Critical Pedagogy: What It Is, Characteristics And Objectives
No one doubts that teaching is essential for societies to progress and form citizens adjusted to the demands that their social environment demands of them.
The problem is that on many occasions teaching remains anchored in simply transmitting knowledge, without promoting meaningful learning or being critical of what is learned.
This is exactly the opposite of what critical pedagogy, with figures such as Paulo Freire and Peter McLaren, supporters that teaching is an act that should encourage being critical, even for what is explained in that teaching. Below we will look at this pedagogical branch in more depth.
Critical pedagogy is an orientation of pedagogy that maintains that teaching is not a neutral or decontextualized process and, in fact, it should not pretend to be either. This branch maintains that teaching should invite critical thinking, to question the lived reality and what is learned in class, since the knowledge taught, after all, is selected by people who cannot escape their sociopolitical context, with its biases. and their opinions.
In addition to this, critical pedagogy aims to go beyond the classroom context. Through critical thinking Students are invited to question the life they have had to live and see to what extent they can change it through political and social intervention.
This type of pedagogy promotes social change by making students participants in the sociocultural movements of their time. The conceptualization of critical pedagogy aims to transform the traditional educational system in particular to encourage changes in society in general.
Although it takes its origins from the Frankfurt School, the ideas within critical pedagogy were deeply developed by several American philosophers, his greatest references being the Brazilian Paulo Freire, the Canadian Peter McLaren and the American Henry Giroux. These were inspired by the philosophical proposals of Karl Marx, and share the importance of teaching students to get involved in what is happening around them, not to learn passively and not apply it in their social environment.
Always starting from an ethical and political position, critical pedagogy seeks to develop the art of questioning in students, making them wonder why their environment is the way it is, to see to what extent social structures are beneficial to them or, on the contrary, They must be transformed or demolished.
Objectives of critical pedagogy
Although we have already been introducing it, We can highlight the following as the main objectives of critical pedagogy::
The figure of Paulo Freire
The founder of critical pedagogy, at least as regards its conceptualization understood as more defined, is the Brazilian philosopher and pedagogue Paulo Freire His idea of critical pedagogy, also called liberating, is quite contrary to the idea of banking education, which according to him was the most appropriate term to refer to traditional education.
As we have commented, critical pedagogy rejects the idea that knowledge is politically neutral, arguing that teaching, in itself, is a political act, regardless of whether the teacher is aware of it or not. The materials to be taught, the way in which they are made and the methods to penalize errors have been selected from an undoubtedly political perspective, both by the teachers and by those in power.
In all countries there are socioeconomic differences in the type of education received, which in itself has a purpose in terms of oppression. The lower classes go to school to acquire the right knowledge to be able to work in low-paying jobs, which hardly allows them to climb positions. On the other hand, it is common that in the education of those who hold power or who were born in privileged classes, their education focuses on how to be able to hold jobs in which they wield power and exploit the lower classes, in a more or less implicit way. .
The educational curriculum in public schools in the most disadvantaged countries is usually limited to being able to read and write, and at most reaching secondary education. In those same countries, the rich can easily reach higher education, in which, either due to the way education is designed for these classes and due to family pressures, they end up studying economics, with clear intentions of directing a large company or a business that uses people with little training as production workers.
The goal of critical pedagogy is emancipation from oppression through critical consciousness This is an idea coined in the Portuguese term “conscientização”. When this objective is achieved, critical consciousness motivates individuals to produce a change in their society, through social criticism as theoretical action and political action as practical action.
Within being critical of society, both ethically and politically, is identifying authoritarian tendencies. To what extent does what we are taught in school allow us to reflect? Are we educated to be servants/dominators or are we really free? Whatever the type of education, it is clear that what is taught is still politicized, and influences society, both by making reality accepted and by initiating change.
The practical aspect of critical pedagogy, defended by Freire, McLaren and Giroux, is, first of all, define what power is like and acquire measures against oppression It is this idea that is understood as liberating within the current. Social transformation will be the final product of a process that begins by questioning the state of things, applying changes, evaluating what has been achieved, reflecting and, again, questioning the new reality that has been reached.
