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Mutual and contradictory relationships among education, oppression, and class processes: An overdeterminist theoretical standpoint
Abstract
Relationships among education, oppression and class have been presented and explained in distinct and different ways by different social theories, namely, neo-classical and orthodox Marxist determinist, conflationist, and Marxian overdeterminist theories. Human practice, following these different social theories has had, and may continue to produce, different social structures, some of them disastrous, irrespective of whether the disasters are intended or not. Others carry in them seeds of freedom and justice. Determinist theories have contributed to disastrous human practice by being exclusionary in approach, picking either education or oppression as their entry points to which they assigned the privileged position of causality, independent of all other processes. The class process is one of those omitted processes because determinist theories had thought it would be wiped out following changes in education or oppression processes. Conflationist theory has formulated its logic differently, gliding education into oppression, presenting and explaining them to mean the class process. Result: changes have occurred in human practice which are nothing other than continual reformulations of the cultural process of education whose guiding threads are those determinist and conflationist theories. Politics, too, has been reformulated to mean competition for power--a process that tends toward oppression even if unintended. The class process itself has either been denied existence in contemporary society or inessentialized vis-a-vis education and oppression, leaving it untouched in the process of changes in education and oppression. This study rests on an alternative methodological standpoint with respect to how education, oppression and class are related, and how they might be removed. Using alternative Marxian theory, whose logic is overdetermination, I present and explain these three distinct and different processes and their relationships. The method of overdetermination understands the processes of education, oppression, and class to be mutually and contradictorily related. Its political implications, which this thesis tries to accentuate as having a promise in achieving freedom and justice, are that changes must simultaneously occur in education, oppression, and class processes. Following this viewpoint, overdetermination believes a different set of processes will constitute a free and just society. Those processes are politics, classlessness, and non-indoctrinational education.
Subject Area
Education philosophy|Adult education|Education
Recommended Citation
Nfila, Badziyili Baathuli, "Mutual and contradictory relationships among education, oppression, and class processes: An overdeterminist theoretical standpoint" (1993). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9316699.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9316699