Abstract

Paulo Freire and Jacque Rancière are key philosophers of the critical education tradition who have criticised didactic educational practice as oppressive through objectification and stultification. They argue that through the working of power in the educator-educated relationship, the educators regulate or control the knowledge that is accessed by the educated’s consciousness and explicate such knowledge to the degree that enforce the notion that the educated have inferior intelligence to that of the educators. This oppressive subject-object relationship is considered to not only result in “naıve consciousness” but also a kind of intellectual laziness that weaken the attention people give to their own intellectual powers in relation to their experiential challenges. This condition leads to educational engagements, underwritten by the belief in intellectual inequality, that equip the educated with reproductive abilities rather than creative will to engage in conscious, reflective, and responsive response to physical and social limit situations that confront humanity presently and in the future. Hence, inspired by the concepts of emancipatory transformative educational principles, I draw insights from philosophers like Freire, Rancière, Biesta, Bergson, and Chia to articulate the principles of an emancipatory educational engagement that is based on the assumptions of intellectual equality and focused on providing the educated with the freedom to develop independent and autonomous creativity in transformative response to present and future limit situations. It is hoped that the application of the proposed principles would foster the orientation of the educated into becoming independent and autonomous critical and creative thinkers who are equipped with the skills of consciousness and critical intervention in the realities of their circumstantial challenges.