Philip Wexler

Body and Soul: sources of social change and strategies of education

In the past decade, the United States has experienced a deepening economic crisis and a decline in the quality of life (Castells, 1980). The search for security in material reward and in cultural meanings which offer consolation for material deprivation and uncertainty speeds up and appears in a caricatured and bifurcated form. Careerism in work and fundamentalism in belief are the most evident expressions of the frantic fashion in which individuals try to solve dilemmas posed by the current character of social change. The social theory of education, despite its claim of detachment as science or critique, is an integral part of these social and cultural changes. The liberal or progressive view of faith in education as the basis of social reform developed during an earlier period of social expansion and belief in a democratic culture (Welter, 1962; Wexler, 1976). The current view of education as cultural reproduction began as a critique of the liberal social theory of education. Cultural reproduction theory belongs to a later time, when commitment to a common culture has become less tenable as a result of the salience of social fragmentation and class division. The most insightful intellectuals see prevailing social arrangements and patterns of culture as partial, deceptive, and socially oppressive. Withdrawal of faith in education is an aspect of this more general removal of commitment from a system of symbolic interpretation that has lost its claim to universality and its capacity to compensate for socioeconomic deprivation with cultural consolation. Cultural meanings, and the institutions through which they are are transmitted, are identified with social domination. The intellectual work of this period is the work of the critique of culture as ideology, and the demonstration of ways in which the acceptance of ideology in general, and through schooling in particular, blocks the realisation of the interests and needs of deprived, and potentially ascendant, social groups (Young, 1971; Brown, 1973; Bourdieu, 1977; Apple, 1979a). This disenchantment is connected to an affirmation, among intellectuals, of the endogenous cultures of the oppressed as more authentic and socially accurate than the official culture. It is also marked by a withdrawal of faith in cultural institutions which

And now for a little deconstruction: A response to Kurtzman

Howard Kurtzman’s paper on psychology and deconstruction is a well-written, intelligent, though inordinately partial, introduction to post-structuralist thought for psychologists. It is an important and valuable paper because it places psychological theory and research within the larger discourse of a prominent strand of contemporary social thought. Its explicit aims are to free psychological theory from metaphysics and to show that underneath the cybernetic structuralism of the current psychology of mind cognitivism is the same field of multiple and unstable differences by which post-structuralism differentiates itself from structuralism. Kurtzman does not, however, realize the disruptive, cutting potential of poststructuralism, of deconstruction as a critical discursive practice that interrupts, dereifies, and disperses disciplinary knowledges like “psychology.” The discursive practice of post-structuralism is neither simply an abstract anti-metaphysical argument nor a conceptual clarification and addition to the disciplinary knowledges of the human sciences. Rather, it is discourse as post-modern weaponry, poised to pulverize the pretensions of only apparently natural objects, the essential centers of concepts and things, so-called human “being” (especially liberal Humanism’s abstract “Man”) and lasting and transcendent ideals, even of capital “H” History itself. Derrida’s decentering of Saussure’s structuralism in favor of the free play of chains of signifiers is not, as the happy consciousness of the liberal human sciences would, with Kurtzman, like to pretend, a disinterested invitation to a doit-yourself language game. Rather, it is destructive, aiming to knock out any selfcongratulatory respite in the cognitive confidence of the Enlightenment and to pull up the ontological anchors of a restful metaphysics of presence. For Derrida, “difference” indicates not just an empirical observation that meaning is made in an indeterminate dynamic system of relational differences among signs. Kurtzman does see the dynamic relationism of post-structuralism, but not the significatory historicity that difference-as-deferral implies. As Derrida (1982) notes “Language, or any code . . . is constituted ‘historically’ as a weave of differences” (p. 12).

Teaching in Context: From Socialization to Redemption

I don’t know how anyone can begin with the question of teaching. It is so profound a question that it must be an end point, a destination that one arrives at from somewhere else.

Book Reviews: Values and Politics Without Society: Value Conflicts and Curriculum IssuesJon Schaffarzick and Gary Sykes, EditorsThe Politics of the School CurriculumDenis Lawton

Six of the nine chapters in the Schaffarzick and Sykes volume are papers commissioned by a Curriculum Development Task Force established by the National Council on Educational Research of the National Institute of Education. The first and last chapters are essays by each of the editors, and one chapter is a partial report of a 1976 national conference on curriculum, which, along with regional public meetings, interviews with a small sample of organizational representatives, and the mailing of commissioned Guides for Public Discussion, constituted the work of the national Curriculum Development Task Force.