ABSTRACT
The socially critical position assumes that education can both challenge existing power structures and enable democratic development. This suggests that education in its current confi guration should not be seen as an unproblematic good and its benefi ts cannot be taken for granted as either neutral or benign. On the contrary, many commentators on educational policy and practice, as it has historically evolved, suggest that education is variously implicated in creating, reproducing, and enhancing inequality. They suggest that education was never developed to be enabling and educative for all young people in a manner that might challenge existing social structures. This chapter documents some of the key explanations of the link between education and poverty from this socially critical perspective. At the outset we need to state that most of the explanations and suggested interventions from such a perspective appear to be at the macro and meso level. At the macro level research focuses on global economic structures and power inequalities that result in poorer educational outcomes for certain class, gender, and ethnic groups. Meso level analysis tends to focus on the possibilities of changed power relations in the classroom or between school and community or on reviewing ‘emanicipatory’ curricular interventions. Although much of the writings from a socially critical perspective focus on the social, there are some strands in the literature where the main level of analysis is on the individual and at the micro. Certain radical developmental psychologists have worked on the interface between a focus on the individual and the impact of community but often in response to what they see as a conservative bias in much mainstream developmental psychology (Holzman, 1997). In addition, there is the work by Davies (2006) and Youdell (2006) which draws on the philosophical work of Judith Butler focusing on the way in which the individual pysche develops. They argue
that identities are heavily shaped by external power relations which constrain or enhance the possibilities that individuals can achieve. Their ideas suggest that educators and policy makers need to take responsibility for the way in which taken-for-granted practices and discourses can limit individuals’ life chances. Some of these ideas are taken further in the meso section below. Given that studies at this level of conceptualisation are limited and, when they do focus on education and poverty, tend to leach out into other levels of analysis, we have decided not to have a separate section in this chapter that focuses exclusively on a socially critical perspective at the micro level. We do, however, document some of the key implications of micro level social critical perspectives in the fi nal section of the chapter.
