Critical.Education

The project

Critical.education was created by Amine Zidouh as an evolving experiment in public learning. Through podcast conversations, visual essays, and interactive inquiries, it brings ideas about teaching and learning into conversation with the experiences of students and educators.

The project is guided by evidence, open inquiry, accessibility, and the public value of knowledge. It does not ask visitors to agree with every interpretation. It invites them to question familiar assumptions, consider different perspectives, and revise a view when the evidence warrants it. The aim is not to make complex issues appear simple, but to give more people a way into them.

Critical.education is for people who teach, people who learn, and people who suspect that education matters far beyond schools and universities. Its starting point is often a question that sounds simple: What makes a great teacher? What happens when a student is afraid to be wrong? Who gets recognized as capable, and who is overlooked? Following those questions can lead into research, personal experience, history, and the institutions that shape everyday life.

The project takes different forms because not every question is best explored in the same way. A podcast conversation can let an idea unfold through disagreement and discovery. A visual essay can make a pattern easier to see. An interactive inquiry can invite visitors to follow evidence, pause, and decide what they think. These forms are connected by the same commitment: to make careful thinking engaging without pretending that difficult questions have easy answers.

Critical.education is still growing. The inquiries here are not meant to be the final word on teaching or learning. They are invitations to think alongside others, to test an idea against evidence and experience, and to remain open to changing one’s mind.

Why the x? — A Letter from the Founder

While coding this site, sipping too much coffee and getting too little sleep, I saved a file under the wrong name: eduxation, when I obviously meant to write education. The seemingly simple mistake disrupted the website code, and when the site stopped working properly, I went looking for the problem. That was when I found the typo. I had spent so much time swimming in questions about education that I had somehow typed an x where the c should have been.

It was probably the lack of sleep, but I stared at that x longer than a typo deserved. It looked like something crossed out, like the red corrections teachers used to leave on my exams and homework. I knew those marks well as a child. I often mispronounced words or spelled them wrong. And feedback could feel more like something out of a scary movie than something that belonged in an elementary school classroom. In that sort of environment I learned very quickly that silence was safer than trying.

My questions were not welcome, either. I personally always needed to understand an idea before I could use it, but school often rewarded something else: a more robotic way of being in contact with education—writing down what the teacher said, memorizing it, and giving it back on an exam. Imagine asking students to copy your words even when they do not understand them, then grading them on how exactly they can repeat them. That was the kind of classroom I knew. I did not stop asking why because I lacked curiosity. I simply learned tokeep the question to myself.

Maybe the greatest irony of this teaching model was when I reached philosophy in high school. I was like, finally! Finally things might be different here. Surely, we would get to think and argue. Instead, much of the work followed the same pattern. We memorized what a philosopher said, the arguments for and against, when he was born, and other (irrelevant) details we were expected to reproduce on the exam. The irony was hard to miss: we were reciting lessons about thinkers who had written about reason and the freedom to think, while having oh so little room to practice either.

By then, I had begun to think the problem was me. The teachers I had known did little to make me feel otherwise. Their classrooms rewarded the student who could repeat an answer, not the one who needed to understand it; my questions were treated as disruptions. Looking back, I am less ashamed of my grades than of how long I let those grades tell me what I was capable of. At home, though, I had people in my corner. My mother believed in me long before I knew how to believe in myself. My father made sure I never lacked anything growing up, even when my grades worried him. I understand that worry differently now: parents can fear that a poor grade will close off a child’s future, and a child can feel that fear before anyone puts it into words. And a child can hear something else in that fear: Is this number what I am worth to you?

I carried that question with me as I moved from one classroom to the next, learning to get through the system without expecting much from it. Then one day, I still remember it as if it were yesterday, I saw a poster for a lecture. The subject caught my eye. That doesn’t sound like the sort of thing they usually talk about here, I thought. Then I noticed the professor was visiting from the United States. Well, that might explain it. I went. The lecture hall was packed, and I barely found a seat among the crowd at the very front. As soon as he began speaking, I was under a spell. He took on questions I had been hungry to hear someone ask, moving through ideas of real complexity with a clarity that never flattened them. There was something almost poetic in the way he spoke, but I could follow every turn. For once, I was not trying to memorize someone else’s words. I was thinking along with them. When the lecture ended, I did something I would normally have talked myself out of: I walked up to him. I had questions. For the first time I could remember, wanting to ask them mattered more than my shyness, my anxiety or the fear of getting something wrong. He listened. He took my questions seriously. We continued the discussion by email and even ended up meeting in person once. Very quickly, he saw something in me that I could not yet see for myself and helped me imagine a future outside my champ des possibles.

After that, I began to question every limit I had mistaken for a fact. I had known teaching as something you endured, something that could make you afraid to speak. His lecture showed me that it could be the opposite: a place where an idea could seize your attention so completely that you found the courage to ask a question.I remember thinking, You can teach like this? I want to do that!

What I wanted was not to reproduce his lecture. I wanted to learn how to offer someone else what he had offered me: the chance to think aloud, to be taken seriously, and perhaps to see a possibility they could not yet see for themselves. I could not change an entire education system, but I could work toward making that kind of classroom for the students who came through mine.

I went on to study in the United States and built a life around teaching and research. Now I speak in front of students almost every day, though I still remember what it cost me, as a child, to raise my hand. That memory comes into the classroom with me. I try to be the teacher I needed, the one I wish I had, and the one that professor showed me was possible. I want to notice the student whose question is taking a little longer to form, not just the one who already knows how to give the expected answer. I want to offer every student an education worthy of their curiosity, while paying particular attention to those who are struggling. Struggle does not always announce itself. It may mean learning differently, worrying about money, trying to belong, or carrying the pressure to succeed when everyone assumes you have every advantage. I want to notice what a student is carrying without letting it define what they can become.

Each classroom has asked something different of me. During the year I led Bucknell University’s study-abroad program in Tours, France, I also volunteered in an education program for incarcerated people at Fleury-Mérogis, near Paris. That experience took me beyond the classrooms I had come to know. In one class, we read Pierre Bourdieu on cultural and symbolic capital: the knowledge, habits, and recognition that affect who is taken seriously and which doors open. These were not distant ideas for the people in the room. As we talked about opportunity and exclusion, they brought their own knowledge to the text, including an understanding of institutions that I could not have supplied.

We also read Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. He traces a shift from public punishment toward quieter forms of power and domination: surveillance, measuring people against a norm, and correcting those who fall outside it. For Foucault, these practices are not confined to prisons. They also shape schools, where exams, rankings, and evaluations can make judgments about a person appear to be simple facts. Reading Foucault at Fleury-Mérogis, I could not ignore how surveillance, ranking, and correction still shape too many classrooms around the world. They teach students to watch themselves and fear mistakes, when education should invite them to question the world around them. Paulo Freire called this alternative problem-posing education: teachers and students thinking together, asking whose interests the world serves, and discovering that it can be changed.

At Dartmouth College, I encountered a different set of challenges, and had the pleasure of meeting some of the most remarkable students I have taught so far. What stays with me is not their grades or the reputation of the college. It is the kindness and integrity they showed toward me and one another, the passion they brought to a question, and the sheer curiosity that could carry a conversation somewhere none of us had expected. Whether in conversations inside class or outside of it, I have had some of the most interesting debates there. We explored power and responsibility in business, politics, science, and emerging technologies. Often, the most valuable moment was not when someone had the right answer, but when a student noticed something we had overlooked and asked a question that made us think again.

That is the curiosity I try to encourage wherever I teach. I do not want students to mistake learning for a race to be right. I want them to have the confidence to follow a question, the humility to discover that their first answer may have been incomplete, and the care to listen when someone else sees what they cannot. The students I met at Fleury-Mérogis and Dartmouth brought radically different experiences into the room. I would not reduce either group to the institution where I taught them. Both reminded me that teaching begins by taking the people in front of you as individuals first, with their own emotions, fears, anxieties, and hopes for the future.

I recognized that lesson again through martial arts. Rickson Gracie recalls asking his father, Hélio, considered the foundation of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, how to become the best teacher he could be. Hélio told him that a good teacher learns a technique precisely and shows a student how to do it. “But if you wanna be a great teacher, you have to understand what the student needs to learn.” That but changes everything for me. Knowing my subject and preparing a good lesson matter; neither tells me, on its own, what the person in front of me needs. Sometimes a student needs another way into an idea. Sometimes they need a harder question, more time, or the assurance that they can try without being reduced to their first mistake. I want to teach well enough to notice the difference and be willing to change my plan when I do.

That is why this story belongs on an About page. The red x is not just a design choice. It began as something I got wrong, placed inside the name of a project devoted to teaching and learning. I tell my students I would worry more if they never made a mistake in my class. It might mean they were holding back, saying only what they already knew how to say. But I also try to show them how that lesson does not end at the classroom door. Trying something unfamiliar, asking a question that might sound foolish, speaking up when something is wrong, or beginning again after a setback all carry the risk of getting it wrong. I want my students to know that a mistake is not a verdict on who they are. What matters is whether they can learn from it, keep going, and find the courage to try again. The x reminds me to make room for that courage, in the classroom and beyond it, and to take seriously the person willing to try.

Dr. Amine Zidouh

Intellectual approach

Critical.education is a growing project grounded in the public humanities and digital humanities. It connects scholarly inquiry with public life, drawing on research without asking readers to arrive with specialist knowledge. An inquiry here begins with a question about education or the art of teaching, then makes room for evidence, lived experience, and more than one way of understanding the issue. The aim is not to settle every debate, but to make it possible for more people to enter it.

The Scientific Committee helps guide that work by shaping inquiries, reviewing evidence, and challenging interpretations before they reach the public. As the project grows, the committee will invite scholars from different fields to develop inquiry pages around questions they are passionate about or currently researching. Each page will give its author room to explore an idea in depth while making it accessible to teachers, students, and curious readers beyond their field.

I also hope to bring researchers, educators, and other experts into podcast conversations and future interactive inquiries. I want them to do more than explain what they already know. I want them to share the questions they are still working through, the disagreements that move their fields forward, and what their work might change about the way we teach and learn.