to social environment and that, if this could be changed,
man could be entirely transformed. (*22)
The fundamental
principles that Owen espoused could be reduced to five: (1) that man was a
product of environment; (2) that feelings and convictions were independent of
our will; (3) that feelings produced the motive to action (will); (4) that no
two humans were ever similar exactly; (5) that every normal individual can be
raised or lowered by social influence. (*23) In line with these principles,
Owen took an aggressively anti-religionist position.
Robert Owen spent
his life attempting to carry out his ideas. A wealthy manufacturer, he was able
to form a model village, to pose as a moral reformer, philosopher and uplifter of society. He paid great attention to infant
schools and to the education of the workmen at a time when such education was woefully
lacking. His idea was, "Happiness cannot be isolated among a few human
beings." (*24) He reduced the hours of labor and introduced his own
factory legislation to improve working conditions.
All the while, Owen
was proving that these reforms only brought more profit to him, that
philanthropy paid handsomely. And, indeed, "Although the wages given to
the workmen were lower than were paid elsewhere, it caused no discontent among
the people, and New Lanark escaped the disturbances and protracted strikes so
general among cotton-spinners in
Robert Owen,
however, knew exactly from whence his large wealth came. He stated
emphatically: "It is a common mistake arising from the confusion of ideas
inseparable from the present erroneous system of society, to believe that the
rich provide for the poor and working classes; while in fact the poor and
working classes create all the wealth which the rich possess .... The rich ... actually
prevent them from creating a supply of wealth that would be sufficient to
preclude all from becoming poor ...." (*26)
Owen was no
disciple of Malthus. The poor need not always be with us; labor could always
produce a surplus. Owen never tired of showing the contrast between rich and
poor and of arguing for a system where all would get the produce of their labor
and form communities to this end. The workers produced forty times as much as
before and yet they were in terrible circumstances. (*27) In his report on the
causes of poverty, made in 1817, Owen pointed to the effects of the
introduction of machinery in this regard and urged that employment be found for
those thrown out of work by the introduction of a system whereby each city
would provide a farm and factory for employment of the poor. In his report he
actually went to the extent of working out the minute details of his projected
scheme of Parallelograms. In a later work he expanded his ideas. Society was to
be divided into four classes: (1) paupers, to be taken care of as above; (2)
workmen; (3) small proprietors; (4) idlers with big capital. The last group was
to hire workmen under conditions whereby the workers would control. Each
workman was to work in comfort for seven years, then to be given one hundred
pounds and placed in class three --- or he could work five years more and be
given two hundred pounds.
With Owen the
problem was not production but proper distribution of wealth. Sturdy advocate
of co-operation, completely refusing to recognize the worth of the State, and
contemptuous of politics, Robert Owen terminated his activities in
However, the idea
of co-operation did not disappear, and, after the Reform Bill of 1832, which
failed to enfranchise them, groups of workers in
Besides Robert
Owen, who was above all a practical philanthropist and a dreamer who had
pictured that he could universalize under the capitalist system the social
conditions which he had been able to construct in his
The fundamental
principle of Ricardo's work was that the exchangeable value of commodities, or
their relative worth as compared with each other, depends exclusively on the
quantities of labor necessary to produce them and bring them to market. Adam
Smith had done this before but had assumed that after rent had been established
and capital accumulated, values fluctuated according to variations of rent and
wages. Ricardo showed this to be wrong both in regard to rent and in regard to
wages. To Ricardo it was not true that if wages rose prices had to rise, as
Adam Smith believed, and "There can be no rise in the value of labour without a fall of profits." (*30) Naturally,
such views could be taken up by workingmen.
William Thompson,
(*31) an economist, was interested not in production, but in the distribution
of wealth to insure the greatest happiness to the greatest number. Like
Bentham, he began to study the laws of happiness and came to the conclusion
that, as all men are susceptible to equal amounts of happiness,
only full equality would lead to justice. Since all men are naturally nearly
equal and all wealth is the product of labor, great wealth must come from
robbery. The rich were, therefore, robbers.
To Thompson, three
different systems of industrial organization were possible: (1) the present
method of theft and frauds, where wealth is for the few and is taken from the
many; (2) the system of "security" where each is to have the whole
produce of labor; and (3) a system of "equality" which may be
considered as flowing from the principle of utility. Thompson himself favored
the third, trying to follow two masters, both Bentham and Robert Owen, although
he agreed with Owen's co-operatives.
Thompson took his
stand against the Malthusian restriction of population. He exposed the Corn
Repeal laws agitation as purely capitalistic, and took the side of labor.
Capital was unproductive; only labor created value. The worker was correct in
joining unions, but the weapon of the partial strike was extremely limited and
could get the worker nowhere.
John Gray (*32)
agreed with Thompson that the foundation of all property is labor. Gray's
method was to study the distribution of wealth in a given society, estimating
the total wealth and discovering what portion each class got. To do this, Gray
had to analyze class relations to find out which were productive and what
proportion of the wealth each section received.
Gray thought only
those who worked by manual labor and produced material wealth were productive,
though some producers were useless --- those producing luxury articles-while
some non-producers were engaged in useful services. "The productive class,
Gray concluded, received only a trifle more than one-fifth of their produce,
while the remaining four-fifths were absorbed by landlords and
capitalists." (*33)
Gray denounced the
occupations of one-third of the population as useless. The very name soldier
was a disgrace to human nature. (*34) Rent was robbery; lawyers were useless;
doctors would pass away under a new social order.
Gray's great
contribution was to show that production is restricted and confined by
competition and exchange. Abolish competition and exchange and there would be
no limit to production. He denied the right of an individual to own land, since
all have an equal right to develop; thus he stood for land nationalization as
well as for a system of small farms. This economist believed in co-operatives,
but in exchange and not in production. He wanted a national bank with paper
notes based on goods.
Gray sums up his
argument as follows: "We have endeavored to show by whom wealth is
created, and by whom it is consumed. We have endeavored to show that it is from
human labor that every description of wealth proceeds; that the productive
classes DO NOW support, not only themselves, but every unproductive member of
society; that they only are productive members of society who apply their own
hands either to the cultivation of the earth itself, or to the preparing or
appropriating the produce of the earth to the uses of life; . . .
"We have
endeavored to show that the real income of the country, which consists in the
quantity of wealth annually created by the labour of
the people, is taken from its producers, chiefly, by the rent of land, by the
rent of houses, by the interest of money, and by the profit obtained by persons
who buy their labour from them at one price, and sell
it at another; that these immense taxes of rent, interest and profits on labour, must even continue while the system of individual
competition stands; that in the new communities all would be productive members
of society; excepting only the persons absolutely required in occupations, who
would also devote their time and talents to the general good. . . ." (*35)
Gray's conclusions
should have led him ultimately to communism, but neither Gray nor Thompson went
that far. Both wanted the laborer to receive the full product of his labor, but
both insisted that the laborer could do as he pleased with this product and
could start his own enterprise by himself. This could lead only to
individualism again. In this way, the communistic theories of Thompson and Gray
were stultified by the limitations of their times.
Starting from an
entirely different premise, Thomas Hodgskin argued
that labor was the source of all wealth, that all exchangeable value is
produced by labor. (*36) Landlords and capitalists produce nothing. Capital is
not stored-up labor as others believe; even wages are the produce of labor
which is entitled to everything it produces. Instead of arriving at communism,
however, Hodgskin embraced the theory of laissez
faire which to him represented a theory of the laws of the harmony of nature.
(*37) Thus Hodgskin was very close to the utilitarian
and philosophic Radical school. He denounced Ricardo as being wholly interested
in profits, but at the same time he also condemned the theory that capital and labor
have contrary interests, believing that both capital and wages could be
increased simultaneously. He wanted the master manufacturers to be paid as
laborers for the value of their services in the factory, although he was
opposed, on the basis of natural rights, to the capitalists receiving an income
from their property holdings.
Hodgskin was jealous of governmental powers which checked the
individual and thus became opposed to the national system of education by
government, favoring the creation of private mechanics institutes instead.
Likewise, he was opposed to parliamentary regulation of factory laws, to the
taxation of alcohol, and to any interference in the relations of capital and
labor. Thus to Hodgskin, socialism was a reaction
from and not a correction of the errors of capitalism, and, like some of the
Anarchists of the day, his real thesis was to perpetuate true competition by
depriving property holders of their privileges.
If we say that Hodgskin belongs to the economic
To John Francis
Bray, the root of all social wrong was the institution of property as it then
existed. (*38) Political equality unaccompanied by economic equality was
impossible, as would soon be demonstrated in the evolution of
Like Owen and
Thompson, Bray declared that man is a creature of circumstances which he cannot
change and which he is forced to obey. All men are equal and have the duties of
equal labor and the rights of equal wealth and social ownership of land. Since
men are more or less equal in labor, wages should be more or less equal.
Bray realized
vaguely that the workers were exploited, although he could not state the fact
clearly, implying rather that the worker is cheated in the process of exchange.
He did exclaim, however, that the worker gives the employer six days labor for
an equivalent worth four days labor, and that all gain is extracted from the
productive classes. The gain of the capitalist is the loss of the workman.
(*39)
Bray characterized
the present system as follows: "Under the present social system, the whole
of the working class is dependent upon the capitalist or employer for the means
of labour; and where one class by its position in
society, is thus dependent upon another class for the MEANS of LABOUR, it is
dependent likewise for the MEANS OF LIFE . . . ." (*40) He recommended
that all should labor, all exchanges should be equal.
The only possible
remedy was the abolition of the private ownership of wealth and of the right of
inheritance. The productive class should take over the State and issue paper
money in terms of labor to buy out the capitalist. Since money and banking were
the great weapons of the capitalists, these were to be replaced by labor notes.
"Society was
to undertake the physical, intellectual, and moral education of all children,
leaving to parents as individuals only the 'caressing of parental love."'
(*41) Women were to be freed from economic dependence and political
inferiority; thus, like William Thompson and John Stuart Mill, who had also
evoked great interest in the woman question, Bray became a champion for the
development of womanhood. He also stood for a complete system of social
insurance and protection of labor.
All of these Ricardian socialists with their theories of value as labor
were limited by the defects of utopians generally. First, as a rule they were
unable to take an historical perspective. Second, they were rationalists,
believing in the power of peaceful persuasion to move the world. Third, they
had no connection with the labor movement, but were intellectual elements of
the bourgeoisie, keen enough to begin to infer what was wrong with the world
and to draw radical conclusions from orthodox, classical, economic theory.
None the less, they
foreshadowed the works of Marx and Engels and reflected the claims and
pretensions of the labor movement then clamorously arising in Chartist
agitations and in the revolutions of
At this time, other
groups also appeared to criticize the industrial system and to espouse the
cause of the under-dog. A Christian Socialist movement arose in
The conditions
which were arising prior to 1848 were such as to make inevitable expressions
leading to the conclusions later embodied by Marx. It would be well to pause to
describe briefly the conditions of the time as they affected the working class,
conditions normally bad, made infinitely worse by the periodic cyclical crises
of overproduction and unemployment which were then setting. in
and which found the worker completely unprotected.
In
In
The figures of the
criminal rates also are illustrative of the situation. Whereas the population
of
The situation in
the
As for working
conditions, we cite the following: "The length of a day's labor varied
from twelve to fifteen hours.... The regulations at
In 1849, social
conditions were investigated by the City of
Under such
circumstances, it was no wonder that, especially within the ranks of labor,
opinions adumbrating those of Marx appeared everywhere. Among the Chartists,
for example, Ernest Jones declared: "Money-capital did not create labor,
but labor created money-capital; machinery did not create work, but work
created machinery. It therefore follows that labour
is, by its own nature the sovereign power, and that it owes no allegiance,
gratitude or subjection to capital." (*48)
Another leader, J. Brontierre O'Brien,,did
much to popularize the phrase "wage slavery." He translated the work
of Buonarotti on the Baboeuf ,movement in the
French Revolution, and thus helped to bring the attention of the English
workman to the early French Communist movement. Even in
Among the
Chartists, G. J. Harnay could declare, "As
regards the workingman exterminating other 'classes, the answer is easy. Other
classes have no right to exist. To prepare the way for the absolute supremacy
of the working classes ... preparatory to the abolition of the system of classes, is the mission of the Red Republican." (*50)
One writer could
actually call for an industrial republic similar to Soviets. "Have the
shoemakers a representative in the House of Commons? There are 133,000
shoemakers in the country, and these, with their wives and families, make
upwards of half a million of human beings in this country, all living by
shoemaking. Yet not one representative have
they....." (*51)
Thus we may
conclude that the writings of the scientific socialists were fully the product
of their times, the result of sharp economic contradictions and crises, of
violent political revolutions. Had Marx and Engels not lived, there is no doubt
that other writers would have elaborated the same points of view.
After the
Revolution of 1830, repressive measures were increased by the reactionary
forces in control of
The League of the
Just did not content itself with abstract propaganda, but began secretly, in
It was this group
that later was forced to emigrate to
At this point we do
not wish to analyze the activity of the Communist League, which we leave for
another chapter. Suffice it to say that the League played an important role in
the political turmoils and revolutions of 1848.
Through the Communist League, Marx and Engels were induced to write their
remarkable Communist Manifesto which, translated into every European language,
became a sort of bible of the working class. Thus the Communist League prepared
the way for the international action of the workers which was first realized on
a large scale in the First International formed in 1864.
The Communist
League was a strictly communist organization with a definite philosophy,
communist procedure, trained cadres. The First
International was an entirely different body.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
A. Principal:
.The upbringing of children - http://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/child.htm
2.http://www.thewaytotruth.org/pearls/upbringing.html
3.Principles of Upbringing children - http://www.al-islam.org/upbringing/
4.Moral Education - http://libr.org/isc/issues/ISC23/B8%20Susan%20Devine.pdf
5.BERKOWITZ, MARVIN W., and OSER, FRITZ, eds. 1985. Moral Education: Theory and
Application.
6.Moral Issues - http://www.hi-ho.ne.jp/taku77/
7.Education -
http://www.educativ.info/edu/dezvedue.html