Critical Pedagogy as Educational Resistance: A Post-Structuralist Reflection

For the last 40 years a tradition of educational analysis has identified and traced the processes of cultural reproduction present in educational practice which support continued exploitation, oppression and inequalities. A significant figure in this tradition of critical pedagogy is the Canadian educationist Henry Giroux, in turn building on the work of Paulo Freire and, antecedent to Freire, Antonio Gramsci. This article will summarise the main tenets of critical pedagogy and its prescriptions for education aimed at resisting unjust power and promoting equality and social justice. However, it will be suggested that this analysis and its prescriptions encounter theoretical limitations that tend to render these prescriptions impotent and that a more nuanced understanding of the play of power on the individual and through the institution of the school might imply different forms of resistance.