Education Cultivates Critical Spirit: A Study On Critical Pedagogy

We are experiencing an age of educational reform because of the great vicissitude of the society. It is imperative to think about the function and purpose of education. Every educator is concerned with the issue about what kind of personality or quality of students should be cultivated. The answers to the question, however, are quite different. For American new conservatives, education is epistemological transmission of the established western values and knowledge, which is completely different from the advocacy of critical pedagogy (represented by Paulo Freire and Henry A. Giroux)—education is a political construction of subject by cultivating critical consciousness for the purpose of social democracy. Different theorists adopt different approaches to do educational research. Conservatives refuse the new social theories and cultural studies, locking themselves within traditional disciplinary boundaries, whereas theorists of critical pedagogy appropriate a lot from theories such as modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism and postmodern feminism to elaborate critical pedagogy and work out a series of educational principles guiding future education.Postcolonialism, based on Foucaultian conceptions of power,discourse, and knowledge, denounces imperialists' conspiracy of legitimating western discourses while marginalizing narratives of the colonized, and advocates re-explanation of knowledge which is estimated as valued and creation of new form of knowledge by breaking down disciplinary boundaries. Modernism's concepts of social progress, emancipation, justice and democracy set up the goal for critical pedagogy. Postmodernism reveals the political nature of education by rejecting the grand narratives and examining the production of knowledge and construction of identity, whereas postmodern feminism highlights the primary of politics and stresses human beings' resistance to the dominant ideology. Based on the above theories, a series of important principles have been worked out by theorists of critical pedagogy, concerning the questions of how individuals learn, how knowledge is produced, how subjects are constructed, and how educators should work.As a fresh and energetic new educational theory, critical pedagogy is far from being perfect. There exists obvious contradiction between the theory and practice. People also doubt the possibility of its implementation. But the deficiencies will not reduce the value it contributes to our Chinese educational reform. It informs us that education is a political subject construction, which is essential for social democracy.