You Can’t Criticize What You Don’t Understand: Teachers as Social Change Agents in Neo-Liberal Times

Despite the existence of success stories of individual teachers and even school-wide groups of teachers successfully teaching from a global perspective, this paper raises a basic question: to what extent can the average teacher be an agent of change in the tradition of Dewey, Freire, and Giroux? The questioning of this role arises from the observation that many teachers are high achieving graduates of the very school system to which they have returned; and, as a result of spending their formative years in largely untroubled middle-class circumstances, are steeped in the dominant neoliberal ideology and consumer-orientation of the global market society. The author implicitly raises the issue, especially given his concerns about the power of the dominant ideology, as to just how critical and how transformative the actual classroom practice of global education and global citizenship education is or has the potential of being.