In Search of a Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

Maxine Greene discusses the primacy of developing a critical pedagogy appropriate for edu cation in this country. The author asserts that because the problems of education are great and educators' notions of the possibilities for change limited by a constrained discourse, it is often difficult merely to envision more humane, more just, and more democratic alterna tives. Yet, without that vision, one cannot develop a critical pedagogy. She therefore suggests ways educators can begin to reappropriate our cultural heritage in order to create conditions for a pedagogy which is meaningful to the American experience.In what Jean Baudrillard describes as "the shadow of silent majorities" 1 in an ad ministered and media-mystified world, we try to reconceive what a critical peda gogy relevant to this time and place ought to mean. This is a moment when great numbers of Americans find their expectations and hopes for their children being fed by talk of "educational reform." Yet the reform reports speak of those very chil dren as "human resources" for the expansion of productivity, as means to the end of maintaining our nation's economic competitiveness and military primacy in the world. Of course we want to empower the young for meaningful work, we want to nurture the achievement of diverse literacies. But the world we inhabit is pal pably deficient: there are unwarranted inequities, shattered communities, unful filled lives. We cannot help but hunger for traces of Utopian visions, of critical or dialectical engagements with social and economic realities. And yet, when we reach out, we experience a kind of blankness. We sense people living under a weight, a nameless inertial mass. How are we to justify our concern for their awak ening? Where are the sources of questioning, of restlessness? How are we to move the young to break with the given, the taken-for-granted -to move towards what might be, what is not yet?Confronting all of this, I am moved to make some poets' voices audible at the start. Poets are exceptional, of course; they are not considered educators in the ordinary sense. But they remind us of absence, ambiguity, embodiments of exis tential possibility. More often than not they do so with passion; and passion has been called the power of possibility. This is because it is the source of our interests and our purposes. Passion signifies mood, emotion, desire: modes of grasping the 1 427 Harvard Educational Review appearances of things. It is one of the important ways of recognizing possibility, "the presence of the future as that which is lacking and that which, by its very ab sence, reveals reality." 2 Poets move us to give play to our imaginations, to enlarge the scope of lived experience and reach beyond from our own grounds. Poets do not give us answers; they do not solve the problems of critical pedagogy. They can, however, if we will them to do so, awaken us to reflectiveness, to a recovery of lost landscapes and lost spontaneities. Against such a background, educators might now and then be moved to go in se...

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