The concept of critical pedagogy may be best described as an approach to instruction that attempts at generating a certain level of awareness among students in the classroom. In this sense, it may be concerned with a wide range of sociocultural and sociopolitical issues, while the focus is always on any forms of domination in various kinds of discourse. Drawing essentially on fundamental ideas of Marxist theory, such as the interdependency of one’s existence and consciousness, critical pedagogy is supposed to make students reflect their own worldviews and beliefs when being confronted with different ones. Developing a critical consciousness thus means challenging notions of ‘otherness’ – and ultimately also reconsidering and amending prevailing beliefs in order to allow for a holistic Weltanschauung.
Now it is rather common to encounter critical pedagogy in literature or cultural studies classes at the university level, as such courses inevitably deal with different types of texts that are located in the discourse matrix of ideology, race, class, nationality, gender, sexuality, et cetera. Obviously, the level of critical analysis and awareness raising will always depend on the respective teacher and his/her very own awareness of critical pedagogy, but, up to now during my studies at Dortmund University (Germany), I have had the privilege to learn from many an ardent advocate of critical pedagogy.
My fondest memory is from a course on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which our instructor basically just advised us to formulate our own definitions of terms like ‘freedom,’ ‘justice,’ ‘terrorism’ or ‘democracy.’ I found myself being deeply impressed by this little self-experiment, as it turned out to be pretty much impossible to find universal definitions for those words – any attempt would lead to a specification only in the wider framework of a particular ideology.
So what exactly do we mean when talking about ‘terrorists’ and ‘freedom fighters’? Nelson Mandela, for example, is considered an icon of the South African resistance and liberation struggle, who was sent to prison for 27 years because he fought for the freedom of his people, the black Africans who were massively oppressed under the apartheid regime of a minority of white Afrikaners. However, it was only in the late 1980s that the Western world actually started to acknowledge and vindicate him as a freedom fighter. Prior to that, he was considered simply a malevolent terrorist and therefore a political prisoner deserving his life sentence – a conviction hold not only by the Afrikaner government but interestingly enough also by most Western nations, especially the United States. Being the leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress, Mandela had engaged in terrorist activities in the 1960s, which in the course of the struggle would inevitably also claim many lives of civilians, thus designating him a terrorist de facto by international conventions. And as a matter of fact, it was not until July 2008 that Mandela and other ANC party members finally were allowed to enter the US without a special visa waiver from the US Secretary of State, only because the US government was still listing them as terrorists according to the old apartheid regime designation (incredibly enough, an exception had been made in all those years just for the UN headquarters in Manhattan).
When in 1994 apartheid was ultimately abolished and Mandela became president, the new black administration abandoned the option to prosecute apartheid perpetrators in retaliatory trials, as they were held by the Allied forces in Nuremberg after their victory over the Nazis. Instead, Mandela introduced an exemplary model of restorative justice to come to terms with the past: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose main objective was to provide disclosure about all the crimes that had been commited during apartheid, both by white and black people.
Reconsidering this little but still very significant example, one has to keep in mind that the South African experience could only open the world’s eyes for a second. True, our allegedly preconceived notions about such abstract terms as ‘freedom’ may have been challenged in that specific South African context, but the world has yet failed to apply this realization to other contexts – for instance, is it the Palestinian who fights for his freedom against Israeli occupation, or do the Israelis defend their freedom against Palestinian terror?
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