In broad terms, Critical Pedagogy is a movement premised on the idea that teachers have the ability to shape reform. What Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux emphasize again and again in their article, Teaching and the Role of the Transformative Intellectual, is that teachers are no longer even looked to as being agents of change within the education system by the general public. Additionally, according to the two authors, the public is also failing to see that the current dominant thrusts in school reform are in contrast with the traditional role of organizing public education in order to ensure the maintenance and defense of the values and principles needed to maintain a democratic society.
These two theses are intertwined because it is the teachers that must help create a society of critical thinkers, and critical thinking is the precondition for creating a society based on democratic principles. Thus, there is a crisis in critical thinking because autonomy is being stripped from they very individuals who should be held responsible for creating a community of critical thinkers.
Aronowitz and Giroux suggest teachers are being disempowered in numerous ways. Deciding what counts as knowledge, what is worth teaching, how one judges instruction, and how one views the role of school and society, are all quite separate from the collective influence of teachers. Furthermore, prepackaged curricula and standardized classroom instruction methods undermine the teacher as any sort of transformative intellectual. Teachers are being de-skilled and proletarianized because of a fundamental shift from viewing teaching as contributing to the maintenance of a democratic society to the wedding of education and the practices of a business society. After this marriage of education and business, business principles like efficiency, hierarchy, and control leave teachers looking more like servants obedient to the commands of people far removed from the classroom. As the nature of the teacher changes (some may say regresses), the idea of the teacher as a transformative intellectual disappears. And according to the authors, there are three reasons a teacher should be viewed as a transformative intellectual:
1. The concept of intellectual provides the theoretical groundwork for interrogating the specific ideological and economic conditions under which intellectuals as a social group need to work in order to function as critical, thinking, creative human beings.
2. By viewing teachers as intellectuals we can begin to rethink and reformulate those historical traditions and conditions that have prevented schools and teachers from assuming their full potential as active, reflective scholars and practitioners.
3. The define teacher work against the imperative to develop knowledge and skills that provide students with tools they will need to be leaders rather than simply managers or skilled servants.
Critical Pedagogy is a very complex movement because it addresses so many areas of education. For instance, Critical Theorists believe in the importance of theory and would argue that it’s crucial to be able to step back and as questions such as, “How does knowledge make us better citizens?” Giroux believes that you should never engage in a practice for which you are not reflective of that practice.
Additionally, theorists such as Peter McLaren apply Critical Pedagogy to theory, construction of knowledge, forms of knowledge, class, culture, levels of culture, hegemony, ideology, discourse of power relationships, the hidden curriculum, and social reproduction. Of particular interest in McLaren’s readings is the introduction of the idea of hegemony coupled with ideology. His thoughts about these concepts certainly tie back into the ideas of dominance and restricted social mobility proposed by Bowles, Gintis, and Ogbu. McLaren says that hegemony, “is a struggle in which the powerful win the consent of those who are oppressed, with the oppressed unknowingly participating in their own oppression,” and insists that hegemony could not exist without support from ideology. Ideology refers to the production of sense and meaning of how the world works which we accept as obvious and true. Ideology is a catalyst that ensures hegemony will occur.
While Critical Theory can be applied to nearly every issue in education, it’s important to realize that the core of Critical Theory is about establishing the teacher as a transformative individual who can serve as a agent of change within the education system.
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