MAPPING THE NEW WORLD:
RADICAL HUMANISM

Roger Boshier
University of B.C., Vancouver

Radical humanists want to upset extant power relationships but are anchored within a subjectivist ontology. Those in this paradigm are usually anti (or post) positivist. But, unlike humanists, radical humanists want to overthrow or transcend existing social arrangements. Many radical humanists employ concepts developed by the young Marx to describe how people carry ideological superstructures that limit cognition and create false consciousness which inhibits fulfillment. Radical humanists want to release people from constraints - which largely reside in their own cognitions. They seek transformation, emancipation, and critical analysis of modes of domination. They want people to reconstruct their view of reality and take appropriate action. Thus education involves praxis (reflection followed by action).

Related Theory

Popular education and Freire's (1972, 1985) notion of conscientization are the clearest exemplars of this world view. Participatory research, popularized by the International Council of Adult Education, springs from similar ontological and ideological roots. Advocates of participatory research are critical of the top down nature of much university or traditional research. Their second apprehension concerns research that has insufficient regard to ways in which people subjectively construe their world, relying instead on the imposition or use of "external" values, measurement devices or "rational" cost/benefit analysis. Participatory research is based on praxis - reflection followed by action. It tends to unmask and then attempt to do something about unequal power relations.

Giroux's (1983) and Aronowitz and Giroux's (1991) analyses of resistance theory are other examples. Dropout from education or unwillingness to believe scientific "facts" has typically been explained from an individualized "blame-the-victim" perspective. The learner dropped out or resists because of a lack of motivation, inferior intelligence or a bad attitude. Resistance theory turns this on its head and there is persuasive research that demonstrates how "dropout" is often an act of affirmation. Sometimes, telling someone to "get stuffed" is a manifestation of positive mental health.

Most movements that employ education for cultural revitalization (Paulston, 1977), whether amongst Maoris in New Zealand, Indians in Latin America or the Lap people in the Nordic countries, is constructed within a radical humanistic perspective. Education informed by this perspective has immense respect for local and culturally constructed "ways-of-knowing" and is committed to a transformation of consciousness.

Feminism is interesting because although some feminist scholars claim a total commitment to subjective ontology there have been recent elaborations of more objective feminisms and a discernible sharpening of interest in marxist or structural feminisms (see Nicholson, 1990). Hence, feminism is in the radical humanism zone but has a leg in radical functionalism. There is also an exceedingly active branch of feminism nested in the postmodern.

Critical social theory is a brand of western marxism and exemplified by a range of writers but most notably Habermas and others associated with the Frankfurt School. Collard and Law (1991) describe the impact of critical theory on the New Left in the late 1960's and its preoccupation with subjectivist ontology. They claim that while critical theory influenced New Left politics (e.g. environmental activism) its influence on the academic analysis of education was muted until Freire's (1972) concern with the need to build a critical consciousness reached North America. These days Freire's neo-marxist radical humanism, partly derived from the work of Fromm (1941, 1949) has an enormous influence in North American graduate programs. Those wondering how to translate critical theory into research methodology could look at Morrow and Brown (1994).

Critical pedagogy is another radical humanist orientation. Activist intellectuals gathered under this banner advocate educational reform and draw sustenance from critical theory and Freire and, in recent years, post-modernism. They claim traditional education systems primarily serve the interests of corporate elites (Korten, 1995) and, in recent theoretical elaborations, slammed the insidious inclinations of popular culture, global advertisers (such as Benetton) and predatory trans-national corporations. Critical pedagogues are suspicious of unproblematized technology constructed as a magic bullet to resolve problems in education.

Technology and Education

A good example of technologically-mediated approaches to education informed by a radical humanist perspective is Freire’s (1985) analysis of cultural action and agrarian reform. It would be a mistake, he claims "to reduce this transformation to a mechanical act by which the system …. yields a new system … as when someone mechanically substitutes one chair for another ….. agrarian reform demands permanent critical thinking focused on (the) act of transformation and its consequences" (1985, p. 29). Irrespective of whether plans are derived from "technicists" or peasants, agrarian reform is culturally conditioned (Freire, 1985). Those committed to an objective reality should not view peasants as "empty vessels into which one deposits knowledge. Quite the contrary, they too are subjects of a process of their own beliefs." Hence "an increase in agricultural production cannot be seen as something separate from the cultural universe where the increase takes place" (1985, p. 30).

Another valuable perspective is found in the radical humanist perspective of Rahnema and Bawtree’s (1997) Post Development Reader. It deploys a Third World perspective to question meanings ascribed to development and Western ideas concerning progress. It is deeply suspicious of western ideas about unproblematized "technology. For Mander (1966) part of this tradition, technology represents a profound centralizing tendency which provides trans-national capital with tools to instantly respond to or exploit markets in distant locations. Rather than seeing connective technologies as a tool for "citizen democracy" and other utopias, Mander sees them as instruments of oppression.

A B.C. example of research nested in a radical humanist ethos is the paper by Boshier, Wilson and Qayyum (1999) which challenges American dominance of the Web from a socio-cultural and critical perspective. In this work readers are reminded of various meanings attached to the notion of lifelong education and the way the notion of network lay at the centre of Illich’s and Faure’s proposals in the 1970’s. Today, the World Wide Web dramatically exemplifies many features of lifelong education and is a metaphor for the learning society.

The problem is that most sites are in the U.S. and Web course architects are prone to include a large number of links back to the United States. Cultural ideas about what is good and bad and the way the world should be organised are nested within American Web courses and learning materials. In this paper Boshier, Wilson and Qayyum (1999) reflect on what U.S. dominance of the Web means for smaller nations and indigenous, non English-speaking and other persons outside the U.S. metropole. With the needs of non-U.S. learners in mind, the authors make one lot of recommendations concerning the "positionality" of Web course architects and instructors and another set concerning "diversity." There is no point blaming Americans for dominating the Web, but those who live outside the U.S. should realise the uncritical use of U.S. courses, links or learning materials has consequences.

These three Canadians have also studied Web access from an objectivist stance. But, in this paper, what makes Boshier, Wilson and Qayyum (1999) radical humanist (or critical) is the focus on the culture and subjectivity of learners apt to be using the Web and the foregrounding of gender, race, class and the centrality of Anglo values. Unlike a functionalist analysis where the Web (or other technologies) are "neutral" and "efficient" instruments for attaining a desirable cost/benefit ratio, the intent is to disrupt zealotry and metanarratives. The authors are saying - what about the psycho-cultural and social predilections of learners who don’t live in and may even dislike the American metropole with its gun-totting cyber-chic and libertarian values blind to racism, violence and urban decay? The authors are not opposed to technology and the Web. However, they worry about the prevalence of an unproblematized Americana and the ability of the Web to deliver it to all and sundry.