Paulo Freire, post-critical pedagogies, and the pedagogical dilemma

Abstract

The Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy by Hodgson, Vlieghe and Zamojski shares several elements with the proposals that, with the same name, have been circulating since the late 1980s. Two of the elements with which these authors seek to distance themselves from critical pedagogy, and which are of particular interest to me here, are the proposal to assume equality between educators and educands as a starting point - rather than the superiority of the former over the latter - and to refrain from proposing substantive commitments about a utopian future towards which one must advance and which serves to judge the present. When analysing the work of the possibly most important author of critical pedagogy, Paulo Freire, I point out that a will to equality was already explicitly and strongly in his work. At the same time, however, there are also several elements related to a will to justice and dignity beyond the pedagogical relationship - the ideas of critical conscience and awareness - that, in a contradictory way, materialise a principle of inequality. The proponents of the Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy define in advance a principle of equality between educators and educands, thereby ending up evading one of the dimensions of responsibility for care that corresponds to the educational practice of critical pedagogy. I propose that, by taking critical education as a caring practice, none of these endeavours should be renounced. I conclude that a critical pedagogy is constituted in the always present and deep attention to the needs of the students, in the tension between a will to equality and a will to justice and dignity.