In composition journals, graduate classrooms, and informal discussions among writing teachers, there is a lot of talk about liberation, empowerment, student voice, dialogue, critical thinking, and democratic teaching--the familiar tropology of critical pedagogy. This nomenclature seems to have permeated the field of composition, across theoretical positions, so that the tropics of empowerment have actually exceeded the bounds of critical pedagogy and achieved a sort of hegemony. However, while ostensibly claiming to be about liberation, empowerment is actually about containment. This can be seen through a close examination of the vocabulary and phrasing in Ira Shor's provocative book "Empowering Education," in which the teacher is constructed, in the Enlightenment tradition, as the liberator and possessor of power and the student as the individual who embodies lack. One instructor at the University of Utah, though, has found that his students know more than he does about the television they watch, the music they listen to, and the world wide web they explore on the computer. Instructors must cease to think of their relationship to their students in terms of the Socratic teacher/student dyad and begin thinking in terms of something like a professional/client relationship. They must acknowledge that students know more than they think they do and they must help them realize this. (TB)