ABSTRACT
This chapter has three parts. The first examines the implications for students who may lack Bhaskar’s (α) cognitive, (β) empowered or (γ) dispositional components of rational agency. I argue that a dialectical critical realist perspective of education in the compulsory years of schooling emphasises two main points:
The criteria for rational agency can be possessed in degrees, as opposed to possessed or not; thus revealing the worth of both the agent’s emancipatory process and the agent’s being to be independent of the limitations upon them.
The ‘opening movement’ of Bhaskar’s emancipatory process from primal scream to cognitive emancipation indicates that there is much important ‘custodial’ work for teachers to do, as they facilitate the articulation of their students’ ‘assertoric utterances’.
