Education Essential for Global Competitiveness A Critical Pedagogy of Resistance: 34 Pedagogues We Need to Know

A Critical Pedagogy of Resistance has three thrusts – to emphasize the diversity of widely influential pedagogues (educators), to challenge the reader’s estimation of their role and to inspire teachers. To accomplish this mission, Kirylo (2011) presents a series of 34 essays, each essay forming a chapter. Kirylo has definite credibility to edit the task, as he is Merritt Family Endowed Professor of Teaching and Learning in Southeastern Louisiana University after teaching for 18 years at the elementary level. Originally from Italy, he taught in various schools in Paraguay and, among other books, published Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife (2011).

Kirylo is quite aware of the causative connection from education to economic improvement. A steady theme in A Critical Pedagogy of Resistance is the desirability that all children have educational opportunities, lest minds, with brilliance among the poor and working class, end up being unused or being used below their capacity to raise the living standard for all of their society. Although the point has salient application to developing countries, Kirylo and his essayists also point to the desirability of narrowing the gap between rich and poor in industrialized nations, including the USA.

Here are the 34 pedagogues (with the essay author or authors in parentheses): Michael Apple (by Lydiah Nganga and John Kambutu), Stanley Aronowitz (Gabriel Morley), Lilia Bartolomé (Tunde Szecsi), Deborah Britzman (Gerlinde Beckers and Aino Hannula), Judith Butler (Lynda Robbirds Daughenbaugh and Edward L. Shaw Jr), Noam Chomsky (Janna Siegel Robertson), Antonia Darder (Linda Pickett), John Dewey (Elizabeth Wadlington), W.E.B. DuBois (John C. Fischetti), Michael Eric Dyson (Kris Sloan), Ignacio Ellacuria (Michael E. Lee), Ana Maria Araújo Freire (Sandra J. Stone), Paulo Freire (James D. Kirylo), Henry Louis Gates Jr (Kennedy O. Ongaga), Carol Gilligan (Kathleen E. Fite and Jovita M. Ross-Gordon), Henry Giroux (Marika Barto and April Whatley Bedford), Jesus “Pato” Gomez (Gabriel Morley and Cristina Valentino), Antonio Gramsci (Arturo Rodrigues and Matthew David Smith), Bell hooks (Debora Basler Wisneski), Myles Horton (Tondra L. Loder-Jackson), Ivan Ilich (Debra Panizzon), Joe L. Kincheloe (John C. Fischetti and Betty T. Dlamini), Alfie Kohn (Jerry Aldridge and Jennifer Kilgo), Jonathan Kozol (Patricia A. Crawford), Donaldo Macedo (Jan Lacina), Peter McLaren (Matthew Davis Smith and Arturo Rodriguez), Maria Montessori (William Crain and Kathleen E. Fite), Edward Saïd (Chandni Desai and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández), Ira Shor (Cole Reilly), Shirley Steinberg (Ann Elisabeth Larson), Aung San Suu Kyi (Basanti D. Chakraborty), Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (Renée M. Casbergue), Simone Weil (Peter Roberts) and Cornel R. West (Lois McFadyen Christensen and Takisha Durm).

The utility of Kirylo’s compilation – the reason why the book should interest readers of the International Journal of Commerce and Management – is in the way whereby the book’s educational outlook, while seeking justice and equality under law, supports the desirability for improved economic standards of living in developing countries. Stemming from Freire’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which stimulated Freire’s forced exile from Brazil, critical pedagogy has been defined, by Donaldo Macedo, as:

Critical pedagogists seek democratization of, and wide access to, education among the masses. Although their motivation in doing so is to enhance justice and equal opportunity for the poorer classes, their efforts have positive business effects, like those of the GI Bill in postwar America, as many thousands of soldiers and sailors returning from World War II became first-in-the-family college graduates and helped the USA educationally and economically to the forefront of household incomes worldwide. (For further discussion of critical pedagogy, see Amidon, 2008; Giroux, 2010. The discussion by Yballe and O’Connor, 2004 is useful.)

Consider, for example, the thesis of Zakaria (2011) in the several editions of The Post-American World. Zakaria posits that the standard of living in the industrialized West and Japan will not decline but rather continue, as Brazil, China, India and other Second and Third World economies reap the effect of more widely spread educational opportunities and rise to comparability with the already industrialized democracies. Education, which is inextricable from, and necessary for, the causes of this economic development, includes the critical pedagogy which will transform even early childhood education toward economic competitiveness. In the meantime, the references cited by Kirylo and his contributors render his book worth buying for scholarly value alone.

A downside of Kirylo’s book is that in it the reader longs for an index. The richness of the information is considerable, but analysts not interested in all of it could use the collection more surgically if they could go merely to passages which interest them without having to navigate all the others.

A Critical Pedagogy of Resistance: 34 Pedagogues We Need to Know by James D. Kirylo is highly recommended not only for scholars interested in the economic benefits of education but also for practitioners who seek educational progress as healthy for the future of their workforces in the developing world.