9: Critical Pedagogy as Revolutionary Practice (An Interview)

So here I am looking to critical pedagogy as a social process, a social product, and a social movement that is grounded in both a philosophy of praxis and democratic forms of organization. On the one hand, critical pedagogy deals with the becomingness of human beings, which is tautologically the defining feature of education, but it does so with a particular political project in mind—anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, antiracist, antisexist, and prodemocratic and emancipatory struggle. It works against what the Peruvian philosopher Anibal Quijano (1995) calls the “coloniality of power.” Here critical pedagogy serves to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar (refiguring how we see the relationship between the self and the social so that we can see both as manufactured, as the social construction of multiple dimensions, and, at times, as the obverse of each other, and the suppressed underside of each other). In addition, it attempts to bring out the pedagogical dimensions of the political and the political dimensions of the pedagogical and to convert these activities to a larger, more sustained and focused project of building alternative and oppositional forms of sustainable environments, of learning environments, of revolutionary political environments, where capitalism can be superseded by socialism. Revolutionary critical pedagogy is not about engaging in specific modes of criticism but about the practice—and praxis—of critique.