Weekly Memo 2
Treveonlh
Chapter2TheoriesofDevelopment.html.zipChapter 2 Theories of Development.html
In 2007, the former UK prime minister Gordon Brown made a speech at the University of Greenwich on the importance of education:
And I believe that … we must confront head on three assertions that I believe have held our country back for too long. The first is an assumption that there is only limited room at the top, that there is no point in educating everyone as far as their talents will take them because the economy simply needs only a few who are trained for the top. Now I think the fast changing global economy has decisively defeated that argument. Even if in the past there might have been national limited room at the top, now there is clearly global room at the top. Indeed there are millions more skilled jobs and opportunities in our country and round the world for people with skills and qualifications.
What we can observe here is an underpinning rationale for education: namely, that it provides individuals with the skills they need to succeed in work and by extension that economic growth is brought about by the investments that countries and individuals make in their skills. This view corresponds to that of human capital theory, one of the key frameworks that have driven international education practice over the past fifty years. That Gordon Brown did not cite human capital theory – or indeed whether he is even aware of it – is beside the point. This and many other theories orient practice and policy, whether or not they are invoked explicitly or used consciously.
This chapter outlines some of the major theories of international development that have influenced the work of supranational agencies, national governments and local actors since the end of the Second World War. It is not intended as a comprehensive overview of development theory but instead a treatment that focuses on the principal types of theory (by political and epistemological orientation) and those that have had most relevance for the field of education. In each case, the major characteristics of the theory are outlined, as well as some of its well-known proponents and its implications for education. (Some of the implications of these theories for research specifically are also drawn out in Chapter 5.)
Yet two questions need to be addressed before turning to the specific theories: first, what exactly is ‘theory’, and second, why – given the apparently practical nature of the task of development – should we be interested in theory at all? In relation to the first of these questions, we might distinguish between what might be called ‘big T’ theory and ‘little T’ theory. There are theories that present themselves as ‘theory X’, have a coherent body of literature – usually with theoretical components and empirical applications – have researchers who utilize them explicitly and are publicly recognizable. Examples of these forms of theories are the theory of relativity, game theory or in relation to international development, dependency theory. Yet there is another use of the term ‘theory’ that is more elusive and at the same time more present in our everyday lives. In this sense, theory is every abstraction from the concrete. Use of language to describe the world around us involves abstraction and representation, in particular in grouping and categorizing phenomena (e.g. use of the term ‘animal’ to denote a wide range of beings with some common characteristics). As an extension, we use theory to understand the causes of the phenomena we perceive (its explanatory function) and thereby to predict how phenomena will change or occur in the future (its predictive function). Furthermore, theory has a normative function in asserting how things should be in the world, particularly as regards human behaviour and social organization. All statements about the world, in this sense, are theory, as they are attempting to abstract from the actual instances to which they are referring.
The distinction between explanatory and normative aspects of theory is important in relation to international development. A theory of the explanatory type is human capital theory (HCT), which attempts to explain why some economies grow more rapidly than others and from which we can adopt strategies for ensuring growth in the future. Normative theories on the other hand make claims about what is of value in the world. The capability approach, for example, asserts that we should evaluate the desirability of social arrangements not on the basis of maximization of GDP alone but on the full range of freedoms that are accorded to people. Martinussen (1997), in a similar vein, distinguishes between three types of theorizing around development: ‘concept’ (the overarching vision of development), ‘theory’ (understanding the process of change and the conditions underpinning it) and ‘strategy’ (actions and interventions adopted to achieve the aims). Of course, we cannot separate completely the explanatory and normative dimensions – normally, explanatory theories are underpinned by normative assumptions (so HCT rests on the value of wealth accumulation, both individually and nationally) and normative theories may also have explanations of the world built into them (Marx’s advocacy for socialism is partly normative, but is also based on a reading of the inherent contradictions of capitalism in practice).
Theory – particularly of the ‘big T’ variety – is often perceived to be intimidating (and it is fair to say that some theorists do little to make their work more accessible). Theoretical thought is portrayed as hard to understand, and moreover to be divorced from reality, either because it is irrelevant in terms of the characteristics of the current situation or too idealistic in terms of the practically feasible. According to this perspective, on the one side we have ‘theory’ – lofty, dry, utopian and irrelevant – and on the other side we have ‘practice’ – everyday, engaging, realistic and useful. However, it is important that we do not view theory in this way. In the first place, theory is not something we can choose to use or not. Understood as the fundamental abstract principles underlying specific instances, theory is within every practice, whether evident and known or not. When a government designs a set of policies for the education system – involving funding priorities, a framework of aims, curricular content and so forth – it is drawing on a range of principles relating to social justice, the good life and the nature of knowledge, whether or not these are made explicit. Likewise, every time teachers stand up in class, their practice of teaching is similarly informed by theories of an epistemological, political and moral nature.
We can identify three main reasons, therefore, for engaging with theory in the field of education and international development. First, as readers and users of research, it is important that we understand the theories that are being utilized by the authors. Second, as researchers, we will utilize a range of theories in collecting, analysing and interpreting data – and indeed in deciding what is and is not worth researching. Last, drawing on the idea above that theory is present in all practice, awareness of theory is essential for understanding the underpinnings of policies and practices with which we come into contact, allowing us more effectively to engage, critique and recast them.
The following sections will outline five paradigms of development theory: liberal capitalist, Marxist, liberal egalitarian, postcolonial and radical humanist. In each of these, different specific theories as well as a range of theorists are grouped. As stated above, this grouping is not intended as an exhaustive categorization of development theories but a generative selection to highlight the major approaches. Some of the key components of these theories are outlined in Table 2.1.
Table 2.1 Paradigms of development theory
The liberal capitalist paradigm
A range of theories emerged after the end of the Second World War associated with promoting and sustaining economic growth and focusing on how countries could most effectively rebuild and restructure their economies. These theories have as their primary assumption that capitalism is the ideal or perhaps the only form of economic organization. They are for the most part universalist and assume that all countries’ economies can and should be organized along similar lines.
‘Development economics’ emerged in the post-war period as a branch of the discipline addressing the specific conditions of the ‘Third World’. However, by the late 1950s, theorists began to recognize the importance of social and cultural factors in facilitating or hindering economic growth (Desai 2012), leading to the emergence of modernization theory. In essence, this theory asserts that the key to economic growth is the transformation of the ‘traditional’ into the ‘modern’. The US economist Walt Rostow (1960) put forward a model of economic development that envisaged countries moving through five phases:
(1) The traditional society;
(2) The establishment of the pre-conditions for take-off;
(3) The take off stage (The Big Push – marked by
(i) an increase in investment rate
(ii) development of growth sectors of aggregate demand and
(iii) establishment of social, political and institutional frameworks);
(4) The drive to maturity;
(5) The époque of high mass consumption (self-sustaining).
Rostow (1960, p. 19) stated:
Above all, the concept must be spread that man need not regard his physical environment as virtually a factor given by nature and providence, but as an ordered world which, if rationally understood, can be manipulated in ways which yield productive change. …
The process of modernization is seen to relate to both the institutions of society (legal systems, the market, political organization) and individuals’ attitudes (becoming ambitious and entrepreneurial rather than superstitious and averse to change). Modernization theory, therefore, had a strong disciplinary presence from outside economics, including sociology (e.g. Inkeles and Smith 1975) and psychology (e.g. McClelland 1961). McClelland’s psychological variant focused on the achievement motive, assessing the varying extents to which peoples around the world were motivated to succeed and thereby allow their nations to develop.
The connections to education are plain. Formal education systems are themselves an instance of a modern institution but also serve the function of ‘modernizing’ through inculcating a set of norms and attitudes, and forming skills for diverse functions in society. Just as the establishment of mass schooling systems had underpinned the formation of the modern state in Western Europe and North America (Green 2013), so they would need to in the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa. As argued by Unterhalter (2008), modernization theory linked in closely with the nation-building agendas of many newly independent countries, served by the development of mass education for national citizenship through a common language.
Human capital theory (which will be discussed in further detail in Chapters 7 and 14) can be located within this paradigm – although the focus is more on skills and other attributes for economic productivity rather than the broader norms or attitudes underpinning the modern state. Economists in the United States from the 1960s (e.g. Gary Becker [1964], Theodore Schultz [1961]) drew on ideas in the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish economist Adam Smith to assert the fundamental role of education in economic growth. Drawing on empirical data, they showed that differences in economic growth between countries could be explained by the level of education of the population (e.g. Psacharopolous 1994). On an individual level, investment in one’s own education (as well as associated factors such as health) would enhance one’s productivity and thereby one’s earnings, and on a collective level the increase in human capital stock would drive economic growth. Despite a range of concerns and challenges to the theory within the field of economics (e.g. screening hypothesis), human capital theory has prospered and is undoubtedly the key driving force for national investment in education and the advocacy of supranational agencies in low- and middle-income countries to this day.
Liberal capitalist approaches have had a significant revival in recent years through the ascendancy of free-market ideas associated with neo-liberalism. Here, assertions of the ends of development as economic growth have been accompanied by claims that the means are through market-based competition, minimal state intervention and individual entrepreneurship and initiative. Neo-liberalism has fuelled, and in turn been given impetus by, the processes of globalization, and the intensification of transnational economic activity. Within education, it has expressed itself through the privatization of educational systems: first, the creation of quasi-markets and introduction of cost-sharing within public systems, and second, the growth of private providers, even serving low-income communities at the primary level in countries such as India, Nigeria and Ghana (Tooley 2009). In this model, education not only serves to form productive workers but is also a source of profit making itself.
All of the subsequent theories to be assessed in this chapter can be understood as responses to one or other of these problematic aspects of the liberal capitalist paradigm. The next focuses on the aspect of economic inequalities, asserting that the purported helpfulness of these theories in fuelling growth in the poorest countries is in fact a mask for ensuring the latter’s continuing domination by the rich world.
There is a body of development theory emerging primarily in the 1960s and 1970s that can be broadly described as Marxist in that it provides a critical counterpoint to the approaches based on accumulation of capital outlined earlier. According to these views, ‘the persistence of poverty was not an oversight, but a key dimension of capitalism, which required a reserve army of labour, who were poorly educated and impoverished’ (Unterhalter 2008). The most prominent of these is dependency theory. The basic principle of dependency is well expressed by this passage from Theotonio dos Santos (1970, p. 1):
By dependence we mean a situation in which the economy of certain countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy to which the former is subjected … . This theoretical step transcends the theory of development which seeks to explain the situation of the underdeveloped countries as a product of their slowness or failure to adopt the patterns of efficiency characteristic of developed countries (or to ‘modernize’ or ‘develop’ themselves).
From this perspective, modernization is a deficit theory, placing the blame for lack of development with the poor countries themselves; for dependency theory on the other hand, poverty is caused by the wealthy countries and the relations of dependency they have created. The world then consists of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ countries, the latter engaged primarily in agriculture and mineral extraction while the former reaps the benefits through controlling flows of capital and high value industrial production. Cores and peripheries are also seen to exist within countries.
The theory emerged first from the work of Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer, who in 1950 independently observed that the terms of trade for exporters of primary goods tended to deteriorate over time in relation to exporters of manufactured goods. Dependency theory is, therefore, initially an explanatory, rather than a normative one, in the sense that it is based on the empirical claim that a country’s dependency has an adverse effect on its economic prospects. It advocated import-substitution and ultimately ‘delinking’ from the international system as the best solution for the so-called Third World countries. Nevertheless, there is clearly a normative element, opposing the existence of an unequal world order and questioning the dominance of the Western powers over the rest of the globe.
Like Prebisch and dos Santos, many of the initial theorists of dependency theory were from Latin America – for example, the sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who went on to be Brazilian president – with the US-based thinkers Andre Gunder Frank and Paul Baran (exiles from Nazi Germany) also influential. Immanuel Wallerstein’s ‘world systems theory’ also drew heavily on dependency theory in asserting the continuing dominance of capitalist centres through drawing peripheries and semi-peripheries into an interdependent global economic system. These thinkers also drew on earlier Marxist analyses such as that of Rosa Luxemburg, in which imperialism is attributed to the need for capital to go beyond national borders and incorporate and thereby exploit non-capitalist regions of the world.
Dependency theory relates first and foremost to the economic system – and as such it has relevance for education as regards the funds that are available for educational provision. However, there have been more direct applications of the theory to education. From the 1970s onwards, researchers and theorists such as Ali Mazrui (1975), Philip Altbach (1977), Gail Kelly (1982) and Martin Carnoy (1974) analysed the ways in which education systems in the South after independence continued to be dependent on the systems of the former colonial powers. They retained colonial languages within education, maintained similar curricula (focusing on Western subject matter) and relied on Western publishing houses. The implication was, as in the economy as a whole, that countries should delink and pursue their own educational course. A significant reform along these lines was carried out in Tanzania, through Julius Nyerere’s vision of Education for Self-Reliance (1967). These changes to the education system oriented the curriculum and institutional forms away from the colonial model and tied them more closely to the realities of rural life and cooperativism, although like Nyerere’s broader designs for African socialism, were unable to fully take root.
Ideas of dependency also resonate with theorists of social reproduction through education such as Bowles and Gintis (1976), Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) and Willis (1978), who showed that instead of providing an opportunity for social mobility, education systems merely reproduced existing social class inequalities. Educational dependency had its critics, however, with McLean (1983) and Noah and Eckstein (1988), for example, questioning the validity of the theory’s transfer from economics to education and its oversimplification of relations between centre and periphery.
Dependency theory more broadly was rejected by supporters of capitalism-driven development as part of the broader ideological and political hostilities of the Cold War. This strong divide – and the marked lack of dialogue between the two sides in the 1980s – has been described as an impasse in development theory: the sense of a dead end, with neither global capitalism nor state socialism providing a viable or effective solution for the world’s poor. As the 1990s unfolded, however, there emerged from the impasse a range of other theories and approaches, as will be explored in the following sections.
The roots of postcolonial theory – in an epistemological sense – are in the post-structuralist movement associated with French philosophers, historians and linguists in the mid-twentieth century. Post-structuralism made a radical turn in questioning the very foundations of Western thought – whether Marxist or capitalist. The European Age of Enlightenment had been founded on the use of reason in the pursuit of truth and the possibility of human progress through knowledge. Post-structuralism asserted that there was no universal or objective basis for these claims to the true, the right or the good. Michel Foucault (1965), through a detailed historical analysis, aimed to show how dominant knowledge paradigms, such as the logic of rationality, had emerged over the ages through a confluence of contingencies. Dominant groups ensured that their version of reality was maintained in the ascendancy, and this discourseworked through others in society, marking the bounds of what was possible and impossible to think or know. Feminist thought has also been influential in this regard, in uncovering and critiquing the fundamental patriarchal assumptions of Enlightenment thought that could be used to portray women as lacking rationality and therefore incapable of political or cultural participation, thus legitimating oppressive structuring of societies.
In a postcolonial paradigm, these ideas were applied to the relationship between colonizer and colonized. It was not just that physical violence had been inflicted on colonized peoples nor that their natural wealth had been extracted and their economies locked into a relationship of dependency: they had begun to see themselves through the eyes of the colonizer and speak with the colonizer’s voice. The imposed language and frames of thought had cast them in the role of ‘other’ – deficient and degenerate in relation to the norm. Thinkers such as Franz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), Edward Said in Orientalism (1980), Gayatri Spivak (1988, 1999), Archille Mbembe (2001), Anita Loomba (2005) and a number of others developed variations on this perspective.
As Spivak (1988, pp. 280–281) states:
The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other … . It is well known that Foucault locates epistemic violence … in the redefinition of sanity at the end of the European eighteenth century. But what if that particular redefinition was only a part of the narrative of history in Europe as well as in the colonies? What if the two projects of epistemic overhaul worked as dislocated and unacknowledged parts of a vast two-handed engine?
The postcolonial paradigm also influenced the emergence of post-development thinkers (such as Arturo Escobar and Majid Rahnema), applying this mode of critique to conventional approaches to development (Escobar 1995, Rahnema and Bawtree 1997). Through this perspective, poverty and the need for external aid are constructions with the development industry simply remoulding the Third World in a bedraggled image of the West. These concerns have resonated both with indigenous movements campaigning against cultural onslaught and with environmentalists opposing the destructive effects of Western models of wealth accumulation. Revolutionary movements such as the Zapatistas in Mexico have drawn on these critiques, as well as on anarchist ideas about the creation of utopias in the here and now, in the development of autonomous communities.
Educational applications of postcolonialism and post-development are to a large extent ones of critique: of revealing the hidden assumptions and veiled disparagement of indigenous cultures (e.g. Adjei 2007). In terms of alternative constructions, the focus has either been on recuperation of indigenous knowledge forms or on a fusion of indigenous and Western perspectives. Decolonizing education, in Andreotti’s (2011) terms, is a process of ‘learning to read the world through other eyes’, of acknowledging the multiple perspectives on reality and refraining from imposing a single reading. An example in practice of the type of autonomous development advocated by the post-development theorists can be seen in the UNITIERRA initiative in southern Mexico (see Pathways to practice 2).
The main critique of post-structuralism and postcolonialism is its lack of a clear path of action in response to the situation of domination (Unterhalter 2007a). Proponents of the approach advocate a process of emancipation, through deconstruction and critique, and increasing awareness and therefore liberation from the enslaving thought forms. However, for many this response is insufficiently concrete and practicable given the pressing challenges and sufferings.
Universidad de la Tierra (UNITIERRA)
The University of the Land, or in its Spanish acronym UNITIERRA, is a rare example of a manifestation in practice of the post-development paradigm. Created in the Mexican state of Oaxaca in 2001 (with a sister ‘branch’ in Chiapas), it aims to challenge fundamental conceptions of the educational institution. Drawing on the ideas of ‘deschooling’ of Ivan Illich, as well as contemporary post-development thinker Gustavo Esteva, it provides an opportunity for higher study for those who have become disillusioned with or dropped out of the mainstream education system. In the words of Esteva, the university has ‘no teachers, no classrooms, no curriculum and no campus’*. Students come to the university with their own research and action projects, whether in philosophy, urban agriculture or video production, and develop these over a period of years through working with facilitators and developing initiatives in the community. Another important feature is that the university provides no formal qualifications. The key challenge of UNITIERRA remains that of whether young people will be willing to give up the exchange value of a regular degree for a more meaningful learning experience.
*http://www.gustavoesteva.com/english_site/back_from_the_future.htm
The liberal egalitarian theories do not take as a starting point the eradication of capitalist modes of production and the free market, although they do require a significant tempering of their workings in practice in accordance with social justice. In opposition to some versions of socialism, they also assert the primacy of individual liberty – guarding against the subordination of the individual to the collective; while in contrast to post-structuralist thought, they retain faith in the possibility of a universal morality and that concrete steps towards improvements in practice can be made.
One version of this approach – that of human rights – has a long lineage but came to the fore in the period following the Second World War and the formation of the UN. The proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the range of subsequent legally binding covenants and conventions, have created a framework intended to guarantee a dignified life for all human beings independently of where they may be living. Rights-based approaches, which became influential in development work from the 1990s, recast the inhabitants of impoverished parts of the globe as rights-holders entitled to justice rather than beneficiaries of the charity of the privileged. A variant – the basic needs approach (e.g. Stewart 1985) – had also been influential from the 1970s, asserting the primacy of the task of ensuring basic minima for all of the world’s population, although lacking a clear relationship between rights-holder (individual and community) and duty-bearer (primarily the nation state) of rights-based approaches. Unterhalter (2008) locates the later EFA movement’s approach to educational entitlements and obligations within the basic needs paradigm.
A more recent variant is the human development approach, drawing primarily on the work on capabilities by Amartya Sen (1992, 1999) and developed by others such as Martha Nussbaum (2000) and Mahbub Ul Haq (1995). These approaches hold that development should be understood as the freedom for all people to do and be what they have reason to value (see discussion in Chapter 12). As such, it represents a departure from reductive emphases on economic growth and acknowledges the heterogeneity of human beings in terms of their life goals. It also represents a more general movement towards people-centred conceptions of development, with participation of local communities seen as having intrinsic and instrumental value – or even to be constitutive of development (McCowan and Unterhalter 2013). Martha Nussbaum’s proposal for a list of central capabilities is presented in Concepts 1. The approach has also been influential in the development of the Human Development Index (HDI), which gauges education and life expectancy in addition to per capita GNI.
A primary application of these approaches to education is that education systems must distribute their benefits in an egalitarian manner: whether upholding for all the right or the capability to education. Yet there is also a reorientation of the aims of the educational process: in this way, education underpins the full set of human rights, empowering individuals to understand, exercise and defend their rights, or being a multiplier of capabilities. Central to this function is the task of fostering individual autonomy, the ability to choose between different life courses and enhance agency. Recent years have seen a flowering of literature on both rights-based approaches to education (e.g. Tomaševski 2001, 2003, UNICEF/UNESCO 2007, McCowan 2013) as well as capabilities in education (e.g. Unterhalter 2003, Robeyns 2006, Walker and Unterhalter 2007). Practical manifestations of rights-based approaches have also been seen in UNICEF’s rights respecting and child friendly schools, for example, which aim to uphold the broad range of children’s rights within institutions (including gender equality, health, nutrition and safety) as well as enhance knowledge of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and children’s participation in the management of the school.
Liberal egalitarian approaches are not immune to critique from either the left or the right of the political spectrum. For capitalist libertarians, their efforts at redistribution place intolerable restraints on the individual freedom that is supposed to be at the heart of liberalism. For Marxists, the entitlements guaranteed to marginalized populations are but a palliative, to provide some amelioration of conditions but ultimately perpetuating the unjust economic system. For post-structuralists, while these egalitarian approaches are less crude than the bulldozer narratives of modernization and Marxism, they are still riven with unfounded, culturally specific and ultimately dangerous assumptions of an epistemological and ontological nature.
Concepts 1
Nussbaum’s List of Capabilities
Martha Nussbaum has put forward a list of 10 central human functionings, proposed as basic entitlements for all human beings around the world and a basis for national constitutions:
(1) Life
(2) Bodily health
(3) Bodily integrity
(4) Senses, imagination and thought
(5) Emotions
(6) Practical reason
(7) Affiliation
(8) Other species
(9) Play
(10) Political and material control over one’s environment
While the list has had widespread recognition, there are also detractors, due to its universal pretensions. Amartya Sen himself has resisted the creation of a list of capabilities, on account of the need for local determination of needs and goals.
Source: Nussbaum (2000)
The final section relates not to a coherent body of theory as such but to the work of certain theorists and practitioners who share a set of principles that distinguish them from the above theories – and importantly for this book, place a particular emphasis on the role of education in development. In these approaches, education is not a fruit of development or even a driver of development but is development itself. The process of learning, understood as the fundamental experience of emancipation, and the necessary engagement in it of all members of society, is both the means and the end of development.
The best-known of these thinkers is the Brazilian Paulo Freire (also discussed in Chapter 15), who formulated his ideas most famously in the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972). In contrast to dominant state socialist advocates, he asserted that revolution needed to start not with the seizing of state power but with the transformation of the self and the emergence of critical consciousness. The collective development of understanding in the oppressed, and the consequent liberation of the oppressors, would lead organically and sustainably to the transformation of societal structures. These ideas, therefore, share some principles with dependency theory and postcolonialism but went beyond critique of the relics of colonial education systems to put forward a practical solution in the form of a set of pedagogical principles. Central to this vision is dialogue – understood not just as conversation, but as a radical revisioning of the pedagogical relationship through which teachers approach learners not as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge (the so-called banking education), but engage with them in a shared and horizontal process of critical reflection and learning (Freire 1972).
Freire’s ideas were taken up by a range of other thinkers, such as Augusto Boal (2000) in relation to theatre. Parallels can also be seen in the thought of Mahatma Gandhi (Kumar 1994) and Julius Nyerere (1967) (as well as many others such as Steve Biko and Rabindranath Tagore) who in their distinct contexts advocated for an emancipatory education as a conduit for and actualization of social transformation. The participatory nature of Freire’s political ideas found echoes in the participatory turn in development as a whole (e.g. Chambers 1997, Hickey and Mohan 2005), leading to fusions such as Participatory Learning and Action. ActionAid also adopted Freire’s ideas in their REFLECT adult learning programme (as described in Chapter 15). However, radical humanist approaches are distinct from mainstream learner-centred reforms in education in their explicit commitment to political emancipation and social transformation rather than just effective learning.
Freire laid himself open to forceful critiques from feminist thinkers, on account of his use of language and inattentiveness to difference and to overlapping forms of oppression (e.g. Weiler 1996). Some (e.g. hooks 1996), while acknowledging deficiencies of his thought, have rekindled the principles in a way that is more attuned to gender and racial injustices – and these ideas have spawned a larger movement on the academic left under the label of ‘critical pedagogy’ (e.g. Giroux and McLaren 1986, Shor 1992). Ultimately, the greatest barrier of these approaches is the quietness of their voice in relation to the blare of global capitalism and even mainstream development. In the contemporary context, the idealism underpinning radical humanist thought is very often dismissed as impractical and excessively optimistic about human nature.
