Depoliticizing pedagogies of comfort and instrumentalism

Instead of the challenge of the climb we crave the rest of the valley; instead of growth and truth
we want comfort. But as we would learn if we were ever cursed with the tragedy of our wish
being granted — comfort is its own form of hell.

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

I am increasingly unsettled by the return of instrumentalism and operationalism, twin logics that reduce education to technique, measurement, and control, in higher education, even among academics who identify as progressive and should know better. Education is too often reduced to efficiency, training, metrics, and measurable outcomes, while pedagogy is judged less by its intellectual force than by whether it preserves student comfort. This emphasis focuses narrowly on whether students feel uneasy or anxious in response to challenging knowledge. This is a profound distortion of what teaching is for. It depoliticizes education by severing critical inquiry from civic courage, reason in the service of justice, and knowledge as a force for social transformation and the expansion of the political imagination. In this sense, such pedagogyechoes Nietzsche’s warning in his figure of the Last Man—a subject who flees risk, distrusts rupture, and mistakes comfort for truth. Against this retreat into safety, Nietzsche insists that thinking requires danger, courage, and that learning demands the willingness to sacrifice comfort in order to confront transformative and often harsh truths.

When normalized, a pedagogy of comfort, wedded to instrumentalism, becomes a mechanism of containment, if not outright infantilization. It narrows how universities respond to students and faculty who challenge power, assert their voices against injustice, including the genocide in Gaza, and practice forms of critical pedagogy that refuse silence or compliance. Under this
regime, dissent is managed rather than engaged, critique is pathologized rather than taken seriously, and education is reduced to the avoidance of discomfort instead of a rigorous pursuit of truth. What advocates of comfort pedagogy fail to grasp is what Hannah Arendt insisted upon, in The Last Interview and Other Conversations, that universities must serve as “the guardians of
truth of fact,” as well as spaces where matters are made public and students are invited to reflect critically on themselves and on their relationship to the world.

Against this reduction of pedagogy to emotional management, pedagogy must be grounded not in comfort but in respect, a value that is both ethical and intellectual. Comfort asks whether students feel uneasy. Respect asks whether they are treated as thinking subjects capable of engaging in difficult knowledge, historical violence, and moral complexity as part of democratic life. Discomfort produced by rigorous inquiry, unsettling histories, or challenges to common sense is not a pedagogical failure but a condition of learning. A pedagogy that unsettles, however, must also be grounded in safety, understood not as emotional insulation but as protection from humiliation, violence, and harm so that students are not excluded from the world of ideas. Safe spaces, in this sense, must also be brave spaces, where discomfort does not
displace commitments to economic justice, social transformation, and collective solidarity.

What violates respect is not intellectual struggle, but the exercise of power that humiliates, punishes, or diminishes students as human beings, especially within asymmetrical relations of authority. To confuse such abuses with “discomfort” is to empty the term of meaning and to shield domination from critique. Comfort is too thin, too privatized, and too politically vacuous a
category to guide education. Respect, by contrast, demands that pedagogy cultivate critical agency, ethical responsibility, and the courage to confront injustice rather than retreat from it.

As schools retreat into either a zone of conformity or indoctrination, they embrace the false claim of neutrality while at the same time they surrender to the demands of a fascist Trump regime in order to keep the money flowing. Within this logic of surrender and complicity, the classroom is purged of its critical possibilities, treating discomfort as a failure rather than as a condition of thinking. Yet this misguided emphasis on comfort is not accidental; it is the pedagogical expression of an instrumentalized university that values bureaucratic efficiency and a sanitized curriculum over critical inquiry, compliance over consciousness, and affective management over intellectual risk. What emerges is a depoliticized pedagogy that mistakes ease for care and a limited notion of safety for education. It is also a pedagogical approach increasingly used by the Trump administration to weaponize education in the service of conformity and indoctrination. In this register, comfort means feeling good precisely because one can escape the hard work of critical inquiry and learning.

Pedagogy that matters is not about reassurance, spiritless teaching, and the comforting glow of never being challenged. It is about illumination. Critical pedagogy is critical precisely because it produces ruptures, unsettles common sense, challenges received truths, and pushes students beyond the boundaries of the familiar. It should teach students to think historically, ethically, and critically, rather than to consume ideas that leave the world and themselves unchallenged. Anything less is pedagogy as sedation.

If students experience discomfort in this process, it may signal that learning has begun, that they are developing a sense of informed agency, voice, and the willingness to think outside the box. To pathologize discomfort is to drain education of its democratic promise and replace intellectual struggle with appeasement, -it revives the dead zone of the imagination, wrapped in feel good sensibilities.

This visionless pedagogy of comfort and instrumentalism mistakes comfort for learning and reassurance for responsibility. It soothes rather than unsettles, affirms rather than interrogates, and in doing so becomes a pedagogy of surrender. Such a pedagogy cannot name injustice, let alone resist it. Against it stands a pedagogy that unsettles, talks back, and is grounded in critical reason, one that refuses accommodation and preserves its emancipatory promise by turning critique against the very social structures that disfigure it. Critical pedagogy is not about making students feel good; it is about making injustice visible and power accountable. It seeks to cultivate forms of agency, identity, and judgment through which students can recognize how knowledge and power are entangled in the service of domination, and how reason itself must be measured not by technical success or managerial efficiency, but by its capacity to challenge oppressive arrangements and expand the horizons of freedom, social justice, solidarity, and democracy itself.

A university that confuses comfort with care, risks becoming an institution of managed ignorance or a laboratory for indoctrination–both now institutionalized in states such as Florida and Texas–rather than a space of critical inquiry. At stake is not simply the emancipatory possibility of a pedagogy that empowers and informs, but the future of higher education as a democratic and emancipatory project. Without such a pedagogy, higher education becomes not a bulwark against authoritarianism, but one of its quiet enablers.

 

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His latest book is The Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence (Bloomsbury in 2025). He is LA Progressive’s Associate Editor. His website is www.henryagiroux.com