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Abstract

The American educational system, because of its seemingly innocuous yet ubiquitous nature, has become, to borrow a term from Roland Barthes, naturalized. By being naturalized, it has become a system that has somehow slipped beneath the radar of the American populace and operates on an autopilot of sorts that allows it to employ practices that don’t necessarily have the best interests of its constituents at heart. Murray Rothbard (1979) argued that compulsory schooling is not guided by altruism, but rather a desire to coerce the population into a mold that is desired by those possessing power in society. This need for control by those with power has created an environment within the educational system that is rife with oppression. Even worse, the dynamic has been so naturalized that the oppression is no longer even noticed by the oppressed. An awakening must occur so that the locus of learning in the educational setting can shift from the faculty to the students. John Caldwell Holt (1975) proposed a solution by arguing that youths should have the power to control and direct their own learning and that the contemporary American school system violates this basic fundamental right of humans. The oppressive dynamic between faculty and students is represented in the film The Cabin in the Woods, which operates as a metacognitive function that will be explored through a co-constructed autoethnography examining this relationship. Through the lens of the film and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the authoritative power and the modernist dynamics of the oppressive faculty/student relationship are explored to illustrate the continued cycle of educational oppression.

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