User:Enlightened80

The pedagogy of humanity was the conceptual idea started by Antonio Garcia II at Indiana University during his graduate studies there (2004-2009). He realized that the field of multicultural education had become essentially an education for non-white students rather than a collective understanding of struggles across race, gender, religion, ideology, etc... His culmination of thoughts generated into what he called the pedagogy of humanity. The idea seeks to break the notion of culture as being "us" and "them" (See Slavoj Zizek's book Violence) in order to articulate a broader understanding of the world. He believes that if consciousness of our being becomes present and resonates with a conscious understanding of the world then struggle and oppression will become evident alone( See Paolo Freire and critical conciousness). His work continues to develop and gain extreme popularity among white educators as it decenters demonize white people and European colonial history associated with oppression and racism. Although this may be controversial he supports that "it is bigger than black and white, then and now, us and them"

In order to properly understand his work it is important to understand the influences, experience, and knowledge that brought him to an "enlightened" sense of the world. Primarily his concern with multicultural education was that is lacked a substantive philosophy that all educators could uphold. It could be reasoned that many multicultural scholars, i.e., James Banks, Geneva Gay, Christine Sleeter, Christine Bennett, Sonia Nieto, etc..., agreed on general principles, but he asserted that a philosophy was needed to provide a foundation on which ideas and principles would be cogent. His second concern was that multicultural education was always discussed in a segmented and hierarchical manner. Race was the first and utmost important, gender was second, and so on. His view was that we most move beyond the categorizing of people and understand that there is a system interwoven with complex matrices that have developed a hierarchical system of power, domination, and pathology. It is at this point that evidence of his influences starts to become clear.

Antonio Garcia was an educator with passion. His passion was his greatest strength, but it was also what landed him in trouble with many of the educational settings in which he taught. Despite the admiration and strong rapport he garnered with many of his students the administration was always skeptical of his personal and professional practice with students. Upon entering graduate school at Indiana University he came to begin reading critical theory scholars like Henry Giroux, Donald Macedo, Michael Apple, Peter Mclaren and others who supported his invigorated ideas of schooling. He became immersed in sociology and cultural studies.

Although he read a great deal of Marx and neo-marxist scholars he himself would not consider himself a Marxist. His ideas of life, schooling, and the world are more appropriated to socialist ideology. His political ideas were influenced with the idea of revolution by Che Guevara, Peter Kropotkin, Noam Chomsky, and others. He believed that humanity had the capacity to bring about equilibrium, but it was man not humanity that teetered.

His work which is still in development may be a crucial part in multicultural education, social studies, and sociology.