Response to "Critical Pedagogy - Major Concepts"

“Men and women are essentially unfree and inhabit a world rife with contradictions and asymmetries of power and privilege.”  From what I understand, the educational theory that this idea prescribes to, or “critical theory,” in which neither society, nor an individual in the society, holds dominance over the other.  That the person is only an “actor” or participant in the machine of society.  I find this idea hard to accept, for this lends to the thought that there is no escape, no progression.  I assume and hope that somewhere in the rest of this reading there will be some sort of solution or idea that will make the educational journeys of the students in our classrooms.

Of course, knowing the theory that an individual is a cog in the machine of society helps us to understand how we might improve the machine that the cog is a part of.  We cannot escape from society; it is part of the environment that surrounds every one of us.  The trick as educators is to facilitate the efforts of individuals to improve and alter their surroundings.  “School is not simply…an arena of indoctrination or socialization or a site of instruction, but [is] also…a cultural terrain that promotes student empowerment and self-transformation.”  School is not a place where one is forced to make their situation worse or more difficult, but is the little shop of keys that provides opportunities to open doors that lead directly to the futures of our students.  They have the entire future ahead of them; it is not our job to stand in their way.  Is it possible for a “good” instructor to consider schools as places of “both domination and liberation?”  As places for us, as teachers to create clones of students, sending reproductions of them into the world, or is it our job to facilitate s

students in breaking out of the molds in which students place themselves?

Perhaps it is best for one to be a “critical educator,” or one who approaches education as something to act on, rather than be someone who is a facilitator, who is acted upon.  They “argue that…schooling must be partisan…” that “there are many sides to a problem, and often these sides are linked to certain class, race, and gender interests.”  In other words, the answers to issues at hand are not always simple or easy, but affected by everything else that makes up society and the people that make it up.