I Innovation and Critique: Passages of a Polymorphic Relation Oscar Espinel Uniminuto, Bogotá, Colombia Introduction: Critique and Innovation Nowadays there is a constant calling for innova- tion as a guarantee of quality and excellence in education. The invocation of innovation is very common as a condition for success, both for per- sonal enterprises and collective projects. This is how innovation is one of the most valued and essential “virtues” of the twenty-first-century sub- ject, along with competitiveness and entrepre- neurship. Apart from having the ability to adjust and respond aptly to the rapid changes of the contemporary world, it is necessary to have the sufficient sensibility to turn every difficulty, every crisis, or every change of rules as an opportunity. Flexibility and previously cultivated abilities are useless if one does not hold the inventive charac- ter demanded by the vertiginous obsolescence of our times. Perhaps this is the place where critique, critical thinking, and the critical ability turn into different ways to answer and name the same call- ing: that of innovation and reinvention, both of which resound as songs of sirens. To what does this permanent calling for cri- tique respond? What roles and functions belong to critique, within the framework of contemporary trends that proclaim the modernization of the school and its articulation with global transforma- tions? Where does the accentuated concern regarding critique, in recent educational reforms, hype pedagogical models, and educational offers that look for new students, come from? What is the relation between critique and other epochal invocations referred to innovation, research, and competitiveness? Facing the expansion of the innovative mandate of our days, could it be thought that critique has been replaced by inno- vation? Or, said differently: Has critique been caught and redefined by the demand for innovation? To understand the relation between critique and innovation and as methodological proposal, we will briefly approach some of the forms that critique has taken or can assume. For this, the analysis will focus on two traditions – or, better yet, two emblematic figures – within the history of philosophy and education: Kant, the philosopher from Königsberg, and, Paulo Freire, the Latin American pedagogue who, situated in a Marxist wake, introduce another idea of critique into the field of education. While the first approximation to critique seems to privilege a certain epistemo- logical character, a clearly marked political char- acter traverses the second one. There are two different ways to perform critique on two different levels. This brief journey will be sufficiently illus- trative to introduce the reconfiguration of critique within certain innovationist drive of the society of © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. A. Peters, R. Heraud (eds.), Encyclopedia of Educational Innovation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2262-4_216-1