Understanding the Relation between Criticality and Knowledge Imposition in Pedagogy

The starting point is the idea that critical thinking can help promote intellectual autonomy and prevent the appearance of knowledge imposition. However, different critical approaches seem to do this in different ways, depending on their different conceptions of critique and critical thinking, and on the particular strategic choices they make. An examination of these conceptions and strategies shows that they all fail to fully prevent knowledge imposition, but each for different reasons. In some cases, the approaches do not provide specific enough questioning tools, and therefore cannot guarantee that their users will actually be able to properly identify and question all the relevant aspects of forms of knowledge. In other cases the tools for questioning provided by the approaches implicitly demand from students the acceptance of a form of knowledge, which therefore they may end up accepting uncritically. A further examination of these issues and the requirements they impose on language shows that it will always be impossible for any critical approach, or indeed any approach, to fully promote critical thinking and intellectual autonomy, and to prevent knowledge imposition. However, the framework used and provided here at least allows one to identify, in particular cases, the dimensions in which intellectual autonomy and critical thinking are or are not being promoted.