Introduction
19
to one of its major proponents, it is “an educational movement, guided by pas-
sion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, rec-
ognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power,” and the
ability to take “constructive action” in relation to education and society at
large (Giroux 2010).
Like the approach taken by Barnett, Johnston, and others in their account
of criticality, critical pedagogy takes the view that critical thinking needs
to be broadened beyond skills and dispositions. It sees the account of criti-
cal thinking as comprising skills-plus-dispositions as very much concerned
with the individual. Like the adherents of the criticality approach, the criti-
cal pedagogues include the importance of
action.
However, unlike adherents
of the criticality approach, they consider
social institutions
(and society more
broadly)—not merely individuals’ actions—to be a vital factor for critical
thinking. This broadens the notion of critical thinking even further than any
of the views previously discussed.
This is clearly an extension of the account of the radically transformed stu-
dent within the criticality perspective; indeed, it extends radical educational
transformation to
society at large.
The critical pedagogues see critical thinking
to be not about mere argument analysis, or dispositions, or individual actions
(although these too are important). They see critical thinking to be principally
about “the critique of lived social and political realities to allow greater free-
dom of thought and action” (Kaplan 1991, 362). Specifically, the critical peda-
gogues are alert to the presence of ideology in discourse and social institutions
and see education as a critical and active engagement with such ideologies.
The key theorists in this area are Freire (1972), McLaren (1989), and Giroux
(1994; 2005). In an illuminating article by Burbules and Berk (1999) a number
of distinctions are made between the critical thinking movement (incorporat-
ing the “skills-based” view of critical thinking and the “skills-plus-dispositions”
view) and the critical pedagogy movement.
The critical thinking movement theorists had taken the adjective “critical”
to mean “criticism” (becoming aware of weaknesses in some claim or argu-
ment). Their aim was putting logic at the service of clear thinking. The critical
pedagogues, by contrast, took “critical” to mean “critique” (i.e., identifying
dimensions of meaning that might be missing or concealed behind some claim
or belief or institution) (Kaplan 1991, 362). Their further understanding is that
such concealment serves an ideological function, masking an underlying state
of affairs. Their aim puts critical thought at the service of transforming undem-
ocratic societies and inequitable power structures, that is, not simply educating
for critical thinking or even enabling individuals to embody a critical spirit,
but educating for
radical
transformation in society as well. They see the critical
person as resisting the ideological hegemony of capitalism, a hegemony that
foists conditions favorable to the maintenance of the capitalist system onto
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