ABSTRACT
Essence is a very dangerous word because it points to radically dangerous things: grasping the nature of the world and the nature of being human in it. Talk of essence and essences demands that ontology be taken seriously and advanced boldly. But such boldness is not widely observed even amongst “revolutionary” educators. Rather, many share a disposition to ontological shyness similar to their bourgeois counterparts. They retreat to a world where ontology is flat, essences are expelled and epistemology rules. The problem of essence is explored via an examination of revolutionary and reformist forms of critical pedagogy. It shows that the broad and often contradictory approaches to critical pedagogy have a long history in social thought and practice. By returning to Marx via consideration of contemporary approaches to essentialism that are non-reductionist and explanatorily powerful critical pedagogy can be freed of its contradictions. If critical pedagogy is to be transformative as it claims it must be essentialist.
