Dear all,

Soldiers in the army use strategies.  Yes, also by corporations, or by football teams that want to beat their opponents.  I dislike when the military or corporative language penetrates the classroom ('teaching strategies" or "management strategies"), and certainly when they penetrate the academia.  Yes, they already penetrated many times.

I love how higher education in the USA attempts to behave like corporations by fostering their discourse and values, treating knowledge as a commodity to be traded and constructing professors as workers who generate added value to the institution's benefit.  The ultimate goal is to serve and justify the institution's existence and create newer goals to further legitimize its functions --ironically under the guise that the university really cares about the students...  Universities are becoming factories of credential production.

The concept and practice of problematization is important to a critical pedagogue. While Paulo Freire has explained it with eloquence by also insisting on asking hard questions such as interrogating who benefits from certain situations or policies, and by analyzing rigorously how power operates, I summarize it as follows:

Problematization