ABSTRACT
Henry Giroux received his doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1977, writing on curriculum theory, sociology and sociology of education. Giroux's early work draws heavily on the Frankfurt School, particularly Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas. He critiques the dominance of the controlling and dehumanizing mentality of instrumental reason for its perpetuation of inequality in society. Schools, in Giroux's view, should be sites of cultural production and transformation rather than reproduction. They should be sites of empowerment and emancipation of individuals and groups within a just society, enabling individual and collective autonomy to be promoted in participatory democracies that embrace a diversity and plurality of cultures and social groups. Radical pedagogy, for Giroux, is not a set of techniques but a questioning of received assumptions about the nature, content and purpose of schooling. In this sense it is a form of 'cultural politics' as it questions whose cultures are represented in education and how legitimate this might be.
