Pedagogical Propaganda: The Power of Image

Images are everywhere. To take one example, most of us carry cameras around in our pockets, use them apparently indiscriminately and then broadcast the images we capture openly around the world. These images, by virtue of the fact that they are broadcast, represent a thing to which the image creator intends to draw our attention.

Just as the image creator seeks to show their audience something, so too does the educator, using pedagogical reduction, and the propagandist, via propagandistic reductions. This thesis will argue that image, pedagogical reduction, and propaganda are interlinking concepts resembling a nesting doll-like conceptual framework: both pedagogical and propagandistic reductions are particular instances of image, and propaganda is an even more particular instance of a pedagogical reduction. From this, it can be suggested that propaganda is pedagogical and, indeed, that pedagogy has the potential to be propagandistic.

This is achieved by setting out definitions of image, pedagogical reduction, and propaganda before linking them together by examining the similarity in the process of creation and, using Barthes’ concepts of studium and punctum, the relation between the image and its audience. This study, therefore, employs a hermeneutic conceptual analysis and comparison, interrogating texts that explore each of the concepts in turn, while further allowing the reconsideration of common conceptualisations of them.

While hermeneutic conceptual analysis and comparison comprise the main elements of the method, this study also uses another, unorthodox, approach which is inspired by Heidegger’s idea of “interest”. One, core text was selected to investigate each concept: “Ways of Seeing” by John Berger (1972); “Propaganda: The formation of men’s attitudes” by Jacques Ellul (1973); and “Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktik Tradition” edited by Westbury, Hopmann and Riquarts (2000). Beyond these core texts, I no longer searched for literature as I leaned into Heidegger’s idea that if one places oneself at the centre of interest, the researcher is inclined towards material that, simultaneously, inclines itself towards the researcher. This unorthodox manner of searching and researching is but an explicit expression of how committed researchers operate, whether they can recognise it or not.

In view of this somewhat novel methodology, the resulting argument in this book is no less robust. It is my intention that it should inspire further discussion on the themes contained within; most notably the value that comes from juxtaposing a notion of education with a similar concept holding pejorative connotations. By exposing the similarities between pedagogy and propaganda, we can delineate the differences as the qualities that distinguish good education from bad propaganda.