On Ideology and Education: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Empowerment

Decades of volatile debates over the term ideology have produced a theoretical residue that continues to fleck the landscape of social theory, creating a conceptual terrain at once murky, distortive, and contradictory. Few concepts in social theory are as pervasive and durable, yet few continue to provoke such a cleavage of opinion among theorists. What makes such an ephemeral concept so tenacious is difficult to ascertain, as it continues to exercise scholars of various theoretical stripe and disciplinary affiliation. Attempts by Marxists and non-Marxists alike to fully delineate a theory of ideology has, over the years, produced a voluminous body of work, the vast sweep of which has so far failed to grasp adequately this often diffuse and impalpable term. The major theoretical traditions have ranged from the work of French rationalists, Anglo-Saxon empiricists to German idealists. The most that scholars have been able to achieve-admittedly no small feat in itself-has been to produce a temporary theoretical truce around contesting definitions of the term. Over the last decade especially, there has been a steady proliferation of studies attempting to both pry loose some determinate meaning from this historically stubborn concept and to register a new set of analytic claims regarding how it should be defined and employed in critical research.' In the first part of the paper, I propose to sketch the contours of some of these new analytic claims in order to specify some problems with existing conceptions of ideology and ideology critique and attempt to move beyond them. In the second part of the paper I will bring my discussion to bear on a concrete public sphere-that of schooling-in order to illustrate how some of these perspectives on ideology can be rethought in analyzing student resistance and developing a critical pedagogy. A portion of this section will draw from recent ethnographic research which I undertook in a Catholic junior high school in Toronto, Canada. *An earlier version of some sections of this article may be found in Peter McLaren, Ideology, Science and the Politics of Marxian Orthodoxy: A Response to Michael Dale, Educational Theory 37,