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In his 11th thesis on Feuerbach, Karl Marx (1845) famously urged philosophers to suspend their efforts to understand the world and to try instead to change it. I am not the first to say that a good way to begin to understand the world is to try to change it. Especially when such changes threaten those in power, abstract theories, scholarly inquiries, dispassionate analyses, and critical interpretations of social reality can quickly provoke adverse and all too concrete responses. When those same educators attempt to exercise their academic freedom, to apply their knowledge to fulfilling the aspirational values of liberal democratic society, and to become transformational change agents, the “iron fist” within the “velvet glove” of civility can be quickly revealed.
This is not, of course, to imply that harsh reality immediately reinvents sensitive Arts, no-nonsense Business, hard-nosed Engineering, punctilious Nursing teachers, and others as Sparticist insurrectionists overnight … or ever. It does not even imagine that intellectual workers in science, technology, the creative arts, the helping professions, and other highly skilled occupations will replace the industrial proletariat as the new “vanguard” of social change as has been cautiously intimated by a few imaginative renegade or revisionist Marxists from Roger Garaudy (1970) to André Gorz (1989).
Few of my colleagues outside (or even within) the “liberal arts” have read Marx intensely or regularly pour over even mildly socialist screeds. While euphemistically “liberal” or even “progressive,” most do not readily self-identify as politically radical and some retain a subtle bourgeois bias against “blue-collar” work and labor militancy. They prefer to imagine themselves as professional in training, non-confrontational in demeanor, and possessed of a selfless and painfully sincere love of teaching as an authentic vocation. They put the perceived interests of their students above their own needs and ambitions. They feel sympathy and demonstrate symbolic solidarity with the toiling masses. They do not aspire to lead the revolutionary struggle.
Generally, transformational learning is encouraged at the individual, not the social level. Elevating awareness and sharing profound insights are matters of personal growth and Maslovian development, not class conflict and revolutionary praxis. In terms of promoting truly transformative teaching and learning, teachers traffic in cognitive, affective, and behavioral objectives. They are certainly not limited to Marxist (or any other grand theoretical) narratives and would, in fact, be horrified by any such attribution of doctrinaire attitudes. In fact, the chief architects and most earnest advocates of transformational education focus on “self-understanding,” altering “personal belief systems,” and changing “individual lifestyles” (Cranton, 1996, 1997, 2006; Cranton & King, 2003; Dirkx, Mezirow & Cranton, 2006) ― matters that the most ardent Marxists of my acquaintance would contemptuously dismiss as bourgeois indulgences, affectations, diversions and conceits.
Since, however, successful transformational teaching also involves changing “frames of reference by critically reflecting on their assumptions and beliefs and consciously making and implementing plans that bring about new ways of defining their worlds” (Mezirow, 1995), progress from self-referential emotional understanding into collective, strategic, political action can be contemplated.