As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, we need critical pedagogy more than ever. We find the world adrift in economic, cultural, and political uncertainty brought about by Western culture’s unrelenting adherence to and proselytizing of neoliberal and neoconservative politics and policies. The threatening triangulation of neoliberalism, conservatism, and nationalism has significantly intensified austerity politics, weakened gender equality, hollowed public education, created economic alienation, and harshened immigration policies. Conservative consciousness and rhetoric have capitalized on crises and disasters, from Katrina to Brexit, where economic insecurity and decline are fused with immigration, racism, and nationalism, instead of neoliberal economics. Such policies have been magnified and intensified with the assault of dis-information in the current post-truth era. This hegemonic onslaught serves to completely undermine the public sphere, and at the same time alienate and disenfranchise the economically powerless. As this book goes to press, the conservative government in Brazil has tragically sought to erode Paulo Freire’s teaching and philosophies and moved to erase the Brazil’s Patron of Education from curriculum and schools, going so far as to threaten teachers who continue to refer to his teachings.
Given the contemporary political shifts in many nations, critical pedagogy garners increasing pertinence in the face of the hastening erosion of the public sphere and the destruction of democracy. This 2nd edition provides comprehensive and updated analyses of issues related to the struggles against the forces of neoliberalism’s imperial-induced privatization, in society generally and in education specifically. These chapters situate critical pedagogy’s relevance today and offer not only critiques but also practical applications, suggestions, and strategies on how neoliberal attacks can be collectively resisted, challenged, and eradicated especially by those of us teaching in schools and universities. For example, in this volume, Henry Giroux presciently unpacks how neoliberalism has normalized a ‘neo-fascism’ in this post-truth era; he writes that neo-fascists have tapped into the growing collective suffering and anxieties of millions of Americans…to redirect their anger and despair through a culture of fear and a discourse of dehumanization by turning critical ideas to ashes by disseminating a toxic mix of racialized categories, ignorance, and a militarized spirit of white nationalism (p. 1).
Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibilities, 2nd edition, reflects Paulo Freire’s prophetic words that ring even truer today: There is no change without dreams, just as there are no dreams without hope… The understanding of history as possibility rather than determinism… would be unintelligible without dreams, just as a deterministic view feels incompatible with them and therefore negates them (Freire 1970, 1992, p. 92). The contributors to this volume argue that neoliberal politics, and their resultant policies, are directly linked and fueled by the exclusionary nationalism, sexism, and racism of the emerging right-wing populism (Giroux 2019; Keskinen 2012; Macrine 2016; Edling and Macrine 2020). They posit that critical pedagogy continues to be relevant and needed to provide a critical framework for the identification and active responses to neoliberalism predatory schemes of crises, errant politics, and resultant policies. At the same time, these scholars offer hope through the development of critical pedagogical possibilities for the renewal of democratic ideals by providing insights, understandings, and hope for the future.
This volume coincides with the recent 50th anniversary of the publication of Paulo Freire’s landmark publication, Pedagogy of the Oppressed in English, and marks the 100th birthday of the Maestro. With over 1 million copies sold in numerous languages on 6 continents, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has emerged as one of the foundations of critical pedagogy and an enduring influence on progressive educators worldwide. Freire’s vision of democratic education was not simply about the teaching and learning of content; rather, it implied that participation in a democracy involves the transformative right to education and the processes of learning for all who participate or hold stake in the operations of schooling. The notion of ‘education for the greater good’ understands that democratic public schooling is a seedbed for new knowledge and culture leading to new selves, new societies, and a new humanity that is more humane. This radical dream of a democratic public education stands in stark contrast to current neoliberal trends in school reform that seek to privatize schools, standardize and script curriculum and pedagogy, and otherwise deskill and disenfranchise teachers and students. According to Paulo Freire, the infiltration of private monied interests in public education was and is highly suspicious because ‘Neoliberal doctrine seeks to limit education to technological practice’ (Freire 1992, p. 4). In the language of neoliberalism, social inequalities such as poverty, homelessness, and unemployment are normalized, inevitable, and even necessary. He added that under neoliberal rule the, ‘opportunities for change become invisible, and our role in fostering change becomes absent’ (Freire 1992, p. 4). Public education is thereby stripped of its transformative potential.
Critical Pedagogy Origins
In the late 1980s, I was as a graduate student studying to be a school psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, coincidently where Giroux’s early books were published. There, I was first introduced to public intellectual, Henry Giroux’s books Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling (1981) and Theory and Resistance (1983). As a result, I became politically ‘woke’ through my readings of Henry Giroux and Paulo Freire.
Later in 1994, when I was an Assistant Professor at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Henry Giroux, one of the founders of critical pedagogy, came to give a lecture. His talk was so uplifting and enlightening that we all experienced what being a ‘critical pedagogue’ means and could mean, but more, what it holds for us as individuals, educators, and scholars and especially within all social, historical, and democratic contexts. Needless to say, it was revolutionary, as Giroux called upon us to work to protect both democracy and education for the greater good. He then traced the origins of critical pedagogy, adding that his first reading of Pedagogy of the Oppressed gave him a new language to understand the conflicts and challenges that he was faced as a high school teacher and later as an assistant professor. He noted that Paulo’s work marked a moment of his own transformation. As a result, Giroux became dedicated not just to Paulo’s work but to reworking and redefining what ‘critical pedagogy’ meant from its early beginnings in the 1970s. Actually, it was shortly after the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed that Paulo Freire contacted Henry Giroux about one of his articles that Paulo had reviewed in Interchange. Within a short time, Henry and Paulo began a life-long collaboration on the emergence of Critical Pedagogy, not only co-editing critical education series at Greenwood, but they also wrote a number of introductions together for specific books in the series.
It was during this same time in the late seventies that Henry Giroux reported that he began to fashion a unique approach to theories of schooling by incorporating the works of the Frankfurt School, Paulo’s work, radical social theory, along with selected works of John Dewey, George Counts, and others to construct the foundation for the critical pedagogy we have today. It is worth quoting at length Giroux’s (2009) thinking about the origins of critical pedagogy:
I attempted to theorize critical pedagogy through the lens of critical theory. So, there was an attempt to link Paulo’s work with European intellectual work. It was also an attempt to move beyond; even then, what I thought was a reductionist, economist model at work in Critical Theory, and in some versions of critical educational theory. I also thought there was a kind of a radical, existential, biographical work emerging that I thought was very important but I thought was limited by virtue of its refusal to link the personal to the public in a way that exemplified the personal not as a kind of emancipatory moment in itself, but one that also needed to be translated. So, we had to understand how private issues translate into public issues. (Giroux 2009, p. 15)
Given that, there has been a history of conflating Critical Theory and critical pedagogy. Critical theory, for clarity, is mainly associated with the Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, established in 1923. While critical theory is actually a derivative source for critical pedagogy, critical theory is rooted in the works of Hegel’s and Kant’s critical philosophy, as well as the writings of Marx and Engels. Interestingly, the British Fabian Socialists (in the 1800s) were also credited with contributing to the development of critical theory (McKernan 2013, pp. 417–418). Their efforts critiqued the social policies aimed at solving the economic and social ills in of nineteenth-century England and by rejecting ‘direct confrontation and violent revolution’. So, critical pedagogy did not inherit the Frankfurt School ‘as is’; rather, it grew out of a collaboration between Giroux and emerged from ‘Paulo Freire’s work in poverty stricken northeastern Brazil in the 1960s. Critical Pedagogy amalgamated liberation theological ethics and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School in Germany with the progressive impulses in education’ (Kincheloe 2007, p. 12). Finally, in the evolution of critical pedagogy, Giroux (1983) contended that the logic of technocratic rationality “suppresses the critical function of historical consciousness” by denying the possibility “of human action grounded in historical insight and committed to emancipation in all spheres of human activity.” He added that “traditional and liberal discourses treat the intersection of culture, power, and knowledge in fashioning a view of teaching and learning.” Further, he argued that in critical pedagogy, it is necessary to develop a critical discourse that embraces pedagogy as a form of cultural politics (p. 41).
Another prominent figure in critical pedagogy is Peter McLaren, whose first book, Life in Schools, brought him to the attention of Henry and Paulo. Peter’s contribution to critical pedagogy over the years has been crucial as he has worked to link critical pedagogy wit...