The Critical Curriculum

4,659 words

Wayne Au
Critical Curriculum Studies: Education, Consciousness, and the Politics of Knowing
New York: Routledge, 2012

I fear that I have ignored Schopenhauer’s maxim: “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones, for life is short.” However, the challenge with his guidance is determining whether a book, especially a more niche or obscure title, is good or bad without reading it. Fortunately for you, dear reader, I read Critical Curriculum Studies so you don’t have to.While unlikely to become a perennial classic of philosophy, it provides a window into the mindset and terminology of contemporary education professors and their educational ideas based in critical and feminist theories.

In 1970, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated from Portuguese into English, began trickling into hands of education professors. His work, now considered one of the foundational works of critical pedagogy, aimed to expand the economic theories of Marxism to a broader sphere including any form of perceived oppression and apply them to education. As the ideas of critical theory wormed their way into the university, critical pedagogy entrenched itself in the colleges of education. Freire’s disciples are legion. Wayne Au, interim dean of the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell, is among their number.

While lesser-known and less cited than the big-wigs of critical pedagogy (Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Michael Apple, and Henry Giroux)[1] who have been writing since the sixties and seventies, Au holds three points of interest: first, as a dean of educational studies, he holds significant sway over how upcoming teachers are trained. Second, through his work with Apple—who edited Critical Curriculum Studies and the series Critical Social Thought—and other critical pedagogues, Au’s work helps to synthesize and summarize a bulk of their thought into a short text. Third, Au serves as an editor for Rethinking Schools, a book publisher and journal focused on promoting leftist ideas in schools (they claim credit for the push to villify Columbus starting in the 90s).

In 2008, Rethinking Schools (along with the organization Teaching for Change) helped create the Zinn Education Project to create lessons based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, notorious for its anti-white retelling of history. The National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the U.S., has promoted the Zinn Education Project. Newsela, a company that produces lessons and articles, is used in 90% of schools and partners with the Zinn Education Project for content.[2]

The average teacher puts in 54 hours a week between classes, grading, helping with extracurriculars, and planning lessons[3]—up to seven hours a week selecting and developing lesson materials.[4] Looking to save time, the vast majority of teachers (90%)[5] now turn to the internet for resources, and there, waiting with open arms, are the free materials provided by Newsela and the Zinn Education Project. While Wayne Au may be unknown to most of society, he’s working diligently to reshape education through his writing, lectures, and editorial decisions.

Au wrote Critical Curriculum Studies as a response to postmodern educational scholars looking through the lenses of feminism, cultural studies, post-structuralism, disability studies, neo-Marxism, and post-colonial studies. He fears that (quoting Landon Beyer and Daniel Liston) postmodernists

without some sense of words and referents that extend beyond the signifier and signified, their talk amounts to nothing, or if it does indeed amount to something, it undermines its own position. Without the possibility of utterances referring to something outside themselves, postmodernism is locked within a circular narcissism, which undermines not only the claims of modernists but postmodern writing as well. Such circularity is debilitating for those involved in education, who are confronted daily with choices that call for concrete action and that often carry long-lasting consequences. (pg. 8)

Au suspects that, if taken to its conclusions, postmodernist ideas become too subjective and disassociate educators from material reality—they focus excessively on theory and not enough about application.

Second, he feels apprehension towards writers calling for pragmatism, focusing on the application of curriculum studies and arguing that it “should not incorporate ideology, politics, personal experience, culture, and other forms of subjectivity that might be brought to analysis of school knowledge” (pg. 6). Au aims to bridge the gap between critical theorists—he lists Freire, Vygostsky, Lukacs, Marx, and Engels as influences—and the application of their ideas in education.

Like Freire, Au believes the most important part of education should be to raise consciousness—but not simply the consciousness of being awake or consciousness in the sense of thinking. Au wants critical consciousness, or for people to become aware of their “context” in terms of power dynamics—capitalist oppression, patriarchy, racism, homophobia—to “see how external relations impinge upon [their] thinking and acting” and to reflect “on the social structures that shape our consciousness” (pg. 24). But, merely reflecting upon those dynamics is not enough; true critical consciousness requires praxis—action undertaken to change those structures.

Fellow disciple of Freire, Henry Giroux, describes the process of consciousness raising—followed by action—as political education. He writes that it is of central importance for teachers to “encourage students to connect knowledge and criticism as a precondition to their becoming agents of social change, buttressed by a profound desire to overcome injustice and a spirited commitment to social action.” Giroux continues: “Political education teaches students to take risks and challenge those with power. […] Political education proposes that the role of the teacher as public intellectual is not to consolidate authority, but to question and interrogate it.”[6]

Kant’s epistemology serves as the foundation for Au’s analysis of consciousness. To illustrate it using the example of a banana (may the scholars of Kant forgive my errors): a banana exists as an object with inherent properties such as size, color, taste, scent, and temperature, independent of whether anyone perceives it. When an individual perceives the banana, they encounter not the object-in-itself (noumenon), but the phenomenon—the banana as it appears to them. Sensory organs like the eyes and nose receive stimuli from the banana, and the mind synthesizes this input to construct a mental representation. However, this representation is shaped by the mind’s innate structures—Kant’s a priori forms of time and space—which mediate and filter all experience. As a result, perception is not a direct grasp of objective reality, but a subjective construction shaped by the perceiver’s cognitive framework.

Au, adopting the ideas of the Russian-Jewish psychologist Lev Vygostsky, adds to this that our processing of sensory (material) and social input is processed through our social, linguistic, and cultural experiences because “we use socially constructed language systems to mediate our interactions with our social and physical contexts, ultimately our consciousness originates socially … we cannot make meaning of words unless we have a systematic, social, historical, and cultural context in which to make linguistic and conceptual sense of them in the first place” (pg. 21). In other words, all human views on reality are subjective rather than objective, and those subjective viewpoints are shaped by the network of social influences we have absorbed, often without us realizing it.

Our perceptions of reality, our epistemological “knowing,” is therefore shaped not just by our intuition of time and space, but also by the social and environmental input we receive. The critical pedagogues fear that because society contains unequal power dynamics people will absorb those into their consciousness. A common example that critical theorists point to is the usage of black and white in culture. In their introductory text to critical race theory, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic note:

In the semantics of popular culture, whiteness is often associated with innocence and goodness. Brides wear white on their wedding day to signify purity. … In contrast, darkness and blackness often carry connotations of evil and menace. … We speak of a black gloom. Persons deemed unacceptable to a group are blackballed or blacklisted. Villains are often depicted as swarthy or wearing black clothes or hats.[7]

The goal of critical pedagogy is for people to question the social inputs they’ve received, to reprogram their thinking, and to take action to remove inequality in society. “It is this critical questioning of inequitable social relations and working towards their abolition, while simultaneously developing new, more equitable relations (including more equitable social, cultural, and material environments), that inhabits a dialectical conception of consciousness and ultimately defines critical consciousness” (pg. 26, emphasis added). Consciousness then, in critical terms, is more than being awake, more than just thinking, but thinking about how one thinks, what inputs have shaped one’s mind.

If the goal is critical consciousness, how does a teacher go about designing a curriculum to engender it in students? First one must define what curriculum is, for it includes more than just the textbooks used or the list of topics to be covered. Au defines curriculum as “a form of complex environmental design” (pg. 29). This environment is composed of the physical materials, the language and symbols used, the behavior of the people within that environment, the temporality of the classroom (the use of time and whether the emphasis is on the past, present, or future),[8] the artistic/creative aspects, and, finally, the social policies controlling that environment.

Of course, as a good critical theorist, Au asserts these factors are controlled by power relations that serve the goal of “socio-economic class reproduction” (pg. 47). Controlling who has access to knowledge in the classroom, the methods of teaching used (teacher-led vs student-led), and the topics discussed, can work to empower the dispossessed or to leave them alienated and unable to learn. This can be done via the explicit curriculum, what is directly taught; or by the implicit curriculum—called the “hidden” curriculum in some texts—the underlying social and economic norms, expectations, and values taught tacitly; or by the null curriculum, that which is never taught at all.

What curricular tool does Au believe best serves the goal of raising the critical consciousness of students? Drawing from the writings of feminists Nancy Harstock and Sandra Harding, Au promotes standpoint theory. While the ideas of standpoint theory rear their heads in many places and discussions, they are rarely titled as such (they broadly fall under the ideas of critical theory, poststructuralism, and postmodernism).

Feminist scholars built from the ideas of György Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, translated into English in 1971. Lukács elaborated Marxist theory: the bourgeoisie experience reality differently than the proletariat. The needs of the bourgeoisie and proletariat are at odds with each other. The bourgeoisie, as those with power, establish society according to the needs of capitalism and promote the ideology of capitalism. The proletariat must become aware of themselves as a group in opposition to the bourgeoisie—achieving “class consciousness”—in order to achieve liberation.

The tenets of standpoint theory are as follows: first, an individual’s material experiences structure their epistemological framework—their knowledge of reality—in ways that promote and inhibit understanding in different areas—again, building from the Kantian idea that we cannot know an object-in-itself (noumena), but we can have a subjective idea of it. A person’s social position (race, class, gender) shapes how a person interprets the world, and it’s easier for people to understand their own social position than it is for them to understand those of different backgrounds.

Second, because of differences in power relations, the “epistemologies available to groups in power contradict and run counter to the epistemologies of oppressed groups—forming epistemological inversions of each other” (pg. 54). Here we have dialectical opposition established between the oppressors (thesis) and the oppressed (antithesis).

Third, “the perspectives of those in power are made functional in the lives of everyone regardless of position … those with more power can exert stronger influence on our commonsense understandings of the world, even if such commonsense understandings fundamentally operate as distorted conceptions of material reality” (pg. 54). In this case, standpoint theorists present bourgeois, straight, white men as those in power who shape how society views the world.

Fourth, a standpoint, looking at the world in opposition to the hegemonic power-structure, arises out of conscious struggle. And fifth, taking up a standpoint allows the oppressed and marginalized the potential for liberation by raising critical consciousness which leads to praxis.

Standpoint theory takes as its starting point—an unquestioned premise—that “the lives of those who have suffered exploitation produce better accounts of the world than that starting from the lives of dominant groups” (quoting Harstock, pg. 55). When discussing race issues, the words of non-whites should be prioritized; analysis of sexism should privilege the voices of women; and so forth.

Because of this premise Au argues that, rather than increasing epistemological relativity, standpoint theory increases the objectivity of knowledge. How? By acknowledging that there is a material world, separate from human subjectivity (noumena), then “embracing our subjectivity consciously and actively reflecting on it” we can “gain a better, clearer, and more truthful—more strongly objective—understanding of social and material realities” (pg. 57). In other words, the almighty words of minorities establish Truth.

Curricular standpoint, Au argues, forms the greatest argument in favor of multicultural (anti-racist) education. Other arguments, such as claiming it’s a moral imperative to have multicultural education, or that it creates global citizens, or that multiculturalism helps democracy, fall back on relativistic claims. Au fears that a moral claim for multicultural education, when “morals are fundamentally relative to an individual or individual group’s particular perspective” would then give “Eurocentric, fundamentally racist” ideas equal value to anti-racist ideas (pg. 63). And calls for citizenship or improving democracy open the doors to quibbling over the details of what education a good citizen should have or about the definition of democracy itself. Rather than arguing, Au holds that no one would argue about giving students a Truthful education, and standpoint theory provides that because it “takes as its basis that the perspectives and life experiences of the marginalized or oppressed provide clearer, more objective understandings of the world” (pg. 64).

Au further argues that standpoint theory works to “prove” systemic racism. Paraphrasing his argument: if data shows disparities between blacks and whites, and the words of non-whites hold more truth-value than the words of whites, and blacks claim racism as the culprit, then there must be racism (pg. 64). Never mind that people absorbing social conditioning forms a cornerstone of his argument. He’s willing to accept that social conditioning causes blacks to feel alienated from society, but he would never consider that society teaches blacks to blame racism for every problem they encounter.

In 1988 when Elizabeth Ellsworth, professor of education at The University of Wisconsin-Madison rolled out an article promoting the use of standpoint theory in education, one critic quipped:

I must ask Ellsworth what characteristics of marginalization or oppression give one’s voice authenticity or the problems she discusses? I suppose Ellsworth would say I’m the wrong person to speak on the issue. It’s true, I’m white. But I think that’s cancelled out, because I’m fat.[9]

 I wonder how Au would justify his premise that the voices of minorities hold greater epistemological value if pressed on the issue. One could argue that the “oppressor” groups have a greater objective understanding of material reality, and that allowed them to achieve their power. Why should we favor the word of a lumpenprole? Likely, upon interrogation, Au would fall back on anti-white animus in order to justify the validity of standpoint theory. Perhaps Au should look at his own “hidden curriculum” for critical analysis.

Evola provides a brief insight into the minds of the critical theorists and their ideological fellow travelers. In Revolt Against the Modern World, he argues that Marxists hold two truths, the “esoteric” or primary truth, and the “realistic” or secondary truth. The “disavowal of every spiritual and transcendent value” forms the primary truth of Marxism. For the descendants of Marx, that primary truth is the destruction of every white spiritual and transcendent value through the destruction of whites themselves. The secondary truths are “forged case by case, often in apparent contrast with the first truth.” These secondary truths are instruments of the primary truth and “are usually set aside as soon as they have achieved their tactical objective.”[10] This explains why progressives immediately discard appeals to justice and equality when upholding such ideals would benefit whites.

Au, and other critical theorists, call for people to question the norms of society, but they rarely seem to question their own premises, like a doctor doling out prescriptions yet balking when told to swallow his own bitter pill. As Michael Walsh noted, “one of the attractions of Critical Theory and progressivism in general [is it] appears to require thought, but in fact all it requires is faith … always in the service of novelty for its own sake, masquerading as ‘dissent’ or ‘revolution.’”[11] In their world everyone is born equal and then society, through systems of privilege and oppression, elevates some and holds others down. In their egalitarian fervor, they dare not consider that people are born unequal, with varying proclivities and cognitive repertoires. And even worse, what if equality itself, the great shibboleth of their religion, was brought into question and tossed from its autotelic throne?

Au argues that the current curricula in schools alienates minorities; they do not see themselves represented nor any connection to their experiences and identities. “[N]ot relating the curriculum to students effectively alienates their knowing from their being, and turns education into a key factor in producing their alienation” (pg. 67). Au hopes that the application of standpoint theory in the classroom—focusing education on the voices of blacks, Hispanics, LGBT, and women—will result in students developing critical consciousness and lead them to take action against the inequalities in society.

It seems strange to think that black students need to hear black voices to avoid alienation but focusing on non-whites won’t alienate whites. If blacks need to see blacks, Asians need to see Asians, Hispanics need to see Hispanics, etc., then the logic follows that whites need to see whites for their mental wellbeing. Schooling is a zero-sum game with a fixed amount of time to spend on each topic. For every minority added to the curriculum, time is taken from a white figure. Accepting the premise that lack of visibility leads to alienation, this creates an inverse relationship between white and non-white alienation; the more minorities are shoved into the curriculum the more alienated white students become. But, again, the goal is not consistency or equality, but rather anti-white enmity.

It would seem then that the best solution would be racially separated classes to help students develop healthy feelings of identity and group belonging. Re-segregation—for the purpose of helping black students via an Afrocentric curriculum—has been proposed by leading proponent of critical race theory Derick Bell[12] and less explicitly by black education theorist Lisa Delpit.[13] Noliwe Rooks, professor at Brown University, recently published a book questioning whether integration helped or hurt black communities:

[C]ourt ordered integration has meant sending black children to white schools ‘that lacked access to caring and demanding teachers, institutional and interpersonal, caring, and the communal bonds that existed in exclusively black schools under segregation.’ […] the trauma their children experienced in predominantly white schools and from white teachers was sometimes more harmful than the undereducation occurring in segregated schools.[14]

However, allowing the creation of racial curricula focusing on non-whites would leave glaring holes and distortions in students’ understanding of history, literature, and philosophy—imagine teaching the American Revolution emphasizing Crispus Attucks and relegating George Washington to a footnote; while this would likely lead to increased in-group cohesion and reduced alienation by creating unifying, racial narratives, it would increase discord between groups as they lose common cultural touchstones.

The idea of teaching students what is relevant to them—race, class, gender, ethnicity—and what interests them may sound good on the surface but is ultimately detrimental. Many students have no interest in math, yet it’s a necessary skillset to acquire; Shakespeare is not an author most students willingly engage with, but studying his plays develops their linguistic skills and understanding of human nature. Students might have no interest in something because they don’t know it exists (null curriculum). Teachers and curriculum designers should help expand students’ knowledge rather than trying to limit it. Au’s plans to use a critical lens in hopes of freeing students’ thinking is likely to limit their intellectual horizons by training them to look at everything through the lenses of race, class, and gender, but nothing more.

Au devotes the fifth chapter of the book to providing historical and contemporary examples of standpoint theory in practice. In the early 1900s, activists established one hundred Socialist Sunday Schools which aimed to instill pride in working class children, teach them that workers were systematically subordinated, and encourage collective action to change the capitalist system. As a historic racial example, Au points to Carter G. Woodson, author of the Mis-Education of the Negro. Woodson believed blacks were being deprived of knowledge of their proud African ancestors and “took up the standpoint of African Americans as vital contributors to the cultural and intellectual history of the world” (pg. 74). He helped to write and edit twenty books about black history and developed textbooks showing blacks in a variety of occupations in hopes of inspiring black children to explore a greater variety of careers and ambitions.

For contemporary examples, Au points to an English teacher who taught her students the “hegemonic role that Standard English plays in cultural and linguistic oppression” and “introduced her students to the origins and grammatical rules of African American Vernacular English” (pg. 79). In mathematics, he shares the stories of “social justice math” where the students present at “their school’s annual social justice data fair” (pg. 83) or another teacher who taught her students about Egyptian (portrayed as synonymous with sub-Saharan Africa) and Mayan mathematics in order to show “the diverse, multicultural, and conceptually advanced mathematical knowledge as it existed historically” and combat the “racist, structurally Euro-centric presentation of mathematics” (pg. 86).

(In 2018, six years after the publication of Critical Curriculum Studies, Seattle Public Schools implemented “math ethnic studies” in six of its schools; their math scores plummeted.[15] Equity-based, critical, and progressive educational reforms only seem to lower academic standards, and, rather than fixing it as they hoped, increased the achievement gap between whites and non-whites.)

In history, one teacher recreated the U.S. Constitutional Convention with a twist: students were assigned to one of seven groups—Male Southern Plantation Owners, Northern Merchants and Bankers, white Workers/Indentured Servants, Enslaved African Americans, Free African Americans, white Women, and Native Americans—and then tasked with role-playing the Convention as if all those groups had been present. The teacher aimed to “challenge the epistemology of the ‘founding fathers,’ many of whom were slave owners and/or benefitted from the taking of indigenous lands, and who somehow neglected to grant citizenship and/or voting right to women, poor whites, those of African descent (free or enslaved), and Native Americans” (pg. 88).[16]

Au proudly describes teaching in 1999 and using Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America as history textbooks; and, before the World Trade Organization met in Seattle that year, he spent a quarter discussing the exploitation of the global South, theft of indigenous knowledge of plants and farming, and environmental ramifications of neoliberal free trade; and then—praxis achieved—many of his students took part in the protests that year.

Education writer Daniel Buck levels two criticisms at these teaching strategies: first, in the effort to display the “oppressed” perspective, the students are often left without the knowledge of the main course of events happening in history and literature or a solid foundation in mathematics and science. “If teachers adopt Freire’s philosophy, they might produce activists, yes, but these activists would lack the knowledge and skills necessary to make a positive change in this world.”[17] Without first acquiring knowledge, it is difficult to think critically about it in any meaningful way; students are told to think critically with nothing in their minds to be critical of.

Secondly, critical pedagogy teaches students to view everything through a lens of oppression, it “turns literature into something of an echo chamber, repeating the same theme with each book” rather than looking at what meaning the text offers in itself.[18] No matter what is read or analyzed, the same conclusion is reached: oppression, hegemony, and power differentials. What does it profit a man to find patriarchal-racists-heteronormative bias everywhere he turns? Questioning should be for the acquisition of truth and virtue rather than merely for the sake of tearing down.

Perhaps you noticed the null curriculum of Critical Curriculum Studies. Nowhere does it mention improving literacy, or knowledge of history, or enhancing mathematical skills. If this was pointed out to the author, he would likely retort that asking about such trifles reflects the internalization of Eurocentric (racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic) epistemology and upholding inequitable power structures. In his discussion of Freire, James Lindsay wrote that “teaching someone to read so that they can get a good job, for Freire, merely enables them to participate in the existing system, which is bad. Not only is this a bourgeois conceit that ignores the plight of the oppressed, it also validated and reproduces the existing system itself.”[19] Critical pedagogy doesn’t care about producing doctors, engineers, scientists, functional bureaucrats, etc. because those are necessary for a functioning society, but Freire wishes to free mankind by destroying society.

Critical pedagogy’s stated goals of consciousness and freedom provide a smoke screen for their hatred of European culture and its people. The critical pedagogues are apathetic to the education of students; they want activists—foot soldiers in their crusade. The disciples of Freire hold up the children of the world, claiming to care for their futures, but, whether wittingly or unwittingly, they simply use them as battering rams to tear apart Western culture; as they toss aside each mentally mangled, illiterate corpse, they scream out at the white world, blaming it for the suffering children.

Notes

[1] The Open Syllabus Project lists the number of times these authors appear in their database of college syllabi:

• Paulo Freire: 9,453
• bell hooks: 12,705
• Michael W Apple: 2,006
• Henry A Giroux: 2,902
• Wayne Au: 422

[2] Luke Rosiak, Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education (New York: Broadside Books, 2022), 143.

[3] Ileana Najarro, “Here’s How Many Hours a Week Teachers Work,” EducationWeek, April 14, 2022. [LINK]

^[4] Daniel Buck, What’s Wrong With Our Schools? (Clearwater, FL: John Catt Educational Ltd, 2022), 152-153.

[5] Ibid., 152.

[6] Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 224.

[7] Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2023), 86.

[8] “[W]e [must] recognize that the curriculum and the educative environments are rooted in the past and simultaneously oriented towards the possibility of a future [… and] are always developing, always in motion, and always in process” (pg. 36).

[9] Guy Senese, quoted in Isaac Gottesman, The Critical Turn in Education (New York: Routledge, 2016), 103.

[10] Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1995), 346.

[11] Michael Walsh, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace (New York: Encounter Books, 2017), 121.

[12] “Derrick Bell, for example, urged his fellow African Americans to foreswear the struggle for school integration and aim for building the best possible black schools. … Other nationalists urge the establishment of all-black inner-city schools, sometimes just for males, on the grounds that boys of color need strong role models and cannot easily find them in public schools. Others back black- or Latino-run charter schools in big cities.”

Delgado and Stefancic, 68.

[13] Throughout her books Teaching Other People’s Children and “Multiplication is for white People” she speaks favorably of schools using Afrocentric curriculums and making sure that black students have black teachers because they do better with black rather than white role models and discipline.

[14] Noliwe Rooks, Integrated: How American Schools Failed black Children (New York : Pantheon Books, 2025), 19-20.

[15] Rosiak, 83.

[16] A version of this activity is available through the Zinn Education Project: Race, Class, and the Constitutional Convention.

[17] Buck, 49.

[18] Ibid., 78.

[19] James Lindsay, The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education (Orlando, FL: New Discourses, 2022), 52.