ABSTRACT
Education, as Paulo Freire has pointed out, is never a neutral process. Either it facilitates “the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system,” thereby encouraging students to internalize its values, or it becomes a “practice of freedom” and a means of enabling them to participate in the transformation of that system (1968, 15; see also Davis 1990). For the last two decades, feminist teachers committed to creating a feminist education that would also be a “practice of freedom” for students, especially for women, have attempted to promote more egalitarian classrooms responsive not only to differences of gender but also to those of class, race, sexual preference, ethnicity, and age. Crucial to this goal of developing new pedagogies that are participatory, experiential, and nonhierarchical—a goal shared with those practicing “liberatory,” “oppositional,” or “radical” pedagogies—have been concepts like “empowerment,” “student voice,” “dialogue,” and “critical thinking.” Under these various labels, however, efforts by both feminist and radical teachers to promote nonauthoritarian classroom environments have often ended up mystifying the very forms of authority they sought to exorcise, authority that is both institutionally and psychically embedded in the social relations of education. This has happened because the social relations inherent in education cannot so easily be reduced to a simple dichotomy between conformity and resistance. Indeed, that dialectic continually founders on the rocks of such anxiety-producing paradoxes as the feminist teacher who attempts to subvert the institution of education while participating in its unequal system of rewards and punishments, or the feminist student who tries to bring down the patriarchal system while maintaining a GPA high enough to get into graduate school, or even the nonfeminist student negotiating a graduation requirement. The social relations of education can be comprehended only within a complex network of intersecting oppositions that include not only conformity and resistance but also identification and rebellion, love and power; they must account not only for the vertical relations between teacher and student but also for the horizontal relationships among students.
