Status Updates From On Critical Pedagogy (Criti...

An educator can act as an interlocutor and proverbial Socrates to tease out, to beg questions, to undermine what is called common-sense. Giroux does not claim that the educator is the change-maker, but a fulcrum upon which the next in line can do something else. I like this mindset of sowing seeds, of starting to roll the snowball down the hill. It is one that I get from the strategic literature I've read, too.

"[US schooling presents] an unquestioned truth: conflict and dissent among different social groups are presented as inherently bad. Not only is [society] abstracted from [class and power,] but students are viewed as value-receiving and value-transmitting persons. There is no room [for] intellectual, moral, and political conflict. Such a view would have to treat people as value-creating agents."

"the culture of positivism asserts its superiority through its alleged suprahistorical and supracultural posture. [It maintains] a heavy silence about its own guiding interest in technical control[.] Unable to reflect on its own presuppositions, or to provide a model for critical reflection in general, it ends up uncritically supporting the status quo and rejecting history as a medium for political action."

"For too many educators, politicians, and corporate hedge-fund managers, poor economic performance on the part of individuals is coded as a genetic and often racialized defect, while an unwillingness to buy into consumer culture is defined as a form of individual depravity."

I am slightly wary of democratic language, but this is good so far. He does well to note 70s-present neoliberal pedagogy, Obama era included.