Critical Education:

• Prepares students to be their own agents for social change, their own creators of democratic culture.

• Is not a lecture on freedom, democracy, or domination. It is an educational practice.

• Is participatory learning (the how) and critical empowerment (the what)

• Examines familiar situations in unfamiliar ways

• Assumes the teacher will learn important things from her students; therefore, she must listen to what is being said differently

--Ira Shor, Critical Teaching and Everyday Life
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987

From Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Friere

• Men educate each other through the mediation of the world. As this happens the word takes on new power. Each man wins back his right to say his own word, to name the world.

• No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.

• Dialogue cannot exist without humility. How can I dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own?

• The interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the conscience of the oppressed not the situation which oppressed them.”