Critical Pedagogy

Critical pedagogy is an educational philosophy and practice that treats teaching and learning as political acts and seeks to help students recognize, question, and change the structures of inequality and domination that shape their lives. It is most closely associated with Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed criticized the banking model of education, in which teachers deposit knowledge into passive students, and proposed problem-posing dialogue that builds critical consciousness, or conscientization. Henry Giroux developed the approach in North America, linking schooling to democracy, culture, and resistance, while Peter McLaren drew on Marxism to analyze capitalism in education. Ira Shor emphasized participatory classroom practice, and bell hops, who is better known as bell hooks, advanced an engaged pedagogy that joined feminist and anti-racist concerns with learning as a practice of freedom. The tradition draws on the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony, and Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s work on the reproduction of inequality in schools. Critics argue that it can be abstract, ideological, or difficult to implement within testing regimes. Critical pedagogy remains central to research on education, power, identity, and social change.