Isaac Gottesman's wonderful book, The Critical Turn in Education, reminds those committed to the critical project that the intellectual history of the critical education tradition matters. As Gottesman makes clear, the label "critical" did not emerge out of nowhere: the label derives from a long political and intellectual history in which scholars associated with a variety of radical social movements have used their theories to challenge oppression and domination and to advance human emancipation. Gottesman's book sits alongside Seehwa Cho's Critical Pedagogy and Social Change: Critical Analysis on the Language of Possibility insofar as both are recent attempts to trace the intellectual ideas behind the critical education tradition.2 Gottesman's book specifically aims to achieve two tasks: first, to provide an intellectual history of "the critical turn in education," which entails showing "how, when, and why critical education ideas emerged, were taken up, pushed and pulled, and developed in relationship to specific socio-historical contexts" (CTE, 3); and second, to internally critique critical education scholars and encourage them to develop more "nuanced, sophisticated, and rigorous educational theor[ies]" [CTE, 4). Gottesman views both of these tasks as important because he interprets critical education scholarship as "not be[ing] in a state of crisis, but it is in a state of dilution and fragmentation," and, as a result, "critical conversations lack a sense of wholeness, of unity, [and] of solidarity" (CTE, 2).
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