Quotes & Sayings About Critical Pedagogy

Shorn of unattractive language about "robots" who will be producing taxes and not burglarizing homes, the general idea that schools in ghettoized communities must settle for a different set of goals than schools that serve the children of the middle class and upper middle class has been accepted widely. And much of the rhetoric of "rigor" and "high standards" that we hear so frequently, no matter how egalitarian in spirit it may sound to some, is fatally belied by practices that vulgarize the intellects of children and take from their education far too many of the opportunities for cultural and critical reflectiveness without which citizens become receptacles for other people's ideologies and ways of looking at the world but lack the independent spirits to create their own. — Jonathan Kozol

The world as it was, is, or will be, is beyond common sense, beyond natural understanding: it must be taught. — Masood Ashraf Raja

Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion. — Paulo Freire

In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue, and thought to have real effects, they must advocate the message that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which they live. — Henry Giroux

of oppressive state power. Gramsci's theory of hegemony as a form of cultural pedagogy is also invaluable as an element of critical educational thought. By emphasizing the pedagogical force of culture, Gramsci expands the sphere of the political by pointing to those diverse spaces and spheres in which cultural practices are deployed, lived, and mobilized in the service of knowledge, power and authority. For Gramsci, learning and politics were inextricably related and took place not merely in schools but in a vast array of public sites. — Henry A. Giroux

It seems to me that the binary opposition that is so much embedded in Western thought and language makes it nearly impossible to project a complex response. — Bell Hooks

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think. — Mary Wollstonecraft

critical pedagogy illuminates how classroom learning embodies selective values, is entangled with relations of power, entails judgments about what knowledge counts, legitimates specific social relations, defines agency in particular ways, and always presupposes a particular notion of the future. — Henry A. Giroux

...we are partisan in favor of our own children and grandchildren, who we hope can live in a world that doesn't poison them when they drink the water, breathe the air, or make a living. — Bill Bigelow

Pedagogy is not about training, it is about critically educating people to be self reflective, capable of critically address their relationship with others and with the larger world. Pedagogy in this sense provides not only important critical and intellectual competencies; it also enables people to intervene critically in the world. — Henry Giroux

critical pedagogy becomes a project that stresses the need for teachers and students to actively transform knowledge rather than simply consume it. — Henry A. Giroux

With the rise of new technologies, media, and other cultural apparatuses as powerful forms of public pedagogy, students need to understand and address how these pedagogical cultural apparatuses work to diffuse learning from any vestige of critical thought. This is a form of public pedagogy that needs to be addressed both for how it deforms and for how it can create important new spaces for emancipatory forms of pedagogy. — Henry Giroux