ABSTRACT
Within the last fifteen years a radical theory of education has emerged in the United States. Broadly defined as “the new sociology of education” or “a critical theory of education,” a critical pedagogy developed within this discourse attempts to examine schools both in their historical context and as part of the social and political relations that characterize the dominant society. While hardly constituting a unified discourse, critical pedagogy nevertheless has managed to pose an important counterlogic to the positivistic, ahistorical, de-politicized discourse that often informs modes of analysis employed by liberal and conservative critics of schooling, modes all too readily visible in most colleges of education. Taking as one of its fundamental concerns the need to re-emphasize the centrality of politics and power in understanding how schools function within the larger society, critical pedagogy has catalyzed a great deal of work on the political economy of schooling, the state and education, the politics of representation, discourse analysis, and the construction of student subjectivity.
