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The late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was a prominent figure in the 20th-century critical pedagogy movement and the celebrated author of the ground-breaking 1968 text, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Freire’s seminal work proposes a dialogical method of teaching literacy that...
To the extent that people know anything about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), they reasonably assume that they have something to do with the economy (development), and with the environment (sustainability). They’re only partly right. The bigger challenge, especially for countries in...
Indian journalist Manu Joseph recently wrote a column in which he questions major intellectual advances in history, claiming they were nothing but delusional ideas of schizophrenics. He asks, rhetorically: “What if many things that we call philosophies today had emerged from a mental disorder?...
Student loan debt has deservedly become a major political issue in the US, with the total debt burden approaching the impressive figure of $1.6 trillion. The phenomenon has revealed many of the structural problems American society is now attempting to address, with little hope of a viable...
The United Kingdom has begun deploying what it calls reception baseline assessment for children entering primary school. It promises to “provide the basis for a new way of measuring the progress primary schools make with their pupils.” It sounds very rational, but according to a survey...
ProPublica and The Wall Street Journal have unearthed a new college admissions scandal in the US, offering new insight into the culture of inequality that thrives at the core of a society that lives and breathes by, for and through competition. This one concerns falsifying information about a...
In an article published by Al Jazeera, Donald Earl Collins, a history professor who has worked as a reader of students’ exam copies for the US College Board, describes one of the ways the US educational system transforms the teaching of history into a form of Eurocentric, neoliberal and...
