the interests of such a community, nor provides any rekrents for indicating
what particular kinds of community and forms of subjectid~ar e
worth fighting for,
In the end what most conservative, radicd, and liberal educational discourses
manage to establish are either reactionary or incomplete approaches
to developing a dialectical view of atlthority and schooling.
Conservatives celebrate authority, linking it to popular expressions of
everyday life, but in doing so they exp~sasn d support =actionay and
undemocratic interests, On the other hand, radical educators tend to
equate authority with fonns of domination or the loss of freedom and
consequently. fail to dewlop a conceptual: category for constructing a
programxn&ic fanpage of hope and sl-ruggle. rib their credit, they do
manage to pro~dea language of critique that investigates in concmte
terms how sch001 authority promotes specific forms of oppression. Liberals,
in general, proGde the most dialectical view of authority but fail to
apply it in a concrete way so as to interrogate the dpamics of domination
and freedom as they are expressed thin the asymmetrical relations
of power and privilege that characterize various aspects of school life
It is at this poiu that I waw to move to a more programmatic discourse
on authority* fn doing so, Z tvant to appropriate the mast progressive
elements in a theory of authority from the political traditions I have
discussed above, At the same time, I want to construct a rationale and
new problematic for making an emancipatory view of authority a central
category in the development uf a critical theory of schooling.
Authority and Schooling: A Rationale
It is important for educators to develop a dialectical view of authority for
a number ofreasons, First, the issue of authority serves as both the referent
and the ideal for public schooling. That is, as a Eorm oEl@timation
and practice necessary to the ongoing ideologicd and materid production
and renewal of society, the concept of authority provokes educators
to take a criticalty pragmatic Sance regarding the purpose and function
that shooling is to play in any given socielgr. As a form of legitimation,
authority is inextricably related to a particular vision of what schools
should be as part of a wider community and society; In other words, authority
makes both visible and problematic the presuppositions that
give meaning to the officially sanctioned discourses and values that legitimate
what Foucault has cdled particular "mtzteriat, historical conditions
of possibility [along with] their governing systems of order, appropriation,
and exclusion."""
Second, the concept of authority raises issues about the ethical. and
political basis of schooling. That is, it calls into serious question the role
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