The aim of this course is to enable you to think critically and innovatively about education. As students and teachers we will work together exploring the ways in which education can emancipate us and others to use our knowledge and understanding to promote a socially just world. 
Education is increasingly defined as a tool of the capitalist economy. It has become so preoccupied with preparing people for the market, that measurement, assessment, grading and ranking, both of people and educational institutions has become an industry in itself. Although the purpose of education is to develop people’s capabilities wholistically, contemporary education is increasingly commercially-led and operates within a ‘banking model’: courses are a means to an end, a means to learning what is required to get a good grade, a certificate or degree. The credential and the grade matters more than the subject or the process of learning. 
While recognising the inevitable link between education credentials and employment, this course will enable students to think ‘outside the market box’. It will explore the perspectives of critical educators, such as Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Henry Giroux, Paula Allman and Michael Apple, people who have been both theorists and practitioners of liberatory education inside and outside the formal education sector. 
Having a critical perspective on education also means examining the internal dynamics of the current education system. Is education equally enabling of people with disabilities, women, carers and older people? Is the idea of meritocracy an unrealisable myth in an economically unequal society? Is education, as Bourdieu has suggested, simply a means of reproducing the class and ethnic/racial structures of society? 
Education is a moral enterprise; given this, what are the moral compasses guiding education presently both organisationally and intellectually? These are the kinds of questions the course will address. The emphasis will be on developing your own critical analysis of the relationship between education and society; it is about developing a new educational imaginary.