Thus, Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction is about the efforts of
humans to move beyond the truncated insights of the present, to find new (and old)
knowledges that inspire us and change the nature of our being, and to produce new
wisdom in light of our understandings of the failures of the past and present. I passionately
believe that such an effort is not merely desirable at this historical moment
but is necessary to human survival. Indeed, the prevailing Western globalizing
epistemology and the education, religion, and politics that grow out of its phosphate
soaked soil are destroying the world. Whether it is the globalized free market
economic policies or the geo-political military actions of the “American Empire,”
the people of the world—especially the poorest among us—are not well served by
our ways of seeing and being. Something has to change. Epistemology is a central
dimension of that alteration as it lays a foundation for the human carnage, environmental
destruction, ethical insensitivity to those harmed by macro-political economic
policies, educational institutions that stupidify more than edify, and ethnocentric
world views that undermine the growth of our consciousness