The Power of Critical Theory: Liberating Adult Learning and Teaching (review)

A few years ago on a job interview, after I had spent half an hour outlining a typology theory I had created, a colleague asked the question I always dreaded to hear: "Your theory is interesting, but how can you use it to make change?" He was not content with my reply that the theory was descriptive rather than prescriptive but could lead to others asking different questions about higher education theory and practice. "But what use is it?" I suggested that I was a self-styled nuevo-neo-Marxist and that, in good neo-Marxist tradition, I was more interested in questioning and analyzing than in directly proffering solutions. The professor nodded, looking as if he had made me admit something he suspected and did not particularly like.

Perhaps if The Power of Critical Theory had existed then, I could have responded to my colleague with an answer that connected analysis, ideology, and practice. Stephen Brookfield has produced a magnum opus, built from decades of teaching graduate and nontraditional students about critical theory and pedagogy. The Power of Critical Theory is a thorough survey of the major authors of social and cultural theory, from Marx to Fromm, Habermas to Gramsci, J. S. Mills to C. W. Mills. Besides the usual suspects (at least in adult education applications of critical theory), Brookfield also includes Cornell West, bell hooks, Herbert Marcuse, and Angela Davis. Inherent in such an ambitious text is a confounding complexity: how to make accessible, let alone comprehensible, a century of thought about race, class, gender, sexuality, economics, cultural and personal development, liberation, power, and pedagogy.

Brookfield's purpose is ostensibly to respond to a student criticism familiar to many of us who attempt to teach critical theory: "I still don't see why we had to read all this critical theory. What's Gramsci got to do with adult education?" (p. vii). This book is an expansion of Brookfield's lectures and at times reads as such. It is filled with lengthy (but really well-chosen) quotations, helpful interpretations, and examples of points of connection between the concepts and common experiences of educators of graduate students and other adults. But if students are the primary audience for this book, I fear that many without a background in critical studies will be lost amid the ideas, language, and history of critical theory; moreover, I am not confident that most adult educators will have the preparation to understand fully the text without further explication.

Brookfield's immediate continuation of his goals for the book is contrary; he states that his "overarching purpose is to try to convince adult educators that critical theory should be considered seriously as a perspective that can help them make some sense of the dilemmas, contradictions, and frustrations they experience in their work" (p. vii). Indeed, much of Brookfield's voice in the text vacillates between an apology for Marxism and a demonstration of how Marxism and progressive notions of liberty are linked. Brookfield displays the hope inherent in both, which is often lost on those who do not see that criticism implies both reality and ideal. "The deep cynicism about politics and corporations that pollsters pessimistically report can, from the viewpoint of a critical theory of adult learning, be seen as a hopeful sign, as a giant teachable moment for ideology critique" (81).

As this quotation demonstrates, Brookfield appears to have a third goal for the text: direct social and political commentary from a critical-education perspective. Brookfield comments on the rise of Orwellian language since September 11, bashes the U.S. Republican party, and decries those who would rule critical thinking out of hand due to "Marxaphobia." While I do not disagree with him, the tone of the criticism is strikingly more stringent than his tone when, say, explicating Foucault.

Brookfield demonstrates links among political epistemology, critical analysis, and daily events and experiences, striving to...