A Cognitive Route to Social Justice: Mark Bracher’s Radical Pedagogies

Early in the last decade, while others were debating the merits and politics of ideological critique and critical pedagogy, Mark Bracher was unabashedly pushing for value-laden pedagogies. Yes, he argued, some values are better and more worthy of teaching than others, and educators need to teach those values and be confident in them. Bracher drew upon psychoanalytical theory and criticism to argue for social change through the education of the emotions and student identity structures. In his new book, Literature and Social Justice, Bracher builds upon these arguments and turns to cognitive science to help effect the changes that cultural studies pedagogies have yet to deliver. He labels his approach “schema criticism,” in his words, “a method for activating, maximizing, and extending the schema-altering processes that certain literary texts are capable of initiating but are rarely able, by themselves, to bring to completion” (288). In his view, literature really can make us better people and help change the world if we are purposeful in using it to inform how we read and understand others. This is a promising approach that risks making less directive teachers uncomfortable in conflating education with “cognitive retraining.” With this proposal Bracher brings cognitive studies into greater conversation with the humanities and prompts worthwhile questions about the means and ends of education for social justice.

Dissatisfaction with dominant forms of cultural studies and social criticism in the humanities, especially in literary studies, serves as an impetus for Bracher’s project. He cites social criticism, new historicism, and psychoanalysis as unsuccessful in bringing about the social changes hoped for by practitioners—despite their tireless work in identifying and exposing the injustices and falsities of racism, sexism, income inequality, and other social ills and forms of oppression. “These efforts have rarely, if ever produced the desired results, however, and there is good evidence that they are incapable of doing so,” Bracher writes. “The reason is that faulty knowledge and beliefs about other people involve more than falsifiable propositions that are susceptible to correction by rational argument and evidence” (4). As a corrective, Bracher offers schema criticism, which focuses on the cognitive processes that produce faulty knowledge. Bracher promises a more effective pedagogy:

The key truth about power that we need to understand and address is the way it operates in, on, and through people’s person-schemas, by getting them to (mis)perceive and (mis)judge other people in ways that lead them to experience unjustified emotions and engage in unjust actions toward them. Such understanding is valuable not as an end in itself but rather as a basis for constructing strategies and practices for correcting faulty and unjust information processing. The key intervention is the fostering of person-schemas that enable people to achieve more adequate understanding of other people, which in turn inspires more appropriate emotions and more just actions toward them.

(294–95)

This dissatisfaction with prevailing social criticisms and the desire to promote more just understandings of others have been ongoing projects for Bracher. In looking to cognitive studies for his means and answers, Bracher appears to have found a stronger mechanism for initiating the changes he has sought. He promises a methodology rooted in evidence-based science. Although there are times when his schema criticism seems to overlap strongly with more traditional social criticism, except in emphasis, that is part of his point. By emphasizing the cognitive processes, Bracher is attempting to inter-cede in how problematic thinking originates and operates.

Traditional social criticism works at the propositional level, by making counterarguments against oppressive social positions and beliefs. Schema criticism attempts to target the cognitive processes that underlie such beliefs. This targeting of cognitive processes is at the heart of Bracher’s project. “Literature has the potential—albeit largely unrealized—to produce lasting, socially transformative psychological changes in readers,” Bracher argues to open the book (ix). He bases his approach primarily upon schema therapy, learning theory, moral philosophy, and psychology. The...