Emancipatory labor educators seek to facilitate among workers an understanding of their common experiences of exploitation as well as their collective power to transform workplace and social conditions. Emancipatory educators have thus stressed the need for working class unity, yet there are significant differences and conflicts among workers. Can the goal of promoting unity be reconciled with the recognition of differences? Critical postmodernist theorists believe that their notions of "difference" and "border crossing" can reconcile this tension. However, an analysis of the relevance of these notions in three labor education contexts reveals their limited value for emancipatory labor educators. abor education programs have become increasingly diverse in terms of content and method in recent years (Gray and Kombluh, 1990), but the predominant type of labor education continues to be the so-called &dquo;tool&dquo; courses. Based on what Aronowitz (1990) has termed an &dquo;instru-
A basic element of postmodernist theorizing in education is the critique of essentialistic modes of social analysis, including reproductionist theories that seek to specify how schooling is structurally linked to the capitalist socio-economic system. Critical postmodernists, notably Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, and Stanley Aronowitz, agree that reproductionist theories are problematic and contend that an anti-essentialistic approach is more fruitful. I argue, however, that their version of anti-essentialism pre-supposes certain false dualisms, and is thus fundamentally awed. Furthermore, their notion of postmodernity-which is based in part on anti-essentialism-fails to adequately characterize key developments in contemporary capitalism. In summary, critical postmodernism does not help us 'name the system' as part of the effort to develop a more viable theory of radical education. A structural, reproductionist theory that takes into account local struggles and 'non-class' phenomena remains an essential part of an emancipatory project to transform existing institutions.
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