OnlySubs Episode 52: Critical Pedagogy Doesn’t Understand Education is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
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Critical Pedagogy is the name for the Critical Theory of education, meaning both applying Critical Theory to education and applying it in education, as in teaching students to adopt Critical Theory methodologies and ways of thinking. Critical Pedagogy, though, far from just being a problem in that it indoctrinates and programs students to become revolutionary activists who want to overthrow a system that they’re not taught to participate in, doesn’t even understand how education works. Being obsessed with power and power dynamics, as all Critical Theories are, it seeks to level even the playing field of power between teachers and students, seeking to turn them into “student-teachers” and “teacher-students,” in the words of Brazilian Marxist education activist Paulo Freire. After explaining why this is a terrible idea in this episode of James Lindsay OnlySubs, my subscribers-only podcast, I relate some stories from my own personal experience both in teaching mathematics and in learning martial arts to show just how wrong the Critical Pedagogy approach is. Oh, and I talk about the Cult of Pythagoras, which is interesting and sordid in its own ways. Join me and check it out!
Previous episodes of OnlySubs can be found here.
6 comments
The “Pythagorean cult” approach doesn’t work in law or most of the humanities, which are meant for lively discussion and argument. The best professors were always those who wanted their students to argue with them. You can learn a lot from sharing different perspectives and exploring different lines of argument.
Also, it is nonsense to try to apply different pedagogical theories to the workplace. In many positions, it’s actually irresponsible to shut up and do what you’re told. That’s neglecting your own duties as a professional.
The plan has been to get critical theory into education all along
https://amzn.to/3e4LST0
As far as asking questions in class, I believe it comes down to how genuine the question is. I see an important distinction between a “know better” trying to “stump the teacher” and a student struggling with a concept respectfully asking a genuine question aimed at helping him clarify a specific concept in his mind.
https://janetakesonhistory.org/2020/07/24/the-not-so-good-old-days-in-education/
The history of the ed school radicalism and anti-intellectualism goes back way further than 1960s radicalism, Dr. Lindsay.
I recommend reading Jay Schalin’s “The Long March Through the Education Schools” for more on this.
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/The-Politicization-of-University-Schools-of-Education.pdf
Here is a description of ed schools from the “good old days” in 1960 by author J. Frank Dobie:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2706&dat=19600810&id=5QJgAAAAIBAJ&sjid=px4NAAAAIBAJ&pg=943,5403383
I did a Master’s thesis on Freire in the late 1980s in social work (a sham discipline). Even though he was a Marxist fruitcake, Freire was in fact writing about adult education in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and not children’s education. Indeed his political education/indoctrination theories/methods for adults were named “andragogy” (adult ed) to separate them from pedagogy (child ed).
In the 1990s, white middle class North American female “Freirian educators” went apeshit over the Central American sexy wild macho trad rad scene of Radio Farabunta Marti Shining Path Che-esque rebel non-white leftist studs who really knew how to sexually manhandle a desperately willing gringo bitch under a black hammer and sickle flag in a jungle clearing.
It was around that time when I noticed that Freire’s andra had collided with Mao’s gogy.
When all these newly post-repressed white female “Left Party as sex party”, anti-racist revolutionary camp followers entered the K-12 system as “teachers” in the 2000s, their lab rats, Les enfants de Paradise Lost, began being manufactured into perpetual mini Red Guards.
I thank the gods I am old and will be dead or mercifully gaga by the time these munchkin killer- automata come of age.