Paul Schofield’s
critique of teaching and learning centers, published
in The Chronicle of Higher Education, arrives
at a moment when higher education is not simply in crisis
but under siege. His argument carries real force. He
exposes how these centers, often cloaked in the technocratic
language of “evidence-based practice,” erode
the pedagogical authority of faculty, flatten the richness
of disciplinary traditions, and substitute genuine intellectual
engagement with standardized techniques and managerial
oversight. In this reduced vision, teaching loses its
intellectual and moral force. What should be a living,
dialogical encounter, charged with risk, imagination,
and critical possibility, is recast as a bureaucratic
performance, measured by metrics, workshops, and institutional
compliance rather than by its power to unsettle, inspire,
and transform.
Schofield
is particularly persuasive in revealing what might be
called the administrative capture of pedagogy. As faculty
defer to external “experts,” the intimate,
risky, and intellectually vibrant work of teaching is
hollowed out. What is lost is not merely autonomy, but
the progressive civic function of education, its capacity
to provoke, unsettle, and transform both teacher and
student. This is a pedagogy emptied of purpose. In its
place emerges a pedagogy of conformity, one that privileges
efficiency and the cult of instrumentalism over vision
and meaning and procedure over purpose.
Yet for
all its force, Schofield’s critique ultimately
remains incomplete. It names the symptoms but overlooks
a powerful body of thought that has long diagnosed the
disease and offered a radically different vision of
teaching and learning. Missing from his analysis is
the rich and enduring tradition of critical pedagogy,
along with the equally vital and often intertwined history
of feminist pedagogy.
Long before
teaching and learning centers began codifying pedagogy
into a set of transferable skills, critical educators
were arguing that education is never merely technical.
Thinkers such as Paulo Freire insisted that pedagogy
is always a moral and political practice, one that either
reproduces existing relations of domination or opens
the possibility for freedom. I have also expanded on
this issue in Pedagogy of Resistance
But this
tradition was never singular. It was profoundly reshaped
and deepened by feminist thinkers including Antonia
Darder and bell hooks, who challenged not only the technocratic
reduction of education, but also its patriarchal, hierarchical,
and exclusionary foundations. At the center of this
intervention stand feminist thinkers such as bell hooks,
whose notion of engaged pedagogy insists that teaching
must be rooted in care, mutual recognition, and the
courage to confront structures of domination, including
racism, sexism, and class exploitation.
Critical
and feminist pedagogy refuses the fiction of neutrality
that undergirds much of the discourse surrounding teaching
and learning centers. It insists that knowledge is situated,
never removed from power; that authority must be interrogated,
and that the classroom is a space where agency, identity,
and values are produced and contested. In this view,
education is not about the efficient delivery of content,
but about the creation of conditions in which students
can become critical subjects capable of naming and challenging
injustice.
This tradition
stretches back through the work of thinkers such as
Paulo Freire and John Dewey, and is radically expanded
by feminist scholars including hooks, Adrienne Rich,
and Maxine Greene. Together, they reimagined the classroom
as a democratic public sphere, a space where experience
matters, where voices are not merely heard but valued,
and where learning becomes a collective project of critical
inquiry and social transformation.
What Schofield
critiques as the loss of disciplinary integrity is real.
But what he fails to see is that the deeper crisis lies
in the erasure of these critical and feminist traditions,
which offer not only a powerful critique of pedagogical
technocracy but also an alternative democratic horizon
for education.
To grasp
the full stakes of this omission, we must situate the
rise of teaching and learning centers within a broader
transformation of higher education. Their emergence
is not accidental; it is bound to the rise of neoliberalism
and the intensification of authoritarian politics.
Under neoliberalism,
education is stripped of its democratic mission and
reorganized according to the logic of the market. Students
are recast as consumers, faculty as clients, and knowledge
as a commodity. This shift produces a crisis of civic
illiteracy, a condition in which individuals are unable
to connect private troubles to public issues or engage
meaningfully in democratic life.
Critical
pedagogy anticipated this danger. It warned that when
education is reduced to individual achievement and emotional
self-management, it not only depoliticizes students
but erases the social relations that shape their lives.
The language of care, imagination, vision, and history
gives way to the language of competition; solidarity
is dismissed as weakness; and the classroom becomes
a site of quiet accommodation rather than critical resistance.
What begins as depoliticization under neoliberalism
does not remain benign; it evolves into something far
more dangerous.
Today, these tendencies are being intensified by a more
overtly authoritarian project. Across the United States
and beyond, education is increasingly targeted as a
site of ideological control. Curricula are censored,
critical race theory is demonized, feminist and queer
perspectives are attacked, and educators are surveilled,
disciplined, or silenced. What emerges is a pedagogy
of terrorism, one that governs through fear, erasure,
and repression.
In this
context, the technocratic model of pedagogy that Schofield
critiques does more than impoverish teaching. It becomes
complicit in a broader project of educational repression,
one that replaces critical thinking with compliance
and transforms the university into an instrument of
ideological conformity.
RECLAIMING
EDUCATION AS A DEMOCRATIC AND FEMINIST PROJECT
If Schofield
calls for a return to disciplinary seriousness, critical
and feminist pedagogy demand something more radical.
They call for a redefinition of education itself. Education
must be reclaimed as a public good, a space where students
are not trained for the market but educated for democracy.
This means reclaiming education as a space where critical
consciousness becomes a way of life in which students
learn to interrogate power, connect their private experiences
to larger structural forces, think imaginatively and
courageously, in ways that grasp the broader social
whole.
At its best,
teaching must also embrace the Freirean insistence that
education is an ethical and relational practice, one
that nurtures the whole person, affirms mutual recognition,
and cultivates a deep sense of care and responsibility
toward others. Knowledge, in this view, is never an
end in itself but a force linked to social responsibility,
enabling students not only to interpret the world with
clarity but to transform it with courage, and to see
themselves as informed, critical citizens capable of
collective action. Such a vision demands that the classroom
be defended as a democratic public sphere, a vital space
where dialogue is not stifled but alive, where dissent
is not punished but valued, and where critical inquiry
becomes the foundation for imagining and struggling
for a more just and humane future.
Such a pedagogy
rejects both the technocratic neutrality of teaching
centers and the authoritarian demand for ideological
conformity. It insists that education is always political,
but that this political dimension can be mobilized in
the service of justice, equality, and freedom.
We are living
in a historical moment in which fascist politics are
no longer a distant memory but a gathering and dangerous
reality. As I have long argued, the struggle over education
is inseparable from the struggle over democracy itself.
Authoritarian
regimes understand what technocrats often ignore: that
education shapes consciousness, and consciousness shapes
politics. This is why they attack critical thought,
erase historical memory, disempower faculty, and seek
to control what can be taught and who can teach it.
This is a pedagogy of indoctrination, intent on turning
higher education into laboratories of conformity while
producing dead zones of the imagination.
In such
times, pedagogy cannot be reduced to method. It must
become a form of resistance. Feminist pedagogy is especially
vital here. It offers a language of solidarity against
isolation, a practice of care against cruelty, and a
vision of collective struggle against the atomization
on which authoritarianism depends. It reminds us that
education is not simply about producing knowledge, but
about producing subjects capable of refusing domination.
Schofield
is right to warn us about the dangers of pedagogical
outsourcing and the erosion of disciplinary knowledge.
But his critique must be extended and deepened. The
crisis of teaching and learning centers is not simply
a matter of misplaced expertise; it is part of a larger
struggle over the meaning and purpose of education and
its capacity to defend and cultivate democratic subjects,
identities, and values.
Critical
pedagogy and feminist pedagogy provide the resources
for confronting this crisis. They remind us that education
is not about adapting to the world as it is, but about
imagining and struggling for a world that could be otherwise.
At a time
of rising fascism, staggering inequality, and the collapse
of moral and civic responsibility, the task of education
is clear. It must create the conditions for students
to become informed, critical, and engaged citizens,
capable of holding power accountable and fighting for
a radical democracy.
This is
not a call for comfort but a demand for vision and courage,
for a clear recognition that education stands as one
of the last vital sites of struggle, a place that must
refuse to reproduce the anti-democratic order into which
the United States has descended and instead nurture
the conditions for a more just and democratic future.
It demands that we reclaim the classroom as a space
of freedom rather than fear, where dialogue displaces
silence and hope refuses the paralysis of despair. Above
all, it insists that education, at its best, is an act
of resistance, a practice of freedom, and a living promise
that the future is not closed, but open to struggle,
imagination, and transformation.
