#12. Confessions of a Lapsed Critical Pedagogue

This is not a new post. A few months ago I was thinking about switching the blog over to Substack and this is the only piece that I posted there. I wanted to preserve this post as I am going to be deleting my Substack account. This post was originally posted on June 22nd, 2026. 

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Why do I call myself a lapsed critical pedagogue? The word lapsed suggests that I once believed and no longer do. This may be somewhat deceptive, as I like to believe that critical pedagogy still informs my teaching philosophy in a meaningful way. It doesn’t have so much to do with my teaching as much as it does with my jaded pessimism towards the current state of critical pedagogy. I want to believe in it, but I can’t, and ultimately I have been conflicted about whether critical pedagogy is dead and if it has actually been dead for a long time. When I say “dead,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that critical pedagogy-informed approaches to teaching aren’t being implemented in American classrooms, or that 21st century critical pedagogues aren’t taking up Freire’s mantle to theorize the modern educational landscape. A colleague has brought to my attention the work of Peter McLaren, who engages critical pedagogy against pressing topics of the day like Trumpian politics and threats of mass technological disruption. Surely one could point to this recent scholarship and argue that the dream is alive and well.

If the dream is alive and well, where is the progress? Almost 60 years after the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, why are there seemingly more oppressed people on Earth than ever before? There are so many things happening outside of the classroom we have no control over. As I write these words, the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran rages on. Levels of antisemitism, islamophobia, and wealth inequality in the United States remain increasingly high. Advances in AI technology threaten to make the professional-managerial class redundant and upend the global neoliberal order. Perhaps it is naive to expect a few dissident teachers in community college classrooms, leading subversive lessons and imbuing students with critical consciousness, to have a substantial impact on these larger-than-life problems. If this is indeed true, how are we supposed to understand Freire’s calls for liberation and revolution?

Solano Beach on June 22nd, 2026.

Perhaps the fate of Marxism could serve as an analogy for the current state of critical pedagogy. A colleague told me in a conversation that critical pedagogy has not demonstrated its transformative power because it has not yet had the chance (I have often heard this same idea applied to the ideology of democratic socialism). Maybe the problem is due to a lack of exposure and organization, and that a coordinated institutionalization of critical pedagogy, or a systemized curriculum implemented across the country would realize the expected transformative effects. I am not super convinced by this idea, as maybe the allure of critical pedagogy resides in its inherent radical aura, and its co-optation by formal institutions would defang its revolutionary promise. Continuing with the Marxism analogy, I have frequently encountered the attitude that Marx had strong criticisms but poor solutions for problems associated with capital, to the point that this statement feels like a cliche. Perhaps this is the same for Freire: He offered an effective critique of traditional education as a practice of domination and offered a hopeful perspective for what education could be, but provided no concrete, pragmatic ways to achieve such aims. Maybe it was always left to us post-Friereans to translate theory into practice.

For this reason, I want to attempt to divorce the micro-level interactional dimensions (the banking method, dialogue) of Freire’s project from its macro-level political dimensions (domination, revolution). I understand this effort may be problematic, as one could strongly argue you can’t have one without the other, and I ultimately agree with Freire that all teaching is political and my own instructional approach is no exception. I use a Writing About Writing approach in my own course that situates the field of composition studies as a specific discourse community. For outsiders of the field looking in, such an approach might not sound inherently political. However, I would argue it is greatly political as it assumes that the purpose of writing instruction is to prepare students for the workforce. As students learn about the field’s conventions, my intention is that students start thinking about their own desired field or profession as a discourse community, and I would argue that this shift in thinking would classify as a form of critical consciousness.

Having admitted this, I still see a need to create a separation, as I have wondered if my curriculum runs counter to Freire’s revolutionary mission. Am I not just legitimizing the status quo and teaching students to be disciples of capital, in a society where their greatest aspiration might be to join the professional-managerial class or the petite bourgeoisie? I aim to listen to and engage in dialogue with students, but am I using a transgressive pedagogy for a conservative project? This contradiction within my course design is reminiscent of an idea from David Brooks, who argues in a New York Times editorial that the MAGA coalition is “reactionary on substance but revolutionary in method,” in that they co-opted the oppressor-oppressed binary for their own purposes. Isn’t it possible to radicalize someone in a right-wing direction? This context sets up a key critique I have of Freire: Critical consciousness is a multifaceted phenomenon, and students might achieve critical consciousness in ways that don’t lead to liberation. This is apparent when considering Freire’s work alongside the work of another post-Freirean scholar, bell hooks.

While Freire was working with illiterate peasants in mid-20th century Brazil and class identity was at the forefront of his ideas, hooks, a black feminist, uses Freire’s theories as a lens to examine problems within American society. In Teaching to Transgress, she spends considerable time writing about race, gender, and the intersection between race and gender. She even dedicates one chapter to the topic of class. She alludes to her own childhood experiences, before schools were racially integrated, in which her own black female teachers had a political motive: “For black folks teaching – educating – was fundamentally political because it was rooted in antiracist struggle” (p. 2). What counts as critical consciousness differs for these two writers, and if we accept the assumption that critical consciousness is multifaceted, I have two concerns: My first concern would be that while a career-oriented approach to writing instruction may ultimately reinforce the oppressive nature of a capitalistic American society, don’t students come to college so that they can land a good career? Am I not making my curriculum relevant to students in the same way that hooks and Freire are? Secondly, while Freire is writing about class and hooks is writing about race and gender, should an activist approach be limited to these three lenses? Instead of Writing About Writing, why not writing about environmental justice, writing about anarcho-capitalism, or writing about Maoism? These examples are extreme, but despite the reality that teachers might be passionate about particular causes, and whether a teacher thinks their selected issue is relevant to students, why should we assume we know what is relevant to students?

In my own classroom, I firmly believe that it is not my responsibility to show students what to think, but to show students how to think, even if I disagree personally with whatever stance they are taking. I do not seek to argue that critical pedagogy is effective or relevant again, but to bring the larger conversation back to the purposes of my own classroom. There is a classic scene in the 1996 film Jerry Maguire when Jerry (Tom Cruise’s character) has his famous “help me help you” outburst: Immediately before this impassioned soliloquy, Jerry, a sports agent, tells Rod (Cuba Gooding Jr. ‘s character) that to effectively renegotiate the contract that he wants as a professional football player, he should forget about money and “get back to the guy who first started playing this game.” This sentiment applies to my own situation, as I don’t want to approach teaching through the perspective of an academic, theorist, or researcher, but solely through the eyes of a humble instructor who wants to help his students.

I still call myself a critical pedagogue. A lapsed critical pedagogue, but a critical pedagogue nonetheless. During the second year of my MA in literature, I needed one more class to graduate, so I unenthusiastically enrolled in a composition studies seminar. This is where I encountered Freire for the first time, as we were assigned to read the widely anthologized second chapter of Pedagogy about the banking method of education. While I had a few years of experience teaching ESL abroad, until that moment I never considered any notion of whether I had a pedagogical identity. When I graduated and began teaching composition at the community college, I was able to appreciate whether the ideas could be put into practice. This makes me feel that the question of whether critical pedagogy is dead is of minor importance. If its core tenets can provide me purpose and motivation in difficult teaching situations, then perhaps it still has some redeeming value.

References

Brooks, D. (2025, Oct. 30). Hey, lefties! Trump has stolen your game. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/opinion/trump-conservatives-progressives.html

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.