The Pedagogy of the Oppressor in 2010: Reflections on George Kent

The peace educator dreams of a class full of students who, after a flicker of insight, stand up and rush to the streets.  However, as anyone involved in the struggle for peace knows, dreams are seldom reflected in reality.  What is much more common is for students to show that they have understood what they have learned, even state their agreement with it, and then go about their lives as if nothing has changed.

In 1977, George Kent published “Peace Education: Pedagogy in the Middle Class,” in the journal Peace and Change. [i] His primary concern should sound familiar to anyone teaching courses related to peace and social justice.  He noted that the predominant approach in these classes was to try to convince students that they lived in a system where many people are oppressed, including in most cases the students themselves.  However, while students would easily agree about the existence of oppression, they would strongly resist defining themselves as oppressed.   While the traditional approach was to simply teach harder, Kent proposed an alternative interpretation:

"Perhaps the students are not persuaded because in fact they are not oppressed…If social structure is understood in terms of the number and quality of the alternatives it presents to the individual, then young university students must be close to being in the best of all possible worlds."

This insight leads Kent to a different approach. If the students are highly privileged, they are likely to have access to the kinds of lives and careers that contribute to oppression; they are “potential oppressors.” The primary question, then, is what type of education will help steer these students away from being oppressors and “to help end the structure of dominance.”

Kent discusses the work by Paolo Freire[ii] and concludes that we have a good idea how to teach “the oppressed,” but that what we need is a pedagogy of the oppressor. Most importantly, it is easy to understand the interest in underdogs in liberation, but how do you motivate top dogs to change a system that benefits them? One approach is to focus on the ways that a top dog could be considered an underdog, but ultimately this just encourages the students’ original perspectives. If I really am an underdog, and I have all this opportunity, how bad can it be?

Instead, Kent proposes that we focus on the fact that a dominating system oppresses and dehumanizes people at all levels of society, but in different ways. Instead of viewing society as being built on the oppression of one group by another, the focus is on the way the system itself oppresses both. Liberation is also reframed from the traditional view where liberation occurs through “converting or slaying the oppressors” (38) to one where everyone becomes liberated from the oppressive situation.

I have just finished my second time teaching an undergraduate peace studies course for New Century College at George Mason University. Even though I have also taught a few other social justice oriented courses, I do not have the experience that Kent or other peace educators bring to their discussions, but I am also facing the same question: how can we use undergraduate education to promote peace and to get students to change their relationship with the world? From my limited experience, I have noticed a shift in the perspectives and abilities of students to engage with peace education.

When Kent refers to exposing the student to their own role as an oppressor, he is primarily focusing on the students’ potential participation in structural violence.[iii] He is concerned that they will “take up jobs, a life style, and consumption habits which can only be enjoyed at the expense other people who will, as a result, be deprived of the opportunity to live their lives up to their own full potential” (37). The implication here is that making students aware of their role in structural violence is the focus of the pedagogy of the middle class.

However, in my experience students today do not have difficulty grasping the idea of structural violence or the ways that it affects their life. Usually, they will say, “Oh, I know about that, we just haven’t called it ‘violence’ before.” Most of the undergraduates I see have already taken a class that either spells out systemic discrimination or oppression (usually based around race or gender) or at least one from a conservation or ecological perspective that relates their behavior to dire consequences. In fact, one of the benefits of the growth of the environmental curriculum in K-12 and undergraduate education is that students are well-exposed to the idea that their personal decisions have consequences beyond what is immediately evident. Extending that idea from the potential for harming the earth to the potential for harming other people is simpler than having to build the infrastructure of understanding for an appraisal of oppression.

In 1977, Kent could claim, “These students may not be aware of the consequences, and there may be no malice,” but I am not convinced this is an accurate description anymore. While students may not be able to explain these consequences in the terms we use in peace education, they are aware that all of their actions are, in some sense, political. However, they still choose to endorse a system that perpetuates direct and structural violence. Why is this? They still operate within the systems of cultural violence that rationalize and support the existing system(s) of oppression.

The focus in peace and social justice courses on exposing structural violence can be taken too far. Not that it is not important, but every class is a struggle between the material we would like to cover and the material we have time to cover. I believe that peace studies and other social justice courses need to spend much more time on issues of cultural violence in order to promote changes in student behavior. This is not only a more efficient path to peace education, but also more suited to the students that we see in undergraduate facilities today.

There are four factors that I see contributing to contemporary students’ potential to address systems of meaning and justification that support the continuing use of violence and the perpetuation of violent structures. First, they have grown up in an environment of participation in media creation. Some have gone so far as to participate in citizen-based journalism, but this is still a small group. Many more, however, participate in the creation of media cultures through Youtube, social networking services, and even online multiplayer worlds. While these students do still consume vast amounts of cultural product that is generated for them, they recognize that this is not the only option. They participate in what has been called “remix culture,” manipulating their cultural worlds by splitting, combining and integrating media in novel ways. Students know that in this sense culture and cultural meanings are fluid in a much more literal way than prior generations. They also know that they can have some influence over the cultural discourse.

This relates to the second factor, the rise of popular media criticism through the internet. Not only do these students occasionally modify, repurpose, and occasionally improve the cultural products around them, but they participate in the active discussion of these products. Even the comments attached to YouTube videos, which often degrade to name-calling and invocations of Hitler, still contain insightful ideas about representations and their relationship to both systems of meaning and to the world (although, of course, not using those terms). A visit to the blogs and sites dedicated to the discussion of popular culture makes it clear that what has been called “the democratization of criticism” is moving ahead. More people participate in the interrogation of the cultural products they consume and with that, develop a perspective slightly separated from the cultural discourses in which they live. This does not mean they are not shaped by these discourses, but that the potential for critical reflection on them is much larger.

While the first two factors relate primarily to the culture industry – films, music, TV – there is a corresponding change in political discourse. In part, this is supported by the same democratization of criticism, with the expansion of political blogs and commentary sites, even sometimes by undergraduates. More important, however, is the change in political discourse over the past twenty years. Today’s undergraduates grew up in a political climate that argues more about labels and definitions than absolute truths and verifiable “facts.” They grew up during the culture wars of the 1990s and the polarization of political discourse that followed. Students seem to be able easily to appreciate that ideology and interest shape the way people discuss the world. They, themselves, can present many examples of “group X calls this A, while group Y calls this B,” and along with that discuss the implications for adopting various labels, even as they also describe their beliefs as essential.

The final factor is the students’ participation in an educational culture that has become focused on testing, repetition and what have come to be called “standards of learning” (SOLs). Many in higher education have criticized the preparedness of students who have been taught to perform well on the SOL tests instead of thinking for themselves, and I agree. To some extent the most difficult aspect of undergraduate education today is reorienting students to the type of learning and scholarship needed to succeed in universities, to train them to be thinkers instead of memorizers and note-takers. However, I have seen a ray of hope in this issue. Just as nonviolent movements may attempt to provoke a disproportional response from a repressive government to illustrate the injustice of their situation, some K-12 administrators have gone so far in promoting the SOL culture that students’ perennial criticism of school has coalesced around their discomfort with the SOL preparation approach. Students seem to be criticizing not just the fact that they have to go to school, but the way that they are being taught.

All four of these factors contribute to the ability of these students to achieve and maintain a critical detachment from cultural and institutional systems in which they live. This detachment is vital to pursuing peace education, since without it all debates will be argued on the ground set by those systems that rationalize violence. Students in peace studies do not arrive with the ability to critique these systems, but they do arrive with the tools to do so.

Although I believe these factors strongly encourage a peace pedagogy focused initially on cultural violence, as the basis for understanding direct and structural violence, I do not think that this means we should focus more on the simplistic, violence-in-the-media debate. Today’s students have been told about the evils of violence on film and TV, or in video games and music. They know that argument, but by and large do not accept it, and more than my generation was swayed by Tipper Gore’s crusade against music lyrics. This is largely due to their relationship to media. They understand that different media have different effects for different people and that the relationship between the cultural product and the consumers of that product is not simply one-way. They are willing to acknowledge the extent to which their cultural environment supports direct and structural violence, but only if that concept is presented in a way that makes sense with their world.

In fact, the exercise that my students this semester agreed was the most useful and provocative was a multi-class viewing and analysis of Inglourious Basterds, a film that no one is going to consider pro-peace. However, it is because this was representative of their consumption practices that a peace reading of the film focusing on the production of direct, structural and cultural violence was more effective. Students were able to talk about this within the context of the film as well as in their own experience as viewers and as observers of those around them.

Similarly, we had a lot of success addressing the concepts of peace studies through a multi-week discussion of peace education. I had added this component since the first time I taught peace studies over half the class was planning to get into K-12 education. After assigning a textbook and setting aside the time in this class, I was chagrined to learn that I had only one student concentrating on education. I believed the class was likely to grind to a halt when we started working on peace education. Surprisingly, this was not the case and some of the best work that we did the semester involved talk about how the students’ prior education supported and rationalized systems of violence. Along with that, they were able to understand what was happening in class, and to critically reflect on their experience as students as well as my performance as an instructor.

Although I did not see it this way at the time, in both these cases I relied on the students’ competency in criticism. Thinking about it now, it seems clear that these two exercises would work well, since they engage the world the student knows in a manner that they feel a least a little qualified to critique. From these critiques we were able to move more confidently into discussions about political justifications for war, ideas about human nature and the roots of violence, and the other topics covered in most peace education.

I am not suggesting here the mass adoption of my approach to peace education. These are only preliminary thoughts and, as I noted originally, I am not very experienced as an educator. However, I agree with George Kent that peace education must address the privileged, those who are most likely to contribute to systems of violence and oppression. If we are going to do that, we will be much more effective by focusing on the lives of our students and not simply the abstract philosophies of pacifism and violence. To develop a pedagogy of the oppressor in 2010, we should be focused on the ways that students participate in and criticize those systems of cultural violence that regularize and rationalize the violence around us.

Notes:

[i] All quotes in this article, unless otherwise attributed, come from George Kent, “Peace Education: Pedagogy of the Middle Class.,” Peace & Change 4, no. 3 (Fall77 1977): 37-42.

[ii] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000).

[iii] Kent is following the approach to violence described by Johan Galtung, and I rely on this as well. In short, direct violence is the infliction of physical or psychological harm by one person on another (whether in an individual or collect setting), structural violence is when systems in a society keep individuals from reaching their full potential, and cultural violence is the system of ideas, representations and justifications that allow direct and structural violence to continue. See Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (January 1, 1969): 167-191.