Standards are sacred. They denote what is conceived to be absolute Truth and serve as a guide in terms of knowledge, practices, skills, or dispositions, which can be defined as the ‘professional’, the right morals. Learning is organized around standards and questioning the construct of standards, not necessarily the content, is sacrilegious. Standards impose and define what is relevant. They attempt to guarantee equal access to knowledge and to guarantee certain levels of expertise, rigor, and professionalism.

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