Youth, Debt, and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy

Introduction

Critical pedagogy is a progressive mode of education influenced by approaches to knowledge and culture developed by The Frankfurt School and by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Critical pedagogy emphasizes that to be meaningful and transformative, education needs to connect the knowledge learned inside the classroom to students’ lived experiences outside the classroom. Drawing on Freire, Henry A. Giroux (2011) describes critical pedagogy as a progressive educational movement that provides students with a consciousness of freedom and an ability to identify authoritarian tendencies and make connections between knowledge and power. Critical pedagogy aims to cultivate in young people the capacity and desire to take action in the real world by challenging oppressive and antidemocratic structures of power. In this sense, critical pedagogy is the opposite of the majority of contemporary neoliberal approaches to education, which see teaching primarily as the delivery of methods,...