Empowerment Knowledge, Power, and Culture

Empowerment Knowledge, power, and culture are interrelated. Knowledge is power: it is a source of cultural capital that aids in the creation of elite classes of individuals who possess the skills necessary to gain economic and political might. Using Marxist theory, Almeida Moraes shows how schools are instruments of capitalistic culture. Schools perpetuate class stratification by tracking students, by emphasizing some forms of knowledge over others, and stressing some methodologies over others.

Schools are often viewed as institutions that churn out the next generation of subservient workers, too: turning some students into the elite controlling class and others into the large mass of laborers (Almeida Moraes). Similarly, Giroux notes how culture is directly related to power. The dominant culture maintains political, social, and economic clout.

Giroux notes that "youth are constructed as subjects and subject to relationships of power within and across a variety of public spaces." Early in their lives students are molded, disempowered because they either conform to social norms or are labeled forever as deviants. As primary social institutions, schools foster the relationship between knowledge, power, and culture. If knowledge is power, then schools have the potential ability to bestow power on some children but not others. Schools possess a sensitive and special responsibility: not just to teach facts but to empower.

To empower students, educators and the schools they work for must redefine their roles. If knowledge is power then knowledge is also empowering. Humanistic theory offers one of the most sensible ways schools can change from disempowering institutions to empowering ones. Humanistic educators "strive to provide the kind of education that, on the one hand, liberates their students from the fetters of ignorance, caprice, prejudice, alienation, and false-consciousness, and, on the other, empowers them to actualize their human potentialities and lead autonomous, full, and fulfilling human lives," (Aloni, 1999).

Both Marxist and humanistic theories offer means to transform pedagogy. Marxist theories show how schools are instrumental in reinforcing -- or doing away with -- class stratification. Humanistic theories show how teachers can lead through example, empowering each of their students by encouraging diversity and different ways of seeing the world. Educators should "set personal example in the art of living as well as to create at their schools a pedagogical atmosphere of care, trust, support, dialogue, respect, fairness, tolerance, inquiry, freedom, commitment, responsibility and reciprocity." (Aloni 1999).

Students are empowered when they are respected for their individual differences and their unique backgrounds. They are empowered when they are challenged without being belittled. Educators empower their students by encouraging active inquiry and creativity, refusing to squelch either in the name of curriculum requirements or assessment standards. Students are empowered when their teachers recognize their talents and abilities and encourage their students to maximize them. Schools can become agents of empowerment by allowing teachers wider girth in their curriculum and their pedagogical approach.

Agents of empowerment allow a large degree of freedom and show students how to develop personal responsibility. Ultimately schools are agents of empowerment when they teach students the real tools they need to thrive and succeed in the dominant culture, revealing the codes, norms, and mores of that culture. Empowerment is unbiased and egalitarian. No school can be an agent of empowerment if it fails to question why some social groups continue to have more wealth and political clout than others.

Students need to question those overarching social realities and educators need to help students ask those questions. Too often, schools are agents of disempowerment. Students who arrive to class eager and enthusiastic may emerge disillusioned by the end of the year because their grades did not reflect their ability to learn. Assessment methods are disempowering: they confer power onto those who already possessed the cultural capital.

For example, students raised in highly literate households will be far more likely to excel in literacy skills than students raised in less literate households or in households in which English is not the first language. Educators disempower their students and themselves when they lose interest in questioning the methods they use or the material they teach. Curriculum that fails to address social ills, glossing over problematic areas of history, is profoundly disempowering.

Discrimination, of race or gender, is the most obvious source of disempowerment but blatant discrimination is relatively rare in 21st century American schools. Subtle forms of discrimination remain extant, however. Impoverished schools cannot hope to empower their students and therefore public policy must change to emphasize education far more in the federal budget. Prioritizing education will endow schools with the power they need to change deplorable social realities such as the growing income disparity in the United States.

Researching different methods of teaching students and basing pedagogy more on empirical research than on meeting assessments criteria are also ways schools can become agents of empowerment and positive change. The role schools play varies according with level of schooling. During early childhood education, empowerment relates more to how teachers set personal examples of the "art of living," (Aloni, 1999). Emphasis is given to developing creative and critical thinking skills, which will later be applied to the difficult social and political issues those same students will encounter later in their education.

Educators should always empower their students by showing them how to think, and not what to think. The theories of Dewey and others who emphasize pragmatism and hands-on learning will also empower students to discover knowledge on their own rather than having it spoon-fed to them by disempowerred teachers working within an overly rigid, hierarchical system. Learning how to think for themselves, students are profoundly empowered. Marxist theory offers one of the most universally empowering methods to view the role of schools as social institutions.

As Almeida Moraes states, the current education system perpetuates a "bourgeois hegemony," that can only be broken down through the creation of a "new.