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Critical social theory is a multidisciplinary knowledge base with the implicit goal of advancing the emancipatory function of knowledge.It approaches this goal by promoting the role of criticism in the search for quality education. Through critical social theory in education, quality is proportional to the depth of analysis that students have at their disposal. As a critical form of classroom discourse, critical social theory cultivates students' ability to critique institutional as well as conceptual dilemmas, particularly those that lead to domination or oppression. It also promotes a language of transcendence that complements a language of critique in order to forge alternative and less oppressive social arrangements. A critical social theory-based movement in education highlights the relationship between social systems and people, how they produce each other, and ultimately how critical social theory can contribute to the emancipation of both. C ritical 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." 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.