Freire & Giroux’s Critical Theory and Its Implications for Educational Reform

초록

The recent educational theorists such as Paulo Freire, Myles Horton, and Henry A. Giroux are inclined to reform the educational system through the critical theory. They try to reformulate the meaning of human emancipation and view schools as agents of socialization. They emphasize the importance of power, and the relationship between pedagogy and power. They criticize domination, oppression, and violence. Unlike traditional Marxists, they do not believe that there is only one human domination, that is, economic class domination. Critical theorists argue that the individual’s uniqueness and creativity are becoming obliterated by the mass culture. They also criticize the danger of bureaucratization and authoritarianism. The characteristics are apt to distort the actual life of the oppressed in order to perpetuate the ruling group’s interests. Paulo Freire thought that one of the most tragic illnesses of our societies is the bureaucratization of mind. The bureaucratization is related to authoritarianism. Teacher’s authority guides and develops his/her student’ potentiality, uniqueness, and creativity. However, authoritarianism is quite different from authority based on professional knowledge and desirable value. The former is the power system accordance to hierarchy of control. Under the circumstances, there only exist teachers as narrators and students as receivers or repeaters. Authoritarianism leads to what is called banking ducation. For these reasons, Henry A. Giroux’s emphasized the role of teachers as transformative intellectuals. According to him, transformative intellectuals are aware of their own theoretical convictions and are skilled in strategies for translating them into practice. Critical theorists usually criticize the system rather than present dominant people. Human beings are victims of the system rather than that of oppressors. Truth is to know such kinds of things. Their approach for the resolution of social or educational problems is not micro level analysis, but macro level analysis. The former has to do with an individual functioning, while the latter is to understand how the system has to be changed. However, their sayings and arguments also have several problems. First, many concepts they adopt are ambiguous and vague. The concepts are usually abstract. Next, they regard their views as truth and knowledge. However, their usage about the concepts are still somewhat controversial.

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