Bill Yahner, Ph. D.

Professor of English

California University of Pennsylvania

Email:
yahner@cup.edu

byahner@adelphia.net

© 2002, 2003 by Bill Yahner. My webpage may not be used for for-profit purposes.

CRITICAL EDUCATION

Table of Contents:

Theory and Practice      Resources and Organizations     Journals

Radicalteachers work with themselves, their classes, and their colleagues to discover, name, and change sexism, racism, classism, and heterosexism. -from Radical Teacher Homepage

Critical pedagogy...signals how questions of audience, voice, power, and evaluation actively work to construct particular relations between teachers and students, institutions, and society, and classrooms and communities...Pedagogy in the critical sense illuminates the relationship among knowledge, authority, and power. -Henry Giroux-

The fundamental commitment of critical educators is to empower the powerless and transform those conditions which perpetuate human injustice and inequality. -Peter McClaren-

In my 33-year teaching career, I'm chagrined to admit that I've encountered precious few critical educators, teachers who interrogate the ideological power structures woven through the very fabric of our educational institutions, teachers who seek to identify whose interests the knowledge they are passing on really serves. I'm not talking about teacher-theorists and public intellectuals, people like Henry Giroux and Peter McClaren, whose brilliant work opposes the influential conservatism of counterparts such as Chester Finn and William Bennett. I'm talking about the hordes of regular working teachers, myself included. Most of us are being increasingly marginalized and silenced by our very ignorance about the takeover of public education by the American Corporatocracy and its anti-intellectual brethren, the Conservative Right. Today, the corporate/conservative bureaucratic invasion of our schools that began during the Reagan administration and continued unabated through Bush (41st) and Clinton, has reached its apotheosis with Bush (43rd). My Critical Education page is designed to be a primer for the ordinary teacher and future teacher on how we all might resist and begin to challenge and overturn the destructive consequences of that takeover to construct an educational system that will serve as a genuine emancipatory project.