Educators need to be educated: Or, ‘class struggle’ in academia

Abstract

Asking questions – questioning – is a medium through which we clarify our thinking as well as others’. Questioning is also a medium through which we begin to oppose the current system. An important space for questioning is academia. When students ask critical questions to their educators, this practice becomes a form of students’ active participation in their learning process. Besides, the vast majority of students are future workers (and many of them are indeed already workers), so developing a critical perspective on society is crucial to their lives as workers. To the extent that some of them might wish to become what Gramsci would call the organic intellectuals of the masses, then what kind of questions might they ask their educations that might expose the biases of their educators, that might aid their own learning process, and that might indeed make learning a collaborative process between students and teachers? The article suggests that these questions centre on the class character of the society in which we live.