Maturing with "Witz": Paul Maar's "Eine Woche voller Samstage"

Strategies in teaching children-pedagogical strategies-seem hard put to circumvent the notion of identity. After all, common thinking has it that we educate children to adulthood, students to intellectual maturity, to a clearly delineated sense of self whereby a formed, mature human emerges who actively participates in social and political institutions and, most importantly, continually reconstitutes, reformulates, and administers the rules and boundaries of these institutions. Essential for this purpose is the education to subject positions imbued with the aura of liberated individuality, independent thinking, and free choice; after all, the structures of dominant institutions (law, education, religion, marriage) must be "naturalized," and this can best be achieved if the child grows up to believe itself to be "liberated," "independent," and "free" in its de facto positionality within these structures. These liberal pedagogical strategies, however, inevitably lead to uncritical thinking in which the adjectives "liberated," "free," and "independent" often stand in for nothing more than the freedom to affirm the status quo. In some ways, the task of working toward a more radical pedagogy seems daunting, if not downright depressing. How indeed can such firmly entrenched norms as "identity" and "self"--don't we build so much of education around the question of experience?--be taken up in an analytical framework which questions and challenges common socialization processes? In "Towards a Postmodern Pedagogy," Henry A. Giroux discusses his agenda for a critical pedagogy in which schooling becomes a process of empowering students by educating them to "critical citizenship":