Zusammenfassung
Within the last few years, the discourses of authoritarianism and the echoes of a fascist past have moved from the margins to the center of politics across the globe. Increasingly, pedagogy has been implicated in this process by becoming less a practice for freedom than an instrumentalized theory and practice for domination, particularly as the culture of education has been transformed to serve the culture of business or reduced to a regressive form of instrumental rationality. This lecture challenges this reactionary mode of education and pedagogy, particularly in its neoliberal versions, and explores how critical pedagogy might provide the theoretical and practical foundation for rethinking the purpose of education and the nature of politics itself, and how these two realms are inseparable. As a moral and political practice, pedagogy is represents not only a struggle over knowledge and values, but also over agency itself. Central to any viable notion of a critical pedagogy is the understanding that pedagogy is always a deliberate attempt on the part of educators to influence how and what knowledge and subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations. In this case, it draws attention to the ways in which knowledge, power, desire, and experience are produced under specific basic conditions of learning and in doing so rejects the notion that teaching is just a method or is removed from matters of values, norms, and power. In addition, central to such a task is rethinking the role of educators as public intellectuals and their responsibility not only to address crucial social problems but also to interrogate critically what it might mean to produce those pedagogical practices and formative cultures that are essential to any substantive democracy. An important issue addressed in this case is that pedagogy is always a moral and political practice and points not only to a struggle over agency and power, but also presupposes discourses of critique and possibility as part of a broader democratic project deeply implicated in addressing matters of economic and social justice and the grounds upon which life is lived and experienced.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
Quoted in Silk and Andrews (2011).
- 4.
Eagleton (2010, p. 78). online at: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/10/0083150
- 5.
Honneth (2009).
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Castoriadis (1996).
- 11.
Giroux (2020).
- 12.
Donadio (2012).
- 13.
De Peuter (2007).
- 14.
De Peuter (ibid., p. 117).
- 15.
Comaroff and Comaroff (2000).
- 16.
For a brilliant discussion of the ethics and politics of deconstruction, see Keenan (1997, p. 2).
- 17.
Derrida (2000).
- 18.
Eagleton (2000).
- 19.
- 20.
This expression comes from Michael (2000).
- 21.
Dean (2000).
- 22.
Hardt and Negri (2004).
- 23.
Cited in Olson and Worsham (2000).
- 24.
Delbanco (2006).
References
Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press.
Bazelon, Emily. 2019. Charged: The new movement to transform American prosecution and end mass incarceration. New York: Random House.
Brown, Wendy. 2005. Edgework. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1996. Institutions and autonomy. In A critical sense, ed. Peter Osborne, 8. New York: Routledge.
Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2000. Millennial capitalism: First thoughts on a second coming. Public Culture 12(2): 305–306.
De Peuter, Greig. 2007. Universities, intellectuals and multitudes: An interview with Stuart Hall. In Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, eds. Mark Cote, Richard J. F. Day, and Greig de Peuter, 113–114. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Dean, Jodi. 2000. The interface of political theory and cultural studies. In Cultural studies and political theory, ed. Jodi Dean, 3. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Delbanco, Andrew. 2006. College: What it was, is, and should be. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Intellectual courage: An interview. Trans. Peter Krapp. Culture Machine 2: 9.
Donadio, Rachel. 2012. The failing state of Greece. New York Times, February 26, p. 8.
Eagleton, Terry. 2000. The idea of culture, 22. Malden: Basil Blackwell.
Eagleton, Terry. 2010, October. Reappraisals: What is the worth of social democracy? Harper’s Magazine, p. 78.
Fuentes, Annette. 2011. Lockdown high: When the schoolhouse becomes a jailhouse. New York: Verso.
Giroux, Henry A. 2019a. Neoliberalism’s war on higher education. Chicago: Haymarket.
Giroux, Henry A. 2019b. The terror of the unforeseen. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Review of Books.
Giroux, Henry A. 2020. On critical pedagogy, 2nd ed. Bloomsbury: London/New York.
Hall, Stuart. 2011. The neo-liberal revolution. Cultural Studies 25(6): 705–728.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire, 67. New York: The Penguin Press.
Harvey, David. 2003. The new imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, David. 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Honneth, Alex. 2009. Pathologies of reason, 188. New York: Columbia University Press.
Johnson, Curtis. 2018. The momentum of Trumpian fascism is building: Stopping it is up to us. Truthout, July 25.
Keenan, Thomas. 1997. Fables of responsibility: Aberrations and predicaments in ethics and politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Michael, John. 2000. Anxious intellects: Academic professionals, public intellectuals, and enlightenment values, 2. Durham: Duke University Press.
Nikolakaki, Maria, ed. 2012. Critical pedagogy in the dark ages: Challenges and possibilities. New York: Peter Lang.
Noor, Jaisol. 2013. Study links high stakes testing to higher incarceration rates. The Real News Network, July 20.
Olson, Gary, and Lynn Worsham. 2000. Changing the subject: Judith Butler’s politics of radical resignification. JAC 20(4): 765.
Silk, Michael L., and David L. Andrews. 2011. (Re) Presenting baltimore: Place, policy, politics, and cultural pedagogy. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 33: 436.
Simon, Roger. 1987. Empowerment as a pedagogy of possibility. Language Arts 64(4): 372.
Simon, Roger. 1992. Teaching against the Grain. Santa Barbara: Praeger.
Steger, Manfred B., and Ravi K. Roy. 2010. Neoliberalism: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2012. The price of inequality: How today divided society endangers our future. New York: Norton.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Giroux, H. (2022). Critical Pedagogy. In: Bauer, U., Bittlingmayer, U.H., Scherr, A. (eds) Handbuch Bildungs- und Erziehungssoziologie. Bildung und Gesellschaft. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30903-9_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30903-9_19
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer VS, Wiesbaden
Print ISBN: 978-3-658-30902-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-658-30903-9
eBook Packages: Social Science and Law (German Language)