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To say the same thing slightly differently, perhaps?  Yes, a critique is (inevitably?) context-dependent, reflecting one's one status and experiences.  But one can, at least in principle, recognize that and move on to attempt a critique that speaks to contexts beyond one's own.  As Albert Camus puts it in The Rebel, "The rebel undoubtedly demands a certain degree of freedom for himself ... The freedom he claims, he claims for all ... Therefore there is something more in history than the relation between mastery and servitude."  Along these lines, what intrigued me in our conversation was the possibility that a  a sense of "powerlessness" may be an element of a widely applicable critique of education as it currently exists. Perhaps, across the board, we are trying to train "leaders" (and "followers") rather than to encourage everyone to be creative critics?  And doing the latter in turn means learning to avoid the seductiveness of "definitive answers"?