Nobody doubts that teaching is essential for societies to progress and train citizens adjusted to the demands that their social environment demands of them.

The problem is that in many cases teaching remains anchored in simply transmitting knowledge, without promoting meaningful learning or being critical of what is learned.

This is just the opposite that advocates critical pedagogy, with figures such as Paulo Freire and Peter McLaren, in favor of teaching that teaching is an act that should encourage being critical, even for what is explained in that teaching. Next we will take a closer look at this pedagogical branch.

Critical pedagogy is an orientation of pedagogy that holds that teaching is not a neutral or decontextualized process and, in fact, it should not pretend to be either. This branch maintains that teaching should invite critical thinking, to question the lived reality and what has been learned in class, since the knowledge imparted, after all, is selected by people who cannot escape their sociopolitical context, with its biases. and their opinions.

Besides this, critical pedagogy aims to go beyond the classroom context. Through critical thinking , students are invited to question the life they have lived , and see to what extent they can change it through political and social intervention.

In this type of pedagogy, it is a promotion of social change by making students participate in the sociocultural movements of their time. The conceptualization of critical pedagogy aims to transform the traditional educational system in particular to encourage changes in society in general.

Although it takes its origins in the Frankfurt School, the ideas within critical pedagogy were deeply developed by several American philosophers , its main references being the Brazilian Paulo Freire, the Canadian Peter McLaren and the American Henry Giroux. They were inspired by the philosophical proposals of Karl Marx, and share the importance of teaching students to get involved in what is happening around them, not to learn passively and not apply it in their social environment.

Always starting from an ethical and political stance, critical pedagogy seeks to develop the art of questioning in students, making them wonder why their environment is the way it is, see to what extent social structures are beneficial or, on the contrary, they must be transformed or demolished.

Although we have already introduced it, we can highlight the following as the main objectives of critical pedagogy :

• Transform the traditional educational system.
• Encourage questioning of what is taught.
• Be applied ethically and politically.
• Encourage students to question themselves about their social actions.
• Promote teaching methods from an analytical position.
• Transform educational values ​​and practices.
• Promote social changes by questioning political and social processes.

The founder of critical pedagogy, at least with regard to its conceptualization understood as more defined, is the Brazilian philosopher and pedagogue Paulo Freire (source: https://writemypaper4me.co/admission-essay-writing-service/). His idea of ​​critical pedagogy, also known as liberating, is quite contrary to the idea of ​​banking education, which according to him was the most appropriate term to refer to traditional education.

As we have commented, critical pedagogy rejects the idea that knowledge is politically neutral, arguing that teaching, in itself, is a political act, regardless of whether the teacher is aware of it or not. The materials to be taught, the way in which they are made and the methods to penalize the error have been selected from an undoubtedly political perspective, both by teachers and those in power.

In all countries there are socio-economic differences in the type of education received, which in itself has a purpose in terms of oppression. The lower classes go to school to acquire the right knowledge to be able to work in low-paying jobs , which hardly allow them to climb positions. On the other hand, it is usual that in the education of those who hold power or were born into privileged classes, their education focuses on how to be able to exercise jobs in those who wield power and exploit the lower classes, more or less implicitly .

The educational curriculum in public schools in the most disadvantaged countries is usually limited to being able to read and write, and at most to have a secondary education. In those same countries, the rich can easily get to higher education, in which either because of the way the education directed to these classes is done and because of family pressure they end up studying economics, with a clear aim of directing a large company or a business that uses people with little training as a production hand.

The goal of critical pedagogy is emancipation from oppression through critical awareness . This is an idea coined in the Portuguese term “conscientização”. When this objective is achieved, critical consciousness motivates individuals to produce a change in their society, through social criticism as theoretical action and political action as practical action.

Within being critical of society, both ethically and politically, is identifying authoritarian tendencies. To what extent does what we are taught in school allow us to reflect? Are we educated to be servants / dominators or are we really free? Regardless of the type of education, it is clear that what is taught is still politicized, and influences society, both by making reality accepted and by initiating change.

The practical aspect of critical pedagogy, defended by Freire, McLaren and Giroux, is, first of all, defining what power is like and acquiring measures against oppression . It is this idea that is understood as liberating within the current. Social transformation will be the end product of a process that begins in questioning the state of things, applying changes, evaluating what has been achieved, reflecting and, once again, questioning the new reality that has been reached.