Like other "primers" published by Peter Lang, it is an introductory text on the topic of critical pedagogy aimed at a wider audience with its use of more accessible language.

The introduction serves the aim and purpose of explicating the role of critical pedagogy in a democratic society, insisting that "questions of democracy and justice cannot be separated from the most fundamental features of teaching and learning" (p. 5).

Critical pedagogy will not stand for these mechanisms of social and educational stratification that hurt socially, linguistically, and economically marginalized students so badly... [S]uccess in school may come only with a rejection of their ethnic and/or class backgrounds.Kincheloe explains that critical pedagogy is "enacted through the use of 'generative themes' to read the word and the world and the process of problem posing."

Drawing from the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, Kincheloe identifies a curriculum that poses students as researchers and classrooms and teachers that are problem posers.

This resistance to dominating powers, which has its roots in Marxism, is again part of critical pedagogy's aim to alleviate suffering.