ABSTRACT
The term “critical education” is relatively new, emanating largely from the recent scholarship of Paulo Freire, Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, bell hooks, Joe Kincheloe, and others. Put briefly, it focuses primarily on helping students to “to become critical agents who actively question and negotiate the relationships between theory and practice, critical analysis and common sense, and learning and social change” (Giroux, 2007, p. 1). It is a form of counter-socialization (Stanley, 2007) that seeks to make transparent the connections between educational and cultural practices and the struggle for social and economic justice, human rights, and democratic community, to enhance critical understandings and emancipatory practices for the purpose of progressive social and personal transformations. It is clear that this work of the last several decades has drawn significantly from the insights of earlier theorists who addressed interrelated issues of power, domination, oppression, justice, equality, culture, agency, identity, and knowledge, including Karl Marx, John Dewey, Antonio Gramsci, Frankfurt School scholars such as Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, social reconstructionists such as George Counts, Harold Rugg, and Theodore Brameld, and more contemporary sociologists and cultural critics such as Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, Basil Bernstein, and Pierre Bourdieu.
