The Time of Educational Liberation in the Age of Empire

Abstract

In approaches to education in the tradition of critical theory, the idea of history as a space of possibility allows for hope, intervention, and educational and political transformation. The process of historical becoming to which liberatory education is dedicated is both individually and collectively human. In this way, critical curriculum and pedagogy replace a narrow and disempowering notion of history (as the narrative of the actions of the powerful) with a dimensional, dynamic, unfolding notion of historicity (as the quality, for all of social life, of being situated in a determinate political moment). The historicity of life redefines history as a space of possibility that belongs to human beings as an ontological fact and an existential problem. The task of education is then to create the conditions in which students can act and intervene, as authentic subjects, in this historical situation. Paulo Freire, whose work is the focus of my discussion in this chapter, has importantly articulated this task in terms of the historical and educational vocation of humanization.1