Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

106 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
This is an idealized situation, a normative goal that educators can strive to achieve in their
classrooms. In the classroom, the teacher has a “more than equal” role and the authority of greater
knowledge about the subject. In which case it is doubly important for the teacher to beware of
becoming a “dominating participant.” Due to structural inequities in society, people will be able to
engage in “critical rational discourse” at different levels and in different contexts. By striving for
the ideal speech situation; the settlement of disagreements through communicative rationality;
and a pedagogical practice informed by the goals, Habermas implicates all of society in a
normative call to come up with solutions to structural inequity. This in turn reaffirms Habermas’s
fundamental belief in the democratic process. Indeed, Pusey (1987) characterizes Habermas’s
concept of democracy “as a process of shared learning” (p. 120).
What, then, is the role of a university, specifically, in a democracy? In Toward a Rational
Society (1970) Habermas details the relationship of the university to democracy. The role of the
university consists of four concurrent tasks that resonate with Habermas’s earlier conception of
knowledge interests. First, research at a university pursues the technical mastery of nature and the
production of new generations of scientists. Second, the university is a place where students learn
practical knowledge, cultural knowledge, which prepares them for life in modern society as well
as provide the “extracurricular” but necessary knowledge for a profession (like quick decision
making skills for a future doctor). Third is to produce, interpret, and pass on the “cultural tradition
of society.” And, finally, the university is a place of development of political consciousness
(pp. 1–3).
Habermas claims that, in Germany during the 1960s, the university system faces a crisis. In
his eyes, the university was pulled in different directions by the technical knowledge interest and
emancipatory knowledge interests. On the one hand the university was increasingly stressing the
importance of developing technical knowledge for industrial applications. On the other hand,
the university was increasingly oriented to the politicization of students in the post-War era.
However, the university, as an institution, remained unchanged in organization since the Middle
Ages. Habermas presents this quandary as having two different solutions. The university could
either retreat into depoliticized, factory-like knowledge production or else the university could
“assert itself within the democratic tradition” (p. 6). Either way, the university has to change its
structure. Habermas’s belief in the democratic tradition leads him to “substantiate [his] vote for
this second possibility by trying to demonstrate the affinity and inner relation of the enterprise of
knowledge on the university level to the democratic form of decision-making” (p. 6).
Habermas reinforces what he considers democracy. It isn’t the formal political apparatus of
modern welfare states, instead he argues for political decision making that is in a “Kantian
manner.” This means that “only reason should have force” and that consensus is arrived in a
discussion free of coercion (p. 7). Kantian and Habermasian reason is not purpose-driven; it is
based on reflection in the tradition of Enlightenment philosophy. In the context of the university,
across all disciplines, Habermas call for a “philosophical enlightenment” that “illustrate[s] a selfreflection
of the sciences in which the latter become critically aware of their own presuppositions”
(p. 8). This self-reflection within research traditions and the pedagogical process will yield
more critical and complex ways of understanding the relation between different subjects and
courses of inquiry. This also brings new “continuity” to the university campus: “critical argument
serves in the end only to disclose the commingling of basic methodological assumptions and
action-orienting self-understanding. If this is so, then no matter how much the self-reflection
of the sciences and the rational discussion of political decisions differ and must be carefully
distinguished, they are still connected by the common form or critical inquiry” (p. 10). Further,
Habermas argues that only through this reflection process can the university system achieve the
three goals that transcend the technical or instrumental goal of advancing the science of industry.
A university in a democracy, then, becomes a site for the rigorous advancement of critical