The Paulo Freire Reader REVIEW
“I worked with the students, not for them, and certainly not on them.” – Paulo Freire
“There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” – Jane Thompson, in Peter Mayo, Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education: Possibilities for Transformative Action (Global Perspectives on Adult Education and Training) (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 5.
From the Introduction: “In the process of becoming literate those new voters, coming from the popular classes, would be challenged to realize the injustice that oppressed them and the need to fight for change. The dominant classes identified the threat and, obviously positioned themselves against the program . . .”
Even though I once took an Educational Philosophy class in graduate school, I had never come across Paulo Freire until just recently (a consequence of conversations with a former student now working on an MSW). Having my curiosity piqued, I began looking into Mr. Freire and his influence and came across a recent book by arch-conservative, James Lindsay entitled, The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education (2022). Before going too deeply into Lindsay’s argument, it made sense to hear from Paulo Freire first and so I special ordered a copy of the Paulo Freire Reader.
I can say that Freire is not easy reading (it took me a week or two to get through the book) but it was time well spent. While Freire has much to say about many things, none of them are unimportant. One of the central questions that he and his life explored had to do with the purpose of education. Should students (at any level) be taught to succeed in the world that they find themselves? Or should they be taught to change the world that they find themselves in? To put it as succinctly as I can, “Should children be taught to look for and take advantage of opportunities that they see in this unjust and broken world? Or should they be taught to see injustices in this broken world that need mending?”
[Obviously, there may be room for some compromise though Paulo Freire’s philosophical approach leaned heavily on the side of those who seek to socialize the young into progressively radical change agents].
WARNING: This may turn into a lengthy post.
First, a few lines from the introduction to place Paulo Freire in context. It is safe to say that Freire was a Marxist but not in the style of a Joseph Stalin or Kim Jung Un. He sees the world in Marxist terms (there are the oppressed and there are the oppressors) but he does not advocate for a violent overthrow of the one by the other. As the introduction puts it when telling of Freire’s exile from Brazil:
“He was only forty-three years old, and he carried with him the ‘sin’ of having loved his people too much and having worked hard to politicize them so they would suffer less and participate more in the country’s decisions. He wanted to contribute to the consciousness of the oppressed . . . He never spoke nor was he an advocate of violence or of the taking of power through the force of arms. He was always, from a young age, reflecting on education and engaging political action mediated by an educational practice that can be transformative.”
“As a political educator, he realized most clearly that we – educators-are in part responsible for this task of transforming our society.”
It does not seem far from the truth to say that he was a “political educator” – someone who sought to change the status quo through education (one might say the same of Jesus of Nazareth and Confucius I suppose). I have no doubt that many people would look at Freire as a secular Jesus. People like James Lindsay would see him in another light. Difference is what makes the study of philosophy interesting. I hope to represent Freire’s thought accurately so that you, the reader (if there are any) can make up your own mind.
The following analysis is inspired by Freire’s most famous work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
We will start by saying that at the heart of Freire’s intended mission is a belief in “humanization.” Oppressors dehumanize in order to more effectively oppress, he argues. And the dehumanized must humanize themselves if they would eventually liberate themselves from oppression. Oppression, he argues, is only inevitable when the oppressor defines other people as “less than” and those “less than people” allow it. Violence is only a manifestation of uninterrupted dehumanization.
It is important to draw a distinction between someone like Freire and some of his Marxist counterparts. Freire insists that “in their struggle to regain their humanity, the oppressed must not become oppressors themselves, but instead restore the humanity of both the oppressed and the oppressors.” [This is the criticism levelled against Marxism in George Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm].
No doubt, people like Lenin and Mao, and Fidel Castro would have said the same. Whether Freire could have maintained his belief in the non-violent elimination of class conflict without resorting to force is a conjectural argument. He never had that power. All he had were arguments and an educational vision. Freire honestly admits that there is a challenge ahead of him though. “It is a rare peasant,” he writes, “who, once ‘promoted’ to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself.”
“Hence our insistence that the authentic solution of the oppressor-oppressed contradiction does not lie in a mere reversal of position, in moving from one pole to the other. Nor does it lie in the replacement of the former oppressors with new ones who continue to subjugate the oppressed—all in the name of their liberation.”
As Napoleon once put it, “among the oppressed are many who would like to oppress.” One is struck by the many affinities that Freire’s work has with the work of missionaries of many different faiths. Freire seems to have been obviously imprinted with the ideas of liberation theology (the religious idea that God is always on the side of the oppressed in this world). Take the following.
“This book will present some aspects of what the writer has termed the pedagogy of the oppressed, a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity.”
“The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization.”
“Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one. The man or woman who emerges is a new person, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is superseded by the humanization of all people.”
“The oppressor is in solidarity with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor—”
One is struck by several references that Freire makes to the need for a “rebirth” within the human soul. Freire writes:
“Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth. Those who undergo it must take on a new form of existence; they can no longer remain as they were.”
Both the oppressed and the oppressor need to become “born again” (though he is not suggesting a need for a Christian rebirth). For Freire, what is needed to make men and women different from what they are is not spiritual conversion but education. The oppressed are required to forget and forgive their former oppression. They are asked to forego the benefits of exploiting others when they have the power to do so. The oppressors, on their part, are expected to commit, what Freire calls “class suicide.” They are expected to surrender the privileges and benefits of their exploitive ways, being convinced that this loss of benefit will be compensated for by the joys of a fuller humanity.
Freier expects all to come to the same conclusion that he has come to:
“I cannot be if others are not; above all, I cannot be if I forbid others from being.”
Perhaps I can interject my own personal reflections at this point. I find myself wondering as I read Freire’s writing if his views of the world have been deeply colored by the starkness of the inequities that he grew up with in South and Central America and later, Africa? All human relationships seemed to have been reduced to class conflict for him. There are colonizers and the colonized. There are oppressors and the oppressed. There are dehumanizers and the dehumanized. One has to ask if his attention has been drawn to injustice as the “essential” quality of all life. Does he see injustice and inequality like some artists see line and color? Or like some poets see rhyme and meter? Or some athletes see speed and strength? Or some philosophers see only logic and rhetoric?
At one point in his argument in Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire seems to make the argument that it is only oppression that need be eliminated in order to eliminate violence in the world. “Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed,” he insists.
“How could they [the oppressed] be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation.”
Scenes from violent demonstrations about the Palestinians came to mind. Scenes from the riots in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Fergusson. Scenes from the French Revolution and the storming of the Bastille. Scenes from the vandalism of suffragettes justified by Emma Pankhurst. Even scenes from Jan 6. Is all that is required of those who commit violent acts a declaration that they have been somehow separated from their human rights?
Freire has strong feelings about those he places in the camp of the oppressors. It is not for me to disagree with him. He seems to know oppressors firsthand.
“For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over against the right, not always even recognized, but simply conceded, of the oppressed to survival. And they make this concession only because the existence of the oppressed is necessary to their own existence.”
I remember having these feelings about the owner of a resort inn I once worked for. I have had these feelings about a certain college president I once had the distinct pleasure of being exploited by (not where I work now). Freire’s condemnations of the oppressor class are not unfamiliar to my own feelings at times in life.
“In their unrestrained eagerness to possess, the oppressors develop the conviction that it is possible for them to transform everything into objects of their purchasing power; hence their strictly materialistic concept of existence. Money is the measure of all things, and profit the primary goal. For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more—always more—even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have and to be the class of the ‘haves.’"
“To the oppressor consciousness,” Freire writes, “the humanization of the ‘others,’ of the people, appears not as the pursuit of full humanity, but as subversion.”
To me, the thing Freire seems to miss involves just how the dehumanization of the “other” can exist on multiple levels. Perhaps this comes from my lifetime of experience cleaning up the apartments of those who Freire would regard as being in the “proletariat” – people who thought it was somehow my job to clean their carpets, toilets, stoves, and trash heaps. People have so many reasons to regard others as less than human. No doubt we all do it, the rich and the poor.
“When people are already dehumanized, due to the oppression they suffer,” Freire argues, “the process of their liberation must not employ the methods of dehumanization.” And yet, how much easier this is said than done (I am thinking of those Revolutionary Americans who tarred and feathered Torries in the course of their “liberation”).
In chapter two of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire explains his “Banking Concept of Education.” He insists that education cannot be a process of “depositing” information into passive students drafted into their classrooms to be assembled like an army of worker bees. As I was reading, I recalled the words of the Dean of Education at Stanford, Elwood Cubberly some hundred years ago.
“[Schools] are places in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products... manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.”
This is where the idea of Freire as a proponent of “political education” is most pronounced. To be clear, he is not saying that education as it exists is apolitical and that it should be political. He is saying that all education is inherently political and that so long as that is the case, it needs to be political in the right way – that is, it needs to have as a primary objective the overturning of political systems that advantage the oppressor over the oppressed.
“The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then” he says of that “banking concept of education,”
“is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. . . . Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.”
“The educated individual is the adapted person,” Freire continues in this chapter,
“Because she or he is better ‘fit’ for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.”
“[Schools] must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making,” we are told,
“And replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings in their relations with the world.”
And the problems that Freire is referring to are the problems of the proletariat (the “have-nots”). Not the problems of the elites (“the haves”).
To do this effectively, Freire requires that teachers join the ranks of the learners and become one of them. Teachers ought not simply tell students what to think about things only the teacher has access to and has experienced. Teachers in this model of education must ask the students to bring the subjects of study to the table and the teachers must convert themselves into fellow learners as they consider those realities of the students’ lived experience. “He does not regard cognizable objects as his private property,” Frier says of the teacher and the curriculum.
“. . . but as the object of reflection by himself and the students. In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students—no longer docile listeners—are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own.”
Note: This will be one of the central tenants of Freirean education that James Lindsay will take so much exception to. This idea that what teachers know is no more or less important than what students know, when adapted as a teaching philosophy, leads to many ramifications for any education system that adopts it.
Freire is not easy to understand sometimes but this passage gets at the argument that he is making for a democratized educational approach:
“Parallel with the reorganization of the means of production [a principle goal of the Marxist Revolution], an essential task for critical understanding and attention in a revolutionary society is the valorization—and not the idealization—of popular wisdom that includes the creative activity of a people and reveals the levels of their knowledge regarding reality. What is implied is not the transmission to the people of a knowledge previously elaborated, a process that ignores what they already know, but the act of returning to them, in an organized form, what they have themselves offered in a disorganized form. In other words, it is a process of knowing with the people how they know things and the level of that knowledge.”
One might argue that it is an assertion that people with Ph.D.'s are not the “betters” of illiterate farmers. People who have “made it” in this world should therefore pay just as much attention to what those who have not “made it” know and how they know it as visa-versa. I am not saying that this is or is not true. Just that for any education system, it is an important matter to resolve. How should knowledge be prioritized in a classroom when the uneducated meet the educated?
Freire acknowledges that there are going to be many teachers (particularly those who have themselves benefitted from assimilating the knowledge curricula of the oppressors) who will resist the educational changes he intends to bring about. On this subject, he writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
“In transforming the educational system inherited from the colonizers, one of the necessary tasks is the training of new groups of teachers and the retraining of old ones. Among these teachers, and especially among those who have taught before, there will always be those who perceive themselves to be ‘captured’ by the old ideology and who will consciously continue to embrace it; they will fall into the practice of undermining, either in a hidden or an open way, the new practice. From such persons one cannot hope for any positive action toward the reconstruction of society.”
It is not hard to see which teachers would be promoted, demoted, or fired in an educational system controlled by a Freirean administrator in an education by, for, and of the oppressed. In a later reading about Freire’s work in Guinea-Bissau he praises Hamilcar Cabral for endorsing progressive education in this way. For Freire, taking over education is the key to the liberation of the oppressed. It is the first order of the day in bringing about a Marxist world order.
In a Freirean school system, the primary goal would be political. The secondary goal would be academic. Students must be taught to examine their societies with a critical eye – they must be on the lookout for injustice, and they must be taught to actively take measures to eliminate exploitation wherever they see it. “The most important feature of such work with the people,” Freire writes, “is the exercise of a critical stance in the face of reality.” The antithesis of a Freirean school system would be a school system where students were taught to support exploiters and to become exploiters if they see the opportunity to do so. In a Freirean school, “real education” involves learning how to actively critique the teacher, the school board, the Department of Education, the curriculum, or the laws of the State if they are part of the “establishment’s exploitive system. They are not simply to discuss how the State is exploitive. They should be brought down to City Hall to protest. “We are not talking about instruction in a school that simply prepares the learners for another school,” Freire says,
“But about a real education where the content is in a constant dialectical relation with the needs of the country. In this kind of education, knowledge, resulting in practical action, itself grows out of the unity between theory and practice. For this reason, it is not possible to divorce the process of learning from its own source within the lives of the learners themselves. The values that this education seeks are empty if they are not incarnated in life. They are only incarnated if they are put into practice.”
He then immediately continues by saying that this political influencing is not something that should only be taught to college students. It should start in first grade!
“Thus, from the earliest cycle of instruction, the first four grades, participation in common experiences stimulates social solidarity rather than individualism. The principle of mutual help, practical creativity in the face of actual problems, and the unity of mental and manual labor are experienced daily.”
“Militant action and social responsibility as part of a permanent process of critical reflection are, of course, indispensable.”
All education at every level, Freire insists should be devoted to what he calls “political consciousness.” Shaping political consciousness is the very raison d’etre of education itself.
“Whatever activity gives rise to political consciousness raising—whether it be health education, means of production, or adult literacy efforts—there is a basic unity of approach.”
“Wherever programs of adult literacy are initiated, in accordance with the priorities established by the Party and the government, they are taken over, as far as possible, by the local population. In this way, an indispensable relation is established between the adult literacy programs and the [socialist] political committees of the villages or city neighborhoods.”
“There is no pedagogical experience that is not political in nature,” Freire insists in this argument.
So much of the cultural conflict over education these days comes down to this. Conservatives claim that their public schools are becoming places where their children go to learn what is wrong with America rather than to learn how to succeed as individuals in America. Are they wrong? Are they sending their kids to Paulo Freire schools as James Lindsay argues? Or would that be some sort of oversimplification, exaggeration, or complete fabrication?
In his essay, The Pedagogy of Hope, Freire declares that while his vision may be inspired by Marx, it is not to be achieved by Stalin. His is a socialist utopia that will be brought about by a government-controlled education system dedicated to convincing the children of the “haves” to commit “class suicide” while the children of the “have nots” are convinced to insist on their common humanity until no one in that society is exploited or exploiting. Freire is never more eloquent than he is when he describes his socialist millennium:
“In this new history of ours, without social classes, and thus without any conflicts other than purely personal ones, we have nothing other to do than to let the calloused hands of the many and the smooth ones of the few remake the world at last into a festival.”
The education that makes this magic happen he refers to as “political pedagogy.” It is not, however (and he is insistent on this) the sort of education where children are indoctrinated by authoritative commissars of socialist doctrine. Freire insists that teachers simply facilitate the process by which little humans naturally develop into beings who just love to share and have no interest in absconding with more benefits than they earn. For Freire, socialist utopia is what comes naturally to human communities when they are left to see reality as it is. Do you agree?
The last reading in this anthology is Freire’s essay, Pedagogy of the Heart
This particular essay is where I felt that Freire had the most to say to our present political life as Americans (a place where it seems like every citizen is some combination of exploiter and exploited). Here are some concluding thoughts from Paulo Freire about the direction of the Progressive political endeavor in his day.
He insists that Progressives should not pretend to be centrists to get elected. They should stick to their principles and declare themselves to be what they are until they can convince people to put them in power. He confesses that he is not in favor of disguising his liberalism to win a general election.
“Instead of converting myself to the center and occasionally coming to power, as a progressive, I would rather embrace democratic pedagogy and, not knowing when, attain power along with the popular classes in order to reinvent it.”
I can see Bernie Sanders agreeing with that.
Freire argues that the socialist utopia is an inevitability (Marx thought so). People who are “satisfied with the status quo” can only delay the eventual utopia he argues. They cannot prevent it.
“The struggle would be between those who, satisfied with today, would make an effort to delay the future as much as possible, to put up obstacles against any substantive change, and those who, exploited today, aspire to a new reality.”
Ironically, Freire notes that there are people who will stupidly vote against their own interests – they will vote for people who enact policies that work to the disadvantage of the lower classes when they belong to those classes. I find it interesting that both the left and the right will insist that this is so (of the other party’s voters).
“They want change; they want to win over inflation; they want a strong economy; they want justice, education, and health care for themselves and their families; they want peace in the shanty towns and urban centers; they want to eat and sleep. They want to be happy in a present lived with dignity and in a future whose realization they play a part in. They vote, however, for partisan coalitions, some of whose predominant forces are, by nature, antagonistic to change in favor of the oppressed.”
Freire astutely labels “the left” as “the lefts” (plural), insisting that the problem with the left has to do with their inability to unite around one form of “leftism” (as though “the right” never shatters into multiple different “rights”). Readers from both the left and right will no doubt have a good argument over which side this applies to more.
“Union among the left is always difficult and cumbersome. While the right is only sectarian against progressive thought and practice, the “lefts" are sectarian among themselves. If there are three or four factions within a leftist party, each believes itself to be the only one truly progressive, and they all fight among themselves. . . . No one in his right mind would think of a left whose activist force was made up of celestial beings. Politics is a job for concrete men and women, those with flaws and virtues. But one would expect the left to become more coherent, refusing coalitions with its antagonists. One would also demand that the "lefts" overcome their superficial differences, having their common identity as a base.”
“No leftist party can remain faithful to its democratic dream if it falls into the temptation of rallying cries, slogans, prescriptions, indoctrination, and the untouchable power of leaderships. Such temptations inhibit the development of tolerance, in the absence of which democracy is not viable.”
“No leftist party can remain faithful to its democratic dream if it falls into the temptation of seeing itself as possessing a truth outside which there is no salvation, or if its leadership proclaims itself as the avant-garde edge of the working class. Any progressive party intent on preserving itself as such, must not lack the ethics of humility, of tolerance, of perseverance in the peaceful struggle, of vigor, of an ever-ready curiosity. It must not lack hope with which to restart the struggle whenever necessary. It must not defend the interests of the popular classes, their right to a dignifying life, their right to pronouncing the world, and at the same time look the other way while the taxpayer's money is being stolen.”
Freire insists that the parties of the “left” have to stop attacking one another or engaging in petty political squabbles and battles for political power. “Such a party's coherence must be absolute,” he says, (no doubt advocating for the absolute control of the education system by his particular brand of “left”).
Freire insists that his party of the left must not expect perfection of its leaders. But they must expect integrity. They cannot say one thing and do another. They cannot, say, go on rants about the dishonesty of the exploiting classes while they use their positions of power to enrich themselves by insider trading (eh hem). “A political party is not a monastery of sanctified monks,” he writes,
“But it should aspire to become an association of truly serious and coherent people, those who work to shorten more and more the distance between what they say and what they do.”
As I said in my opening to this review, everything in Freire’s vision of the world is imbued with a Marxist notion that all conflict is class conflict. Everyone in a Freirean world wears the uniform of the exploited or the exploiting. “The oppressor is not humble, but arrogant,” he insists,
“The oppressed is not humble either, but humiliated. In order for oppressor and oppressed to become humble, it is necessary for the oppressor to convert to the cause of the oppressed, and for the oppressed to commit to his own fight for liberation. It is only from that point on that both will have met the requirements to learning humility.”
I am reminded of that story in the Gospel of Mark where a rich young ruler comes to Jesus and asks him what one more thing he needs to do to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and Jesus tells him to go and sell all he has and give it to the poor and come follow Him. Upon which, we read, the young man’s face grew dark (same Greek word used for the sky the day Jesus was crucified) and he went away, for he was a wealthy man. Similarly, soon after, Jesus asked his disciples to humble themselves and recognize that the greatest among them would demonstrate that greatness by being a servant. Upon which instruction, they immediately began arguing with themselves who was the greatest.
I wish Paulo Freire well. He belongs to a long line of optimistic humanists.
I will close this review reiterating a quote used above as it really got me to thinking.
“I cannot be if others are not,” Freire affirms, “above all, I cannot be if I forbid others from being.”
I could see a lot of my liberal friends agreeing with that and suggesting that the logical implication should be higher taxes to support more robust social services. I can see a lot of my conservative friends agreeing with that statement and suggesting that the logical implication should be greater restrictions on abortions.
Thank you, Paulo Freire, for making me think.
Question for Comment: What do you think about Freire’s ideas about the purpose of education? Would you prefer to send your kids to a school where they learned to capitalize on opportunities in a somewhat broken and less than just system (a system that rewards people who are on the look-out for opportunities)? OR would you prefer to send your kid to a school where the focus of every class every day involves exposing injustices in the culture and the world. – An educational system that rewards those who develop an eagle eye for injustice so that they can become moral saints (and maybe martyrs)? Or is there some way to split the difference?
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