Towards a framework for critical citizenship education

include the following: feminist / gender-based; class-based; race-based; Queer Theories;
and Post-colonial theories.

Whilst education is seen to lie ‘at the center of the perpetuation of inequality’, it
also has the potential to ‘reduce inequalities’ (De Ferranti et al. 2003, p. 303). Freire’s
(1972, p. 53) argument that the ‘banking’ approach to education ‘attempts to maintain the
submersion of consciousness’, combined with Gramsci’s (1971) concept of hegemony,
would suggest that, in the classroom, all students are ‘oppressed’ until they have become
‘critically conscious’ (Freire 1972). One practical difficulty for critical pedagogy is thus
Freire’s emphasis on local contextualisation as a vital element for his methods, which
contrasts with the need to emancipate huge numbers of people from oppression. The result
of this difficulty is a predominance within critical pedagogy of either small local projects,
or theoretical / analytical studies such as this one.

Collective Focus (Social)

Freire (1972, p. 49) considered one of the most crucial aspects of his pedagogy to
be the use of ‘discourse’ or ‘dialogue’, creating partnerships between the ‘revolutionary
educator’ and the student. Dialogue, in Freire’s eyes, must be founded upon ‘love,
humility and faith’ which, he maintains, will naturally evolve into a ‘horizontal
relationship of... mutual trust’ (Freire 1972, p. 64). He contrasts genuine dialogue with
‘assistencialism’: ‘policies of financial or social assistance which attack symptoms, but not
causes, of social ills’ and which tend to encourage ‘silence and passivity’, rather than equal
dialogue, from those it aims to assist (Freire 1976, p. 15, footnote 1).

The focus on dialogue as ‘one of the most significant aspects of critical pedagogy’
(Darder et al. 2003, p. 15) allows critical pedagogy to counteract what Giroux (1997, p.
109) describes as the ‘individualistic and competitive approaches to learning’ of the

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