W. E. B. Du Bois was not a critical theorist and was not influenced by the Frankfurt School. Indeed, a significant portion of his scholarly work was produced before the development of critical theory. Nevertheless, Du Bois is one of the earliest figures promoting many of the same ideas that animate both critical theory and critical pedagogy. On many topics his ideas are still profoundly relevant and instructive for those seeking to develop an evolving critical pedagogy and a racially sensitive critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century. For these reasons we include him as an indispensable figure in the pantheon of scholars contributing to critical scholarship and action. His history of the slave trade written while he was a doctoral student in the 1890s is still viewed as one of the smartest and most comprehensive studies of the topic. Indeed, his scholarship on a variety of topics will inform critical pedagogists for generations to come. The extensive and prescient work of Du Bois on education alone places him in the position of forerunner of critical pedagogy. Understanding that schooling should ground itself on a transformative vision of the society, we want to construct rather than simply reinforce the social arrangements of the status quo. Du Bois argued that the all-black schools of his time should aim to develop the latent power of students. Such students will become, he argued, people of “power, of thought—who know whither civilization is tending and what it means”(Du Bois, 1973, p. 14). Thus empowered, such black students—no matter how dramatic their disempowerment—gain the ability to resist politically, socially and economically by acting in solidarity with one another. Influenced by Du Bois, the prominent African American scholar Cornel West (1993) would pick up on this theme nearly a century later as he maintained that educators must develop the power of discernment among oppressed students. A powerful analytic moment is produced, West concluded in the spirit of Du Bois, when minority students gain a deep grasp of their present condition in light of the past. Such a moment highlights the ability of productive power to mitigate the effects of oppressive social structures by subjugated individuals’ capacity to make meaning, interpret, and produce knowledge. African Americans, Du Bois maintained, had been situated as the “other”by slavery. In this position they had been stripped of their cultural consciousness. A worthy education would restore self-consciousness, selfrealization, and self-respect. It would allow black people to see themselves through their own eyes instead of solely through the eyes of white people—as in traditional forms of education. Du Bois’s education was, in the language of critical theory, an emancipatory pedagogy with insights for the education of African Americans and all peoples in the contemporary era. A careful reading of Du Bois’s work reveals numerous parallels with what would come to be called critical pedagogy. For decades, white scholars viewed Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, for example, as little more than an interesting description of black culture for a white reading audience. A more informed analysis reveals that the author constructs an unprecedented and carefully argued treatise on the nature of consciousness, selfconsciousness, power, freedom, and resistance to oppression. These are the bread and butter issues of critical pedagogy—and Du Bois addresses them in ways that still hold profound insights into their complexity and enactment within a complex world. He well understood the need to view events in larger and diverse contexts, as illustrated by his work connecting race to European colonialism and the world economic system. In this framework his book The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896) is a classic. Long before the advent of critical multiculturalism and critical multicultural education (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1997), Du Bois understood the inseparability of race and class. In the 1890s he asserted that ghettoization is not the creation of poor African Americans but of social, political, and economic forces operating far away from the scene of the crime. He pointed out the existence of structural and institutional racism seventy years before the concepts were understood in mainstream sociology. Recognizing the folly of social Darwinist arguments made in the nineteenth century that attempts to help the poor are counterproductive, Du Bois called for the “democratization of industry,” a concept that would later be called economic democracy. Proponents of economic democracy contend that political democracy cannot exist until wealth is more equally distributed (Kincheloe, 1999). In a neo-social Darwinist era, Du Bois’s “democratization of industry” is as important a concept today as it was in the 1890s. In his concept of “double consciousness,” Du Bois argued that if subjugated peoples are to survive they must develop an understanding of those who attempt to dominate them. In this context they understand the mechanisms of oppression and the ways they are deployed in mundane, everyday situations for best effect. This double consciousness or second sight is the ability to see oneself through the perception of others. It is involves the ability to see what mainstream society sees and to see as well from vantage points outside the mainstream. This Du Boisian concept is central to critical pedagogy. A pedagogy of second sight is grounded on the understanding that a critically educated person knows more than just the validated knowledge of the dominant culture—she understands a variety of perspectives about the issues she studies. Subjugated perspectives, of course, are given high priority in this critical context. Du Bois was also far ahead of the curve in the study of whiteness and white privilege. Early in his career Du Bois wrote about white privilege, specifying it in relation to the public deference granted whites, their unimpeded admittance to all public functions, the tendency of police officers to be drawn from the ranks of white people, their lenient treatment in court, and their access to the best schools. Whites in the U.S. drew what Du Bois labeled the unearned “wages of whiteness.”Such benefits comforted them with the knowledge that no matter how far they fell down the socioeconomic ladder, they were still white. No matter how alienating and exploitative their work lives might be, they were still not slaves. Around Du Bois’s work the whiteness scholarship that emerged in the 1990s coalesced. Such work drew on Du Bois’s insights to induce white people to understand their privilege and listen to the wisdom of those people that whiteness has often silenced. In the spirit of Du Bois, whiteness scholars asked whites to see themselves as the oppressed have historically viewed them in order to gain a new frame of reference on power and oppression in the society (Roediger, 1991; Kincheloe, Steinberg, Rodriguez, and Chennault, 1998; Rodriguez and Villaverde, 2000). Du Bois also anticipated the work of poststructural theorists such as Michel Foucault in the area of genealogy and subjugated knowledges—both of which are central concerns of critical pedagogy. To understand ourselves as black people, Du Bois wrote in 1946, we must understand African history and social development. African knowledges, he argued, constitute one of the most sophisticated worldviews the planet has witnessed. Foucault’s concept of genealogy follows Du Bois’s line, maintaining that excluded contents and meanings emerge in a state of insurrection against dominant knowledges. In this context genealogy traces the formation of human consciousness (subjectivity). As Du Bois delineated in relation to African American consciousness, Foucault’s genealogy helps us see ourselves at various points in the web of reality, ever confined by our placement but emancipated by our appreciation of our predicament. Thus, empowered by our knowledge, we begin to understand and disengage ourselves from the power narratives that have laid the basis for the dominant way of seeing. In the context of subjugated knowledges—knowledges that have been erased by dominant culture as primitive and/or invalidated by science—Du Bois viewed the African and African American past as a storehouse of insight for individuals struggling for equality. The methods used by our black ancestors, Du Bois posited, to fight slavery and oppression can be put to use in present struggles against racial tyranny. The blueprints for the black future, he theorized, must be built on a base of our problems, dreams and frustrations: they will not appear out of thin air or be based exclusively on the experience of the Other. In the context of subjugated knowledge and genealogy, Du Bois understood many decades before white analysts that the black past holds out great kinetic insurgent energy because it served the political function of destabilizing the existing order by revealing its social construction and its horrors. In a celebration of subjugated educational knowledge, Du Bois wrote about traditional African education. In West Africa, he contended, education began very early as children accompanied their parents in their daily tasks. Early on children learned how to sow, reap, and hunt; young children learned the wisdom and folklore of the tribe; they learned the geography of the region. At the onset of puberty boys and girls learned about sex and emerged from this period with a graduation celebration that allowed them to sit on the tribal council with their elders. West African education, Du Bois concluded, was completely integrated with everyday life. No education existed in this context that was not concurrently usable for earning a living and for living a good life. In the spirit of the critical celebration of subjugated knowledge, Du Bois argued that American education could learn lessons from Africa (McSwine, 1998). Indeed, Africans and African Americans in their genius had a message for the world, he proclaimed. Du Bois’s paradigm-busting body of work has been left out of the critical canon far too long. The critical pedagogy that I promote here embraces Du Bois as one of the most important architects of critical pedagogy in general and in relation to race and racism in particular. He created an alternate paradigm for sociology and history that was suppressed until after his death. He even anticipated the critique of positivism—delineated in Chapter 1—in the early decades of the twentieth century. Contrary to the work of eminent sociologists and historians of the time, Du Bois wrote, human experience is not machine-like and scholarship cannot be disinterested and neutral, for it is always informed by particular, albeit hidden, values. He even anticipated my “innovative” work in multi-method research (Kincheloe, 2001; Kincheloe and Berry, 2004). Indeed, what many contemporary scholars have called “bricolage,”Du Bois employed in 1899 in his compelling work, The Philadelphia Negro. In this study, Du Bois employed research strategies as varied as historiography, survey research, ethnography, urban mapping, urban ecology, geography, criminology, and demography. Du Bois was never afraid to engage in research for the purpose of furthering social action—a central dimension of knowledge work in critical pedagogy. Scoffing at mainstream scholars’ claims of disinterestedness in their work, Du Bois set the standard for emancipatory forms of research long before the term was used by the Frankfurt School. Not surprisingly, Du Bois’s work was suppressed for decades and considered by many as a form of dangerous knowledge. No critical pedagogy can be complete or free itself from charges of being a white discourse without the towering presence of Du Bois. His work serves as a foundation for the work of critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century (Du Bois, 1973; Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1997; McSwine, 1998; Monteiro, 1995; Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, 1993). Reference: Kincheloe, J. Critical Pedagogy, Peter Lang PrimerLink Reference: Kincheloe, J. Critical Pedagogy, Peter Lang Primer - Amazon Link