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Education as a social function both reinforces and challenges the cultural…
Education as a social function both reinforces and challenges the cultural terrain.
How does critical pedagogy reveal and confront the role that schooling plays throughout history in the United States?
Education serves as a liberatory force, allowing people and communities to change their social, economic, and academic position to one greater than society would otherwise prescribe.
Emancipatory Knowledge
Challenges the social structure by teaching collective action and uniting the working class.
Educators and students must consider the relationships between power and privilege and question how they shape society.
Students learn to question and potentially overturn the social order.
Challenges the idea that only certain voices/stories are important enough to be taught in the classroom. This type of learning emphasizes narratives that have been silenced historically.
Students are considered as whole beings, already in possession of valuable social and community knowledge.
Students are challenged to think critically using their own wells of knowledge.
Literacy has long been recognized as a tool of social emancipation. People in the US South who were enslaved went to extraordinary lengths to become literate, risking their lives in the process. After the Civil War, Freedmen in the South were the greatest advocates for public education.
Challenges class distinctions and encourages equity.
Recognizes that people have the right to learn for its own sake, rather than any percieved "outcome" or profit that the education might impart.
Education is a function of the elite to maintain the power structure.
The curriculum taught in schools is often designed to reinforce the power systems already in place.
Nationalist versions of history continue to teach outdated and racist historic theories including Great Man History and the Lost Cause.
History and English classes often center the experiences of the white, male, and heterosexual, effectively reinforcing both racial and gender stereotypes.
Different fields of learning are favored or disfavored by the elite: math and science are often upheld as the highest forms of academic achievement, while the liberal arts may be denigrated by the same systems.
Who is given access to learning and to teaching
Students of color have historically been discouraged from taking academic coursework in favor of industrial learning.
Schools are traditionally taught by white women (until you get to the collegiate level, when white men become predominant).
When schools desegregated during the Civil Rights Movement, black teachers were more likely to lose their jobs in favor of their white counterparts.
Those in power may not see a need to change the status quo.
Women have historically been shut out of certain academic paths and institutions, which has led to inequalities that manifest in the modern world.
Funding
Which schools receive funding is typically determined by those with political power, which gives them the ability to change access to learning on the basis of class and compliance.
During the first half of the twentieth century, White Southern Landowners/politicians were able to prevent adequate funding from being allocated to black communities to fund education. These communities were forced to pay out of pocket to create schools in a system known as "Double Taxation."
Schools are viewed by many as a reflection of the capitalist marketplace, meaning that
funding
is connected to academic "profit," typically measured through standardized testing.
Political forces can punish schools that they deem unviable by allocating fewer resources to them.
Standardized testing has been shown to be both racist and ableist, failing to look at students as whole beings.
Politicians can use funding as a tool to control curricula.
Education is simultaneously a tool of the oppressor and of the oppressed. It is the role of the critical educator to ensure that students are taught in an emancipatory way.