ABSTRACT
The notion of 'critical education' is extraordinarily complex and heavily contested. Despite this rich variety in conceptions and practices of critical education, some common themes can be detected among many approaches. Most accounts depict an educational process that contributes to the development of some form of critical consciousness. The idea of developing a questioning frame of mind poses a number of potentially significant existential and ethical problems for educationists. Education, Leo Tolstoy and Miguel de Unamuno show, promotes a kind of wakefulness – a restless discomfort – that carries with it all sorts of dangers to our health and well-being. Tolstoy divides human knowledge into two broad, opposite hemispheres: the experimental sciences and speculative philosophy. The beginnings of a resolution to Tolstoy's despair came as he awoke to the realisation that those with whom he associated were but a narrow social group, so blinded by their privileges that they could not see what was evident among others.
