Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning (Critical Studies in Education Series)

Firmly in the intellectual tradition of Paulo Fiere, Giroux has no peer as a brilliant advocate for critical pedagogy. His true gift is for distilling the complex issues at stake resisting the corporatization of education implemented by neoliberal elites. This book is wonderfully easy to read despite Giroux's refusal to dumb down language and idiom. It should be required reading in all education courses and for all teachers.Henry Giroux with this book gives every believer in the liberating power of teaching and education an invaluable primer in the fight against teachers and critical pedagogy.

disappointed with the writing. It doesn't make the case for Teachers as Intellectuals in a usable fashion…as I hoped it would.

I read this book when I first read this book about five years after I started teaching. By then I was able to see just what Giroux is getting at in this book: teachers in this country are mainly trained to be technicians about their subjects rather than intellectuals. In other words, most teachers--and I base this on observations of my colleagues--are so focused on the academic content they teach that they have so little awareness of other academic disciplines and the larger world in which they teach. They see teaching as a tool for helping students get certified, not as a tool for improving the world.Giroux argues that the role of teachers and adminsitrators is to become "transformative intellectuals who develop counterhegemonic pedagogies that not onoly empower students by giving them the knowledge and social skills they will need to be able to function in the larger society as critical agents, but also educate them for transformative action. That means means educating them to take risks, to struggle for institutional change, and to fight both *against* oppression and *for* democracy outside of schools in other oppositional poublic spheres and the wider social arena."Thus, Giroux situates teaching in a true democratic process, in which the classroom is one of the few public institutions in which an exchange of ideas and utopian visions can take place. But for this to happen, teachers will have link their knowledge of the content they teach with other academic and social contents. In other words, an English teacher should work to be aware of politics, history, science, art, and other disciplines, rather than just focusing on the teaching of novels and the discipline of writing.The only problem with this book is that the writing is dense, so it's sadly not reaching the audience who should be reading it. Cultural critic bell hooks does a little better job with the same subject in her book "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom." She use personal anchedotes and a little more accessible language to argue the nature of teaching.