ABSTRACT
Critical pedagogy encompasses all the areas of study that aim to redress biases that have informed ways of teaching and knowing in our society ever since the first public school opened. The two great movements for social justice in our nation that both changed all aspects of our culture and created small but powerful revolutions in education are the civil rights and feminist movements. After the militant push for racial equality led to desegregation and the changing of laws, black power activists were one of the first groups in this nation to call attention to all the myriad ways education was structured to reinforce white supremacy, teaching white children ideologies of dominance and black children ideologies of subordination. For example, they critiqued school children being taught that “Columbus discovered America” (a bias that denied the presence of indigenous native people in this nation before colonizing whites came to the so-called new world), and they exposed the knowledge that 24African explorers had traveled to this soil before Europeans. Few people in our nation of any race want to remember the way in which black power activists worked in public schools both to see that children who were hungry would be fed and to offer them what Malcolm X called “new ways of seeing” themselves and the world.
