It tends to unmask and then attempt to do something about unequal power relations. The learner dropped out or resists because of a lack of motivation, inferior intelligence or a bad attitude. Hence, feminism is in the radical humanism zone but has a leg in radical functionalism. There is also an exceedingly active branch of feminism nested in the postmodern. Critical social theory is a brand of western marxism and exemplified by a range of writers but most notably Habermas and others associated with the Frankfurt School.
Critical pedagogy is another radical humanist orientation.
Activist intellectuals gathered under this banner advocate educational reform and draw sustenance from critical theory and Freire and, in recent years, post-modernism. Critical pedagogues are suspicious of unproblematized technology constructed as a magic bullet to resolve problems in education. Quite the contrary, they too are subjects of a process of their own beliefs. It deploys a Third World perspective to question meanings ascribed to development and Western ideas concerning progress. In this work readers are reminded of various meanings attached to the notion of lifelong education and the way t he notion of network lay at the centre of Illich s and Faure s proposals in the 1970 s.