Parenting as a Political Pedagogy, a Disobedient Critique

Abstract

Using Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and bell hooks’ “Understanding Patriarchy,” this essay examines the patriarchal family as a situation of oppression and suggests that if we address the parent/child relationship as an educative site with political implications, families/households can be transformed from situations of domination to situations of love. To understand parenting as a political pedagogy is to acknowledge the parent/child relationship as partly constitutive of each individual’s foundational understandings of power, domination and love and to engage our daily lives as sites rich with contradictions and the corresponding potential for transformation. Parenting as a political pedagogy fosters a praxis that is a continual process of love/dialogue and action/reflection, serving as the foundation of a lifetime of living in process with others as subjects in a continuous transformation of reality. This project is an attempt to engage the imagination in pursuit of envisioning alternative forms of human association that can facilitate the transformative project of restructuring social hierarchies and creating a world in which it will be easier to love.