ABSTRACT
Critical education received its most formal statement in Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated from the Portuguese in the midst of "third world" politics and revolutionary movements, the civil rights movement, and the international student movement. Freire's early work has two distinctive features that are often neglected in the push to 'postmodernise' the critical educational project. First, it is point of decolonisation theorising, without the sophisticated textual self-consciousness, deconstructionist play, and radical scepticism towards metanarratives and revolutionary projects of Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Rey Chow and others. Second, Freire's work was an uncommon philosophical blend of Hegelian idealism, Marxist materialism, and Christian existentialism. It brought together Hegel's historical dialectics of consciousness, the master/slave dialectic, the negation of binaries as philosophical method, and translated these into a pedagogy that stressed historical self-determination of individuals and communities through problem posing and solution, the latter recalling Dewey's educational and aesthetic theory.
