"Critical Pedagogy" Response

Speaking from experience, I can say that I never quite felt like the use of Shor’s techniques for a democratic classroom (e.g., creating rules, selecting grading policy, etc.) were of any great pleasure. I am taught in many of my teacher education classes to make my classroom democratic in these types of ways. I should have the students create the class rules and have them decide how I should grade things. However, we are also instructed to try to guide the students into deciding on the same guidelines I myself want to use. I suppose with this, we truly are recreating our nation’s democracy within the classroom—leading the masses to believe they actually have a voice in the matter. Even as a student I can always sense that we are going to come up with the same rules and regulations that the teacher would have decided without us. So I never volunteer answers for possible rules. All of the other students know what to say, and it cannot be argued against because we all know that it is standard fare. Even if the other students are not aware of the fact that they are being herded, they are aware that they should mirror exactly what the teacher’s expectations are. Thus, we the students recognize that we are not being given any more power with these “democratic” opportunities than we are without them.

The whole utopian society that critical pedagogy is trying to invent through democracy seems rather ridiculous to me. First, we live in a democracy: is it utopian? Then how can mirroring a classroom after the society surrounding it produce a utopia? It can’t. Like George says many times throughout (and tries defending in one short paragraph in the conclusion), critical pedagogy is simply a paradox. It is an impossible dream that does not belong in the composition classroom. The scariest part about this pedagogical discourse is its multiple mentions of unity and unification within the classroom, both among students and between students and teachers. Unification goes against one of the core values of our society—individualism. Yet the critical pedagogues argue that they are bringing students the tools they need to live in our society. Worse than this misalignment of values is the inherent and completely unavoidable teacher-student hierarchy. This hierarchy inevitably places teacher values at the forefront of the classroom. Students want good grades, so they will give the teacher what she wants. So if students are taking up the teacher’s values (no matter how much the liberatory teacher instructs against it), the unification that is happening in the classroom not only de-individualizes the students, but it unifies them in the beliefs and values of the teacher.