ABSTRACT
Critical pedagogy refers to a particular strand of educational practice, associated most commonly with the name of the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, whose educational philosophy, politics and praxis1 was directed towards revolutionary social change. This chapter begins with a personal account of my own changing perspective over the past thirty years on the goals of liberation, democracy and social justice, which were often assumed, in the literature of critical pedagogy, to be universal and unproblematic. Among the theoretical understandings that have helped me to make sense of problems arising in my personal and professional experience, I draw upon feminism and deconstruction to explore the ways in which the emancipatory goals of critical pedagogy are embedded in a masculine construction of human subjectivity. This is evident in Freire’s account of liberation, which is defined in opposition to domestication. In this account there is thus an implicit denigration of those aspects of human experience – the work of caring for our own and our dependants’ physical and emotional needs – that are located in the domestic sphere, and are generally associated with women’s lives. After outlining the source of Freire’s masculine construction of the liberated subject, I go on to show how this is reflected in accounts of radical education, transformative learning and related strands of adult education practice. Finally, I consider the implications of this critique for adult educators, with reference to themes emerging from my own study of the experiences of work, learning, and domesticity among a particular group of women in Southern England (Clarke, 1998). While there is no intention to generalise from this small-scale study to make universal claims about women’s experience, my concluding arguments refer to ‘women’s experience’ as the current state of affairs in which most, but not all, women, and some, but very few, men take on the bulk of domestic and caring work in human societies around the world.
