Digital Education Manchester

By Susan Robertson

My colleague, Jason Beech (University of Melbourne), and I would like to share some reflections on the importance of revisiting the social theories we use in a paper of ours just out – The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Post-Industrial Learner: Contemporary Capitalism, Education and Critique, for a Special Issue (SI) in the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.  

The SI ‘Critical Times’ invited potential authors to re-engage with critical theory and critique in relation to education. We jumped at this invitation in the context of a wider set of debates that have been circulating about critical theory and its relevance to the contemporary moment, on the one hand, and how we might read the OECD’s recent turn to what appear to be a humanistic set of concepts, like well-being and happiness, on the other.  The shift by the OECD in its 2030 future of education and skills agenda; from skills and human capital to agency, well-being and happy schools, deserves close scrutiny; a challenge we were up for.   

It is important to point out that critical theory is not one thing, with one voice, though the best-known strand is the Frankfurt School launched in the 1930s. And even here, there are important differences between the generations of the Frankfurt School. Earlier writers included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin; a second generation Jurgen Habermas and Axel Honneth; some suggest a third generation that takes in the work of Hartmut Rosa. What connects them is a broad commitment to an interdisciplinary research program (proposed by Horkheimer in 1931) combining philosophy and social theory with psychology, political economy, and importantly cultural analysis – something that had been missing in the Marxist tradition. The overall aim was to provide an encompassing interpretation of social reality as a whole – as “social totality,” to use a concept central to the Marxist tradition.   

And given as we note in our paper societies change, then our theories of capitalist societies must be scrutinised, reviewed, and redeveloped if they are to remain in the critical theory tradition. At the same time, we need to be attentive to the limitations of our theoretical tools. In this regard, writers like Said have pointed to blindspots in the broad work of the Frankfurt School around race, coloniality and a tendency to universalisms.  Others, like Johann Arnason, have called for critical theory to downsize its ambitions and claims.  Broadly we agree. 

In our paper we develop our argument in four parts. First, we engage with critical theory in relation to its own internal critique; to develop a more reflexive, situated, and contingent critique. Second, we outline the broad contours of the empirical case, the OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030 to crack open its assumptions and make visible the forces at play; the rise of the digital, immaterial labour and arguments around transformations on the nature of capitalism as a result.  All of this, of course, means that education systems – as sites of social reproduction as well as production, are under pressure to also change. Third, we show that despite the appearance of a humanistic turn by the OECD with the use of concepts such as agency and well-being, it is rather adapting its long-standing economic agenda to respond to shifts in labour in contemporary capitalism.  We were particularly taken by the relevance of Milan Kundera’s novel for our purposes – to shed light on the paradoxes and contradictions, inclusions and exclusions, presences and absences, at work. Key here, we point out, is that the ‘immaterial’ labour of the digital worker needs to be linked to the material labour of workers in the gig economy, and the very real materiality of the digital’s impact on the environment.  

The really important work for critical theory is not simply to offer a critique, but to then think through what might be done to set in motion a set of changes that make a difference to learners. Critical theorists call this context-transcendence. The question for us then is how creative cognitive labour might be turned toward a normative project of social transformation. This would include the development of a critical digital literacy that stepped outside of tech boosterism and instead enabled learners to see the link between contemporary digitally capitalism and big concerns over climate change and environmental degradation.  

Taken together, we hope our paper makes a modest theoretical, substantive, and normative contribution to a critical theory reading of the OECD’s Futures of Education and Skills 2030 policy work.