Bare Pedagogy and the Scourge of Neoliberalism: Rethinking Higher Education as a Democratic Public Sphere

Abstract

A new form of bare pedagogy is emerging in higher education focused on market-driven competitiveness and even militaristic goal-setting, while critical pedagogy, with its emphasis on the hard work of critical analysis, moral judgments, and social responsibility (critical pedagogy that goes to the very heart of what it means to address real inequalities of power among faculty and administrators) withers. This occurs while at the same time critical pedagogy poses a series of important and often-ignored questions such as: What is the role of teachers and academics as public intellectuals? Whose interest does public and higher education serve? How might it be possible to understand and engage the diverse contexts in which education takes place? What is the role of education as a public good? How do we make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative? How do we democratize governance?