Critical Hope in Education for Social Justice

Abstract

Thinkers like Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx or Freud have based their project of radical social change on the questioning of the established order. However, a criticism without alternative does not lead to action, only to discouragement. Critical Pedagogy began as a movement that combined strong criticism with a commitment to hope. However, so that criticism does not overcome hope, it is necessary to insist on the need for hope to live, to survive. Returning to philosophers like Herbert Marcuse (1991) or Ernst Bloch (1986), we propose to recover the spirit of hope and Freire's utopia, from his Pedagogy of Hope (Freire, 2005), as a way for education to contribute to a more just society.