Critical theory of maker education

Critical theory of maker education asserts that maker education curriculum and pedagogy necessarily aligns itself with the greater educational imperative (as described in the Critical Pedagogy Primer) that "questions of democracy and justice cannot be separated from the most fundamental features of teaching and learning" (p. 5). Foundational Critical Theorists like Paulo Freire in his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, stressed the need for a new relationship between teacher, student, and school, that would cultivate in students radical liberation from the political injustices that oppress them. Maker education is another avenue by which radical liberation is possible.

Scholars Shirin Vossoughi and Paula K. Hooper of Northwestern University, and Meg Escude of Exploratorium, offer an in-depth look at the ways in which maker education reinforces educational inequality by perceiving learners from backgrounds that are not "grounded in gendered, white, middle-class cultural practices" through the deficit lens of the culture of poverty. Not only do Vossoughi, Hooper, and Escude critique maker education as it is currently practiced, they also offer proposed solutions for "equity-oriented design" of maker experiences which include, "critical analyses on educational injustice, historicized approaches to making as cross-cultural activity, explicit attention to pedagogy, and inquiry into the sociopolitical values and purposes of making".

In his article "A more lovingly made world", McKenzie Wark of The New School writes that the problem with maker culture is that makers don't actually make things, they assemble them. While this experience is satisfying and fun (and Wark does acknowledge the way in which his children are not hemmed in by gender expectations while playing at the Maker Faire), it doesn't teach the underlying principles required for the actual making of functional objects. It also does not, though Chris Anderson and Mark Hatch evoke Marx in their Maker manifestos, map accurately onto an understanding of labor, and certainly not the life of the laborer.

Alessandro Carelli, Massimo Bianchini, and Venanzio Arquilla of the Politecnico di Milano argue that maker culture presents a "maker contradiction" in which DIY producers in the "so-called Third Industrial Revolution" become post-production consumers, further reinforcing hierarchies of social, political, and economic power.