Critical Pedagogy

Within the last few years, the discourses of authoritarianism and the echoes of a fascist past have moved from the margins to the center of politics across the globe. Increasingly, pedagogy has been implicated in this process by becoming less a practice for freedom than an instrumentalized theory and practice for domination, particularly as the culture of education has been transformed to serve the culture of business or reduced to a regressive form of instrumental rationality. This lecture challenges this reactionary mode of education and pedagogy, particularly in its neoliberal versions, and explores how critical pedagogy might provide the theoretical and practical foundation for rethinking the purpose of education and the nature of politics itself, and how these two realms are inseparable. As a moral and political practice, pedagogy is represents not only a struggle over knowledge and values, but also over agency itself. Central to any viable notion of a critical pedagogy is the understanding that pedagogy is always a deliberate attempt on the part of educators to influence how and what knowledge and subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations. In this case, it draws attention to the ways in which knowledge, power, desire, and experience are produced under specific basic conditions of learning and in doing so rejects the notion that teaching is just a method or is removed from matters of values, norms, and power. In addition, central to such a task is rethinking the role of educators as public intellectuals and their responsibility not only to address crucial social problems but also to interrogate critically what it might mean to produce those pedagogical practices and formative cultures that are essential to any substantive democracy. An important issue addressed in this case is that pedagogy is always a moral and political practice and points not only to a struggle over agency and power, but also presupposes discourses of critique and possibility as part of a broader democratic project deeply implicated in addressing matters of economic and social justice and the grounds upon which life is lived and experienced.