Abstract
“Critical pedagogy” has become a prevalent grammar furthering the necessity of a change in pedagogy from a banking‐style to problem‐posing approach, which it argues will facilitate students’ development of independent values and equip them to lead the liberation of society from authoritarianism into democracy. To achieve this, classrooms need to serve as cultural forums, through which either engaged pedagogy or negotiated authority empowers teachers and students to engage in free dialogues that problematize school textbooks as “cultural politics.” This empowerment demands that teachers perform as transformative intellectuals, dedicating themselves to the amelioration of inequity in educational results by reconstructing new texts, making them more accessible to working‐class students. While these theoretical lexicons envision a new perspective for the “educational function,” alleviation of the phenomenon of cultural reproduction can only occur if critical pedagogists pay more attention to academic curricula. Student achievements in such curricula, which respond to the demands of the social division of labor, have a profound influence on their potential social mobility.
Highlights
The school of critical pedagogy presumes that edu‐ cation can accomplish its emancipatory function of transforming an authoritarian society into a democratic form by leading students to cultivate critical thought
The paramount mission of critical pedagogy is to develop students’ independent values with the goal of establish‐ ing and maintaining a democratic society. This attempt can be achieved if education accomplishes its emanci‐ patory function through the strategy of problem‐posing, which motivates students to pursue self‐reflections through free dialogues. This can be achieved by creat‐ ing classrooms that serve as cultural forums whereby negotiated/engaged authority empowers both teachers and students to apply the politics of culture to engage in critical reflections on familiar issues through desocial‐ ization
While independent values are the core element in exercising education’s emancipatory function, there are other functions, including concern for produc‐ tivity that prescribes the necessity of academic curricula transmitting scientific knowledge/skills required by the social division of labor
Summary
The school of critical pedagogy presumes that edu‐ cation can accomplish its emancipatory function of transforming an authoritarian society into a democratic form by leading students to cultivate critical thought This mission calls for a great change in pedagogical approach, from the traditional “banking” mode to one based on problem‐posing, which allows students to draw upon their own experience to reply to questions posed by teachers (Freire, 1990). Education needs to secure pro‐ ductivity through the transmission of knowledge/skills associated with production, in order to meet a variety of social needs (Durkheim, 1933) This function under‐ lies the necessity of academic curricula, within which students’ achievements play a key role in social mobil‐ ity, which in turn is viewed as a yardstick for measur‐ ing educational inequity. Critical pedagogy has evolved by assimilating a range of other theories (Kincheloe, 2008), space limitations com‐ pel us to narrow the scope of this analysis to the leading proponents of Freirean critical pedagogy, Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux, who are its founder and most distin‐ guished scholar respectively
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
