Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

164 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
also the Cold War and McCarthyism in the United States, and the vigorous and often ruthless
“counterrevolutionary” activities of conservative social forces during the waxing of the struggle
over civil rights in the United States. Here he argues that there are forms of behavior, of belief, of
action in society that ought not be tolerated by progressively conscious individuals—and deserve
to be met with concerted, deliberate, and perhaps violent, protest. “False” tolerance refers to the
toleration (and so legitimization) of areas in our culture that in fact are repressive, even though
they argue for themselves as progressive in the name of pluralism (and often God) and relativity
of opinion; these areas offend the telos of true tolerance, which supports diversity, inclusion,
progression, and evolution.
But who has the capacity, and is qualified, to make such distinctions? Here is a central point for
educational psychology: everyone in the maturity of his or her faculties. The distinction between
repression and progress appears to be a value judgment to the alienated mind, repressively tolerant,
but in contrast is empirically rational and verifiable to the mature human being. The answer to
the dictatorship, to the fascism of indoctrinating ideology and repressive superego, is the mature
human consciousness, intolerant of repressive factors and contradictions masked by propaganda
and Orwellian manipulation. The real crisis we face in the modern era is that of a closed society in
which such maturity exists only as abstract possibility. If there were lasting human developments
to issue from the Age of Enlightenment, they grow from the presumption that persons are rational,
with access to universal truths and their own, direct experience of their conditions of existence.
If society renders this presumption false, then “Enlightenment” is at best a lie.
Marcuse argued in “Repressive Tolerance” that we must be intolerant of the words, images,
and processes that feed false consciousness. Education cannot be value-free, except through a
repressive sleight of hand. Previously “neutral” aspects of learning must be understood as crucial
and political in both style and substance. The liberating education is, again, empirically rational;
it is radically critical. The student, Marcuse believes, must be able to think in the “opposite”
direction of repressive forces; the student must be able to truly inquire into his or her concrete
circumstances and the reality of his or her struggle. Education in general—and philosophy in
particular—plays the progressive role in Marcuse’s social theory by developing concepts that are
subversive of prevailing ideologies, helping to develop imagination and the language of critique
and possibility. Without such language, imagination, or critique, the real autonomous subject
remains bound by abstractions, ideals, and representations, divorced from its true needs.
In his earlier work from the mid-1960s, One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse addressed most
specifically (and what some criticize as pessimistically) the terms of this occlusion. Here he also
addressed the two main historical predictions of inevitability in orthodox Marxism—that now
seemed to be concrete improbabilities: the rise of the proletariat to power and the fatal crisis of
capitalism. As he argues, explaining how Marxist thought must grow to include contemporary
conditions: one-dimensionally, all thought conforms to the preexisting patterns of the dominant
culture. “Bidimensional” thought, in contradistinction, represents “what could be”; it signifies
human capacity and realization of critical subjecthood, the possibility for transcendence, subject
as distinct from the dominating object. One-dimensional thought smoothes over differences and
distinction, it quells radicalism and subversion through enclosing the possibilities for thought.
History is relieved of its contentious concrete character, replaced by myths. One-dimensional
persons have short and opaque memories, for both history and their own true needs. Both have
been falsely administered by a totalizing society. Authentic individuality itself has become a myth,
rather than a fact of existence. Human beings have largely lost touch with their capacities to look
beyond current conditions and conditioned “reality,” and to perceive alternative dimensions of
possibility.
But rather than deeply pessimistic, One-Dimensional Man might instead (and has been) read
as a critical manifesto. It set the stage for a series of Marcuse’s articles and books—including