Rethinking Marxism

A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

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Bourgeois Ideology and Education: Subversion

through Pedagogy
by Steven Snow. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Elsa Wiehe

To cite this article: Elsa Wiehe (2020) Bourgeois Ideology and Education: Subversion through
Pedagogy, Rethinking Marxism, 32:2, 271-274, DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2020.1727252

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2020.1727252

Published online: 29 Apr 2020.

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 Reviews 271

Bourgeois Ideology and Education: Subversion through Pedagogy, by

Steven Snow. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Elsa Wiehe

The book Bourgeois Ideology and Education: Subversion through Pedagogy by

Steven Snow develops an approach to teaching students about bourgeois ideology,
focusing on uncovering Malthusian thinking and meritocracy. Pedagogical tools for
subversion include open and rational dialogue based on independent thinking and
analysis of facts; service learning as a means to reduce prejudice; and analysis of
literature to understand the lives of the poor. The book makes a timely contribution,
informing instructors in political science, political economy, sociology, or any field
committed to social justice.

Key Words: Bourgeois, Ideology, Pedagogy, Service Learning, Literature

In an era of rising hate, deepening inequalities, and fake news, truth has become a
relative term. The goal to help students acknowledge structural poverty, inequity,
and racism is thus an essential part of an engaged pedagogy that seeks social
justice. Indeed, as the title of Snow’s book indicates, this pedagogical project
becomes a subversive one. In the Gramscian sense, Bourgeois Ideology and Education:
Subversion through Pedagogy moors the instructor as an organic intellectual who tire-
lessly works to produce a new common sense for students. Copiously referencing lit-
erature in critical pedagogy; theoretically framed in Marxist, neo-Marxist, and
anarchist perspectives; and informed by the author’s reflections on his own teaching
practice, the book provides important insights to support teachers who are committed
to helping students see through the obfuscating veils of capitalist ideology. With this
central aim, Snow theorizes a pedagogical approach based on several tenets: indepen-
dent thinking and dialogue as a conduit for openness to new ideas, direct service
learning experiences that promote understanding of the less privileged, and exposure
to fictional narratives that enable emotional connections to the lives of the oppressed.
The introduction creatively reviews the learning process by associating with a
mental “app” the cognitive schemas we develop as we learn. The chapters that
follow are each anchored in conceptual or physical locations of the pedagogy
Snow articulates. Chapter 1 rightly opens with an exposé of bourgeois ideology as
a main force that pedagogy should seek to subvert; it is thus a tracing of the historical
developments of bourgeois ideology “in the air,” the set of Malthusian ideas about
the naturalness of unequal distribution of wealth and accompanying stereotypes
of the poor, which are firmly embedded into the political culture in the United
States to the point of appearing natural. Readers will appreciate his detailed
272 Wiehe

discussion of the force exerted by Malthusian thinking that the poor deserve their
poverty as given by God. Secular versions of this same narrative were developed
by Spencer and Sumner as a continuation of Malthusian capitalism and were
later captured by followers of Ayn Rand. The continued justification of these ideol-
ogies in public culture is that the poor are fundamentally to blame for their own in-
sufficiency and that cash assistance will only serve to increase poverty.
Underpinning this thinking, as Snow (2018, 22) rightly points out, is a stereotypical
and erroneous focus on the “culture of poverty,” a perspective that further degrades
the poor, along with the central role of sexuality as captured in the image of the
welfare queen, “the over-sexed woman on social assistance who has children
whom she fails to socialize.” Here, Snow mentions the centrality of African American
poverty in this well-established and deeply hurtful image, a comment on the salience
of racism and gender discrimination that is unfortunately too rare in a book that
could and should have centrally linked the intersection of class, race, and gender dis-
criminations as a set of interlocking oppressions. A further question to raise here is
whether the better entry point to critiquing bourgeois ideology is either the Malthu-
sian meritocratic and class-based perception of the working poor or else learning
about the economic base and the role of exploitation as a production of class.
Chapter 2 is by far the most interesting as its situation “in the classroom” will be
relevant to instructors across various contexts who are interested in unpacking the
role of myths in the construction of bourgeois ideology and, specifically, the idea of
meritocracy. To do so, Snow puts forth a psychological reading of the ways we—
instructors and students—are subject to myths, regardless of intellectual and polit-
ical positioning. Centrally, then, this chapter critiques the longstanding Marxist
framing of ideology as a force that supposedly muddies the viewpoints of the
working classes whose consciousnesses need to be liberated. Instead, Snow
(2018, 45) maintains, even instructors who think of themselves as above these
myths “might have similar patterns of thinking.” This examination analyzes the as-
sumptions around our knowledge positionality and, more precisely, is a rejection
of absolute truth. The pedagogical implications for Snow are to anarchically en-
courage students to think for themselves and challenge all forms of authoritative
knowledge, including that of the instructor. However interesting in its impulse
to promote critical inquiry and rational judgment, the underlying ontology is
worth recasting in a political-ethical light. Rejection of all claims to authority is
a stance that risks promoting a disillusioned relativism that throws out the
moral compass needed for students to understand the ethics of the political
project of rejecting capitalism and its associated oppressions. Several alternative
pedagogical angles—well supported in feminist theory (Ellsworth 1989), critical
pedagogy (Giroux 2010), and antiracist education research (Zembylas and Papami-
chael 2017)—show that there is no neutral place from which to teach. In critical
pedagogy, for instance, the instructors are not better than their students but
instead embrace their sociocultural situatedness in a transparent way. The key is
thus to harness the political-ethical aspects of social injustice and use these as
 Reviews 273

catalysts for student engagement and learning (hooks 1994). This approach is also
grounded in a very solid body of research in neuroscience on the role of emotions
as fundamentally part of rational thinking, as anchors for morality (Nussbaum
2003), and as conduits for the way the brain learns (Immordino-Yang 2016). There-
fore, instead of refuting all authoritative claims to knowledge, instructors should
lean into an ethical positionality that is self-reflective and transparent to students.
A final important point here is that Snow’s stance seems to assume that students
would not be aware of situations of oppression, which consequently assumes a
student archetype that is white, male, middle class, and unable to connect with
or have direct experience of intersecting oppressions.
It is no surprise that Malthusian thinking justifies right-wing assaults on the poor
and on welfare-state policies. However, chapter 3, “In the Community” denounces
the long history of disdain coming from the Left regarding charity toward the
poor. Specifically, it exposes Marx’s, Engels’, and Oscar Wilde’s perspectives that
charity work reduces workers’ motivation toward change, degrades the poor, and
helps the rich feel better about themselves. As an alternative way to practice
charity, Snow makes the case for service learning to engage students with groups
who are different from themselves in order to reduce prejudice. Snow describes
lessons learned from years of leading service-learning courses in different contexts.
Similar to the previous chapter, the lack of demographic details about his students
may lead readers to the assumption that his students are all from privileged back-
grounds. This critique notwithstanding, the chapter puts forth Allport’s (1954) valu-
able intergroup contact theory as a driving theoretical framework. Intergroup contact
theory postulates that biases and prejudices will be reduced with intergroup contact
if under certain conditions of equal status, common goals, intergroup cooperation,
and institutional support, with later research adding intergroup friendship as a con-
dition as well (Pettigrew 1997). While these conditions are hard to re-create, Snow ex-
plains that positive learning occurs as a result of community-based experiences, and
he describes a case of students who gained tutoring experience on behalf of a small
business while at the same time gaining understanding of larger issues of migration.
Chapter 4, grounded in the humanistic goals of promoting human cooperation
and empathy, uses literature “in the mind” as a tool toward transforming students’
consciousness. Indeed, as Snow importantly points out, literature may lower stu-
dents’ affective filters, providing low-risk situations for students to reflect on narra-
tives that bring them closer to the deep experiences of those in need. Ultimately,
literature may help students be more open to hear a political message that they
might be shut off to in other situations. Snow fittingly cautions that prescriptive lit-
erature, such as that called for by Lenin, closes students off through its didacticism.
He also points out research on the ways that using literature may backfire against its
political goal and cause the development of false empathy and an intensified knowl-
edge about how to oppress. Advocating for the use of nuanced novels as the most
effective form, Snow describes the plots of the stories he uses and the ways they
allow for opportunities to discuss capitalist ideology, a useful move for educators
274 Wiehe

who seek to incorporate similar literature toward similar ideology-unmasking ends.

For example, Snow narrates his instructional moves when introducing the concept of
ideology through Kuprin’s The Outrage: A True Story and then turns to an analysis of
several of Chekov’s novels to show the ways literature can teach students about social
hierarchies, the classist attitudes of the wealthy, and the inheritance of wealth,
among other important topics that clarify the ways bourgeois ideology operates.
The one important absence to deplore in this analysis—and this is an absence felt
throughout the book—is that of the student. Indeed, the voices of learners are not
central, even though their reactions and ideas are mentioned in several instances,
mostly collectively. Any pedagogical strategy is only good if it percolates into
student learning. A follow-up analysis would benefit from sharing more evidence
on how students are impacted by Snow’s approach. Even though educational re-
search values instructional experience and teacher narratives, the analysis would
be enhanced with deeper autoethnographical strategies to strengthen the empirical
basis and render the complexity and contradictions in student learning. Despite this
critique, the book is timely and succeeds, as demonstrated in chapter 5, in positing
the importance of ideological work with students in the “post-truth” era. Even
though the book advocates for fact-based, rational pedagogy that promotes
“supple thinking” (Snow 2018, 124), as well as dialogue as a conduit for learning, it
is also an important call to all instructors to take up education as an ideological bat-
tleground for the success of progressive socialist ideas.

References

Allport, G. W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley.

Ellsworth, E. 1989. “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working through the Repressive
Myths of Critical Pedagogy.” Harvard Educational Review 59 (3): 297–325.
Giroux, H. 2010. “Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the
Promise of Critical Pedagogy.” Policy Futures in Education 8 (6): 715–21.
hooks, b. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York:
Routledge.
Immordino-Yang, M. 2016. Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational
Implications of Affective Neuroscience. New York: W. W. Norton.
Nussbaum, M. C. 2003. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Pettigrew, T. F. 1997. “Generalized Intergroup Contact Effects on Prejudice.” Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin 23 (2): 173–85.
Snow, S. 2018. Bourgeois Ideology and Education: Subversion through Pedagogy. New York:
Routledge.
Zembylas, M., and E. Papamichael. 2017. “Pedagogies of Discomfort and Empathy in
Multicultural Teacher Education.” Intercultural Education 28 (1): 1–19.

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https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2020.1727252