ABSTRACT
Critical social theory (henceforth CST) is a multidisciplinary framework with the implicit goal of advancing the emancipatory function of knowledge. CST is not a traditional discipline but maintains a quasi-disciplinary status in the academy, which is more accurately described as a convergence of existing disciplines. In education, CST promotes critical thinking, broadly conceived. Through the multidisciplinary framework of CST, quality education is proportional to the depth of analysis that students have at their disposal. Deprived of opportunities for historical analysis in its material and discursive forms, students experience their education in its alienated and abstract form; we could hardly call such an experience “quality” or “critical.” However, with the benefit of CST, classroom discourse broadens students’ horizon of possibility, expands their sense of a larger humanity, and liberates them from the confines of their common sense (Leonardo, 2003a). The multidisciplinary knowledge base of CST affirms the role of criticism as bound up in the definition of a quality educational experience. It also privileges the role of theory in critical education, not as something separate from practice, but its conceptual form. In fact, CST rejects the radical distinction between theory and practice as two separate poles of a dualism. CST does not promote theory for theory’s sake, or what Althusser (1976) called “theoreticism,” but encourages the production and application of theory as part of the overall search for transformative knowledge.
