Critical Pedagogy and Class Struggle in the Age of Neoliberal Terror

Abstract

Within the North American progressive education tradition, critical pedagogy has been a broadly debated project of educational reform that faces students to develop politically well-educated so that they might better recognize and change how power and privilege works on a daily basis in current social contexts. As a project of social change, critical pedagogy is pushed as a significant protagonist in the struggle for social and economic justice, nonetheless it has infrequently ever challenged the fundamental root of capitalist social relations. Amongst the many and varied exponents of critical pedagogy in the United States, Marxist analysis has been almost missing; in fact, over the last decades, its conceptual alignment has been more closely associated with postmodernism and poststructuralism. This paper debates that without class analysis and class struggle play a central role in critical pedagogy, it is meant to go the way of most liberal reform movements of the past, combining into calls for fairer resource distribution and allocation, and maintenance for racial diversity, without fundamentally challenging the social world of capital in which such requests are made.