freire believed education to be a political act that could not be divorced from pedagogy. freire defined this as a main tenet of critical pedagogy. teachers and students must be made aware of the "politics" that surround education. the way students are taught and what they are taught serves a political agenda. teachers, themselves, have political notions they bring into the classroom (kincheloe, 2008). freire believed that "education makes sense because women and men learn that through learning they can make and remake themselves, because women and men are able to take responsibility for themselves as beings capable of knowing — of knowing that they know and knowing that they don't" (freire, 2004, p. 15)