ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I look at how critical language study (CLS) might contribute to the emancipation of those who are dominated and oppressed in our society. After a brief general discussion of the potential contribution of CLS to social emancipation, the chapter focuses in on one domain in which this potential could be developed: language education in the schools. I argue that critical language awareness, based upon CLS, should be a significant objective of language education, and there are some suggestions about methods for developing it. The main reason for this choice of focus is its current relevance, given the major changes in educational policy and practice which are being implemented or planned, and given more specifically the report of the Kingman Committee and the deliberations of the Cox Committee on the teaching of English in schools. (The reference is to the time of writing the first edition of the book. No significant advances have been made since in official policy in terms of critical awareness of language.)
If CLS or any other mode of critical social analysis is to make any contribution to social emancipation through the raising of consciousness, certain conditions must obtain. We can distinguish 'objective' and 'subjective' conditions. The main objective condition is perhaps obvious, but nevertheless worth reiterating: the wider social situation must be such as to make progress towards social emancipation feasible. The emancipatory potential of CLS in a fascist dictatorship, or even in a democracy where the position of the dominant bloc is unassailable, is strictly limited! Subjective conditions involve, first, dominated groupings of people: they must be open to critique and raising of consciousness, and this depends on their experience of social struggle. Oppressed people will not recognize their oppression just because someone takes the trouble to point it out to them; they will only come to recognize it through their own experience of it, and their own activity in struggling against it. Thus struggle and the raising of consciousness are dialectically related: struggle opens people to the raising of consciousness, which empowers them to engage in struggle. Then there are subjective conditions relating to those who act as catalysts in the raising of consciousness: there must be people who have the theoretical background to enable them to act in this way, as well as sharing the experience of the oppressed to a sufficient extent for them to be accepted as catalysts. Very often they will be educators in some formal or informal sense, but this is not necessarily so. Part, but only part, of their equipment might be a familiarity with CLS, and the capacity to mediate books like this one to people without the background to read them.
