Critical Pedagogy: My Take

When Henry Giroux stood in front of a crowd in College Station, Texas, and proclaimed that school was "the antithesis to life," I wholeheartedly agreed with his statement. Often times in my childhood I struggled to see the application of schooling as relevant to my life. And I know why this still happens in school to this very day. Even in my collegiate experience, I've noticed that the "why" is quickly bypassed most often in the name of "what" and occasionally in the name of "how." To me, this pressing concern with "why" that arises in Critical Pedagogy is one of the most valuable ideas the theory contributes to education. In 15 years of public education, a teacher has never posed the question, "What is the purpose of public education?" And only a select few teachers have ever even bothered to explain why they chose to be educators at all.

To me, it seems that this should be standard first day material. When I went to China, I didn't pull out a course syllabus on the first day and talk about major instructional goals of my four week time span there. I explained why I was there--my motivation, what it meant for us to share and learn from each other, and how my English instruction could benefit them in a world of globalization. Because of my constraints with language barriers, this was done subtilely and slowly, but it was done first because this sort of discussion puts our experience together in a real life prospective.

Thus far we have looked at clashing Humanist and Progressive Theories that seek to discredit each other to a certain extent. Then, Social Efficiency Theory provided us with bold problems and a much too bold, impractical solution. Where does Critical Pedagogy fit in to the the scheme of these other theories? It pulls from both Humanist and Progressive influence because Critical theorists state that education must be meaningful and relevant before it can be critical. We already established that, in order for information to be either meaningful or relevant, a basic knowledge must exist (Kohn "no one argues that kids should be taught about nothing...") Critical Pedagogy also has potential to tackle some of the harsh realities presented by the Social Effiency Theory without resorting to democratic socialism. Critical Theory actually arose from Paulo Freire, who wrote about "pedagogy of the oppressed." It was designed to have the oppressed think critically about their place in society. Critical Pedagogy may very well indeed be the only way a substantial amount of change (more than just the usual exceptions) can occur to the domination/oppression structure of education as described by Bowles, Gintis, and Ogbu.

So Critical Pedagogy is the answer, right? I wish, but I still retain some questions and doubts.

Who bears the responsibility for disempowerment of teachers? To a certain extent, haven't teachers allowed themselves to be turned into rudimentary knowledge transmission machines? Where is their pride and indignation? Where are the groups of truly intellectual teachers mobilizing and gather to promote social change?

Unfortunately, I believe teachers have been controlled in this way because our system doesn't have enough of the type of transformative intellectuals describe by Giroux and Aronowitz. So the big question becomes, how do we bring teachers to this level? Aronowitz and Giroux mentioned reasons why we should view teachers as intellectuals, but I would argue that we don’t just need to view teachers as intellectuals, we need to find teachers that are intellectuals. Viewing me as an NBA All-Star won’t make me one. We shouldn't bring so much false hope to such a promising theory by neglecting the very tough intermediary decisions to be made about the practicality of finding transformative intellectuals to teach our nations students. We need to know exactly how to find, cultivate, and promote these people to the status of a true transformative intellectual.