Anti-Oppressive Education

Anti-oppressive education is a set of educational approaches that work to actively confront oppression rather than treat ordinary teaching practice as neutral, arguing instead that conventional education often reinforces the oppressive systems already present in schools and in society. It rests on two claims, that ordinary educational engagement itself contributes to oppression, and that common efforts at school reform often disguise or even deepen oppressive practices rather than fixing them. Putting anti-oppressive education into practice means rethinking curriculum, teaching methods, classroom discipline and the culture of a school all together, along with the institutions own structure and policies, and it deliberately raises ideas that go against educational common sense, expecting to make people uncomfortable and to provoke disagreement. The approach draws heavily on critical pedagogy, especially Paulo Freires critique of the banking model of education, in which students are treated as passive recipients of information rather than as people engaged in critical inquiry. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/