Paulo Freire in the 21st Century

Education, Dialogue and Transformation

Peter Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317254638
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores the implications of world renowned educationalist Paulo Freire's theories for educational practice and how his ideas can help in bridging different genres and traditions. It addresses themes, questions and issues that have received little attention to date, including Freire's conception of the critical intellectual, the problem of defining literacy, and the possibility of a Freirean response to debates over political correctness. Roberts also relates Freire's ideas to those of other writers: Israel Scheffler, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Hermann Hesse, among others. Paulo Freire in the 21st Century makes a distinctive contribution to the international literature on Freire's work.

Chapter 1
Pedagogy, Politics, and Intellectual Life

Freire in the Twenty-First Century

Freire’s posthumous publications have played a significant role in stimulating ongoing international interest in his work. This chapter addresses some of the key questions raised in Pedagogy of Indignation, a collection of previously unpublished letters and other writings released in 2004. Particular attention is paid to a somewhat neglected theme in Freirean scholarship: the characteristics and responsibilities of the critical intellectual. It is argued that Freire’s approach to intellectual life, although not without its weaknesses, remains relevant and important in the twenty-first century. Freire’s work provides a clear critique of, and alternative to, a neoliberal orientation to the world—an orientation still dominant in many countries across the globe.

A Pedagogy of Indignation

Freire’s Pedagogy of Indignation (2004) needs to be read and understood against this broader context of his life and work. The book was published by Paradigm as part of the Series in Critical Narrative edited by Donaldo Macedo, Freire’s close friend, coauthor, and translator. A further book by Freire, Daring to Dream (2007), was published in the same series some years later. Pedagogy of Indignation comprises three letters and several other short pieces by Freire, together with a foreword by Macedo, a prologue by Ana Maria Araújo Freire (Freire’s second wife and widow), and a letter by Balduino A. Andreola (another friend, invited to respond with a reply to Freire’s letters). Freire’s letters were composed in the last months of his life, whereas the majority of the other essays were written in 1996. The titles of the letters—“On the Spirit of This Book,” “On the Right and the Duty to Change the World,” and “On the Murder of Galdino Jesus Dos Santos—Pataxó Indian”—are broadly indicative of their content, although Freire ranges widely over a number of philosophical, political, and educational themes throughout. Two of the other writings (“Challenges to Adult Education Posed by the New Technological Restructuring” and “Television Literacy”) ostensibly deal with the theme of technology and education; again, though, the focus is considerably broader than this. One of the other pieces included in the book—“The Discovery of America”—was written in 1992 but has not previously been published. There is a chapter on “Literacy and Destitution.” The remaining two chapters—“Education and Hope” and “Denouncing, Announcing, Prophecy, Utopia, and Dreams”—had both been intended for publication in other books (see A. M. A. Freire, 2004, p. xxx). In a novel touch, there is also (prior to the Contents page) a poem by Freire, “Obvious Song,” written in 1971.

Many of the key themes in Pedagogy of Indignation are familiar ones for readers of Freire’s work. Freire discusses the political nature of education, the question of change, the relationship between theory and practice, the inadequacies of technicist and scientistic approaches to education, the idea of reading and writing the word and the world, the process of knowing, and the ongoing importance of love, hope, and social justice. There is renewed emphasis on the significance of emotion as well as reason in education and human life. Freire also reinforces his opposition to neoliberalism and the ethics of the market. Questions of spirituality surface briefly, as they have from time to time in previous publications, and there are fresh thoughts on the new information technologies. In addition, however, Freire comments in some detail on the crucial role played by the will in meeting personal and pedagogical goals. He employs a revealing personal example—his overcoming of a heavy smoking habit—in illustrating key theoretical points about the power of willing. Freire also pays more direct and extended attention here to families—to the responsibilities of parents and their relationships with their children. Finally, Freire stresses, in more than one place, his strong commitment to ecological issues. It would be deplorable, Freire suggests, to engage in progressive, revolutionary discourse “while embracing a practice that negates life—that pollutes the air, the waters, the fields, and devastates forests, destroys the trees and threatens the animals” (Freire, 2004, p. 120). Freire continues to embrace the dream of creating a better world. This, he says, is a process of struggle against, among other things, discrimination, lies, impunity, and all forms of violence—including “violence against the life of trees, of rivers, of fish, of mountains, of cities, against the physical marks of historic and cultural memories” (p. 121). Without this struggle, he believes, life could become “something to play with only for a time, determined by fate, in which one winds up living only while not dead and able to sustain life” (p. 121).

Balduino Andreola, near the end of his letter, situates Freire’s work within a constellation of thinkers, spiritual leaders, and activists who collectively contribute to a “pedagogy of great convergences” (Andreola, 2004, p. xliii). He places Freire in the company of other “great masters of humanity” from the twentieth century who “fought for and devoted their lives to a more human, fraternal, and solidarity-based vision for the world” (p. xliii). This group includes “Gandhi, Pope John XXIII, Martin Luther King Jr., Simone Weil, Lebret, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, Teresa of Calcutta, Don Helder, Mounier, Teilhard de Chardin, Nelson Mandela, Roger Garaudy, the Dalai Lama, Teovedjre, Betinho, Paramahansa Yogananda, Michel Duclerq, Fritjof Capra, Pierre Weil, Leonardo Boff, Paul Ricoeur, and others” (pp. xliii–xliv). Andreola detects in Freire’s later writings a movement “away from the West toward the East and the South” (p. xliii): “Reading your letters has confirmed this impression that, while not renouncing the rigor of science and philosophy, you are much closer to the thinking and the vision for the world of the great Eastern masters, as well as to the cosmic, mystical, and welcoming spirit of the African peoples” (p. xliii).

This, in my view, is an accurate assessment of where Freire’s thinking was heading in the later years of his life. Care needs to be taken, however, in the way Andreola’s comments are interpreted. Freire said very little directly about Eastern philosophy or spiritual traditions in his published work. Readers seeking a substantial discussion of mysticism or meditation and their significance for education will search in vain in Freire’s books. Yet, there is, as Andreola recognizes, an important sense in which Freire’s work is closer to the “spirit,” intentions, and commitments of many Eastern thinkers than it is to dominant currents of Western thought. There is, of course, no one way of thinking, no one mode of being, in either the East or the West (cf. Roberts, 1996b). It is, moreover, easy to exaggerate the differences between diverse Eastern and Western traditions, ignoring important points of compatibility. For Freire, it is not a case of moving away from all Western ways of thinking but from those he regarded as most destructive. There is no doubt that Freire regarded one of the most powerful ideologies of the last two decades of the twentieth century—neoliberalism—as deeply flawed. As Peter Lownds (2005) puts it, Freire “growled the word neoliberal like a lion in pain” (p. 177). In Pedagogy of Indignation and other later books, Freire rails repeatedly against the rise of marketization policies across the planet. Yet, he remained true to some of the fundamental ideals promoted by other Western thinkers over the centuries. He continued, until his death, to place a premium on the value of critical thought, dialogue, tolerance, and democracy (see Freire and Shor, 1987; Horton and Freire, 1990; Freire, 1994, 1996, 1997a, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 2007). These ideals, he would have stressed, are by no means exclusively Western, and they have been understood and enacted in myriad different ways in the West and East, within both the “Third World” and the “First World,” in recent decades. Freire’s kinship with the “great Eastern Masters” and the “cosmic, mystical, and welcoming spirit of the African peoples” is perhaps most evident in his unswerving commitment to love as a human virtue, his holistic approach to pedagogical and political questions, and his respect for life in all of its forms. In these ways, among others, his work stands opposed to the thinking underlying policy reform agendas in many countries of the Western world in the 1980s, 1990s, and early years of the present century.

Ana Maria Araújo Freire notes in her prologue that it was she who gave the book its title. At first glance, the reference to “indignation” seems somewhat misplaced. Indignation is sometimes taken to imply an insistent—perhaps reactionary or possibly hostile—response to a problem or issue. Indignation seems to lack the reflectiveness and the gentleness that were hallmarks of Freire’s theory and practice as an educator. Yet, as is explained in the prologue, “We cannot forget something Paulo always said—that all truly ethical and genuinely human actions are born from two contradictory feelings, and only from those two: love and anger. This book, perhaps more than others, is ‘drenched,’ as he might say, in his humanistic love and his political anger or indignation, which translated into his entire body of work, as he lived those feelings through his very existence” (A. M. A. Freire, 2001, pp. xxx–xxxi). Indeed, it becomes clear when reading the book that Freire retained a certain anger toward what he saw as utterly intolerable human injustices right up to his death in May 1997. He reserved much of this anger for the politics of late capitalism under neoliberalism and globalization, drawing attention to the extraordinarily destructive impact of corporate greed and market inequities on his fellow Brazilians and others across the globe.

Freire’s style of writing here and in many of his other later works has both strengths and weaknesses. Conveying ideas in the form of letters is a stylistic technique employed to good effect by Freire in Letters to Cristina (1996) and Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach (1998a). In those works, as in Pedagogy of Indignation, the letters become self-contained chapters, each with a distinct theme, written in a relatively informal register. In some ways, the structure provided by the form of the letter has allowed for a tighter presentation of ideas than has been the case with some of Freire’s other later works employing more traditional chapter formats (e.g., 1994). In most of his later books, Freire speaks more directly to readers, reveals more of himself as an author, teacher, and person, and allows his work to become more “readable” than earlier texts such as Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972a). Yet, Freire’s informal style also has its limits. Freire wrote a great deal in the last decade of his life, while also carrying very significant other responsibilities (including the enormous challenges he faced as secretary of education in the municipality of São Paulo from 1989 to 1991). It is clear that he continued to value not only the act of writing but also the process of reading in these years, and, as has been noted earlier, he extended and deepened many ideas from his earlier work during this energetic period of publishing activity (see further, Mayo, 2001). He came to rely rather heavily, however, on anecdotal and personal examples in illustrating theoretical points, drawing only infrequently on other published studies and empirical research findings to support his key claims. This lack of scholarly “clutter,” with relatively few citations of other studies, allowed for a more relaxed and accessible style, but it also left some gaps.

For example, Freire developed a perceptive feeling for aspects of the postmodern turn in social theory, but he never undertook a systematic review or critique of the work of key thinkers associated with this turn. Carlos Torres (1994c) argues, correctly in my view, that Freire’s view of the critical intellectual combines traditional, modernist, and postmodernist elements. Of the three broad elements, the postmodern component is perhaps the weakest. The beginnings of a distinctive approach to postmodernism and education are present in Freire’s later writings. Mention might be made here of Freire’s emphasis on not being too certain of his certainties, his revival and reworking of modernist concepts such as tolerance in the face of postmodern notions of difference, his attempt to sustain ideals such as solidarity and collectivity while shedding some of the doctrinaire baggage associated with their earlier use, his critique of sectarianism among intellectuals on both the Right and the Left, his distinction between conservative and progressive approaches to postmodernism, and his identification of convergences between some strands of postmodernism and neoliberalism. Yet, nowhere in his corpus of later published writings does Freire pay sustained and detailed attention to theoretical work on postmodernism and postmodernity. Freire does engage some of the criticisms of his theory of oppression and liberation made by postmodern feminist writers in education (see, for example, Freire, 1997b; Freire and Macedo, 1993, 1995), but his response to many of the other issues raised by postmodernists remains underdeveloped. Freire has even less to say about the related scholarly domains of postcolonial theory and poststructuralism. (For a thoughtful discussion of the former, in relation to Freire’s work, see Giroux, 1993.) Freire’s position on postmodernism emerges, for the most part, in “pieces” across various writings (cf. Peters, 1999). It is possible to put these pieces together to make a coherent whole, but the lack of in-depth theorizing in any one publication leaves too many unanswered questions.

Feelings were important to Freire, as will be evident to any reader of his later publications. (See also Ana Maria Araújo Freire’s comments in Borg and Mayo, 2000.) The relationship between reason and emotion is discussed in depth in Chapter 2 of this book, but a few brief points can be made here. Reading, writing, studying, teaching, and political activism were all, for Freire, deeply emotional experiences. Freire was not afraid to describe his experiences as “joyous,” or to speak of the beauty of writing and books, or to assert the overriding necessity for love in learning and life. Yet, in many ways, his account of emotion—and its relationship to reason—remains underdeveloped. He made little overt reference to work in areas such as the philosophy of emotion, the ethics of care, and virtue ethics, all of which could have been helpful in constructing a robust philosophical framework for his views on the significance of emotion in educational life. His pedagogical theory and practice might also have been enriched had he engaged other published work on feminism and education, education and the ecological crisis, neoliberalism and educational policy, spirituality and education, and indigenous education in greater depth and detail.

At the same time, it must be acknowledged that one theorist can only do so much. Freire himself was aware that he could not be all things to all people, and he urged others to take up some of the questions and issues addressed only briefly in his own writings. In that spirit, the remainder of this chapter will be devoted to a discussion of a somewhat neglected theme in Freire’s work: his position on the roles and responsibilities of the intellectual. Freire touched on this theme in a number of publications over the years, but he never paid book-length attention to it. A number of Freirean scholars have commented on this issue (e.g., Torres, 1994c; Mayo, 1999), but, overall, there has been less interest in Freire’s stance on the nature of intellectual life than might reasonably have been expected, given its relevance to contemporary debates in education. I want to suggest that Freire’s approach to critical intellectual activity, although not without its problems, remains especially important in an educational age dominated by market imperatives.

Freire on the Role of the Intellectual

Freire’s position on the role of the intellectual is intimately connected with his ontology and ethic, his educational theory, and his political practice. Freire’s principal concern is with the development of what might be called the critical intellectual. What does this mean? Freire encourages those undertaking intellectual work to adopt a curious, investigative, probing, searching, restless attitude toward the world (Freire, 1985). In Pedagogy of Indignation, Freire captures the importance of curiosity in these words: “Curiosity, intrinsic to the vital experience, deepens and improves in the world of human existence. Disquieted by the world outside of the self, startled by the unknown, by mystery, driven by a desire to know, to unveil what is hidden, to seek an explanation for the facts, to verify, to investigate in order to apprehend—curiosity is the engine for the discovery process” (Freire, 2004, p. 87). As curious beings, we ask questions. The critical intellectual, for Freire, enjoys asking, pondering, and addressing questions, but, and this is a point often forgotten, this does not mean all ideas need to be questioned all the time. A questioning frame of mind also demands a certain form of acceptance. We must take some things as given if we are to ask a thoughtful question or develop a coherent line of critique or pose a well-conceived problem. Questioning, if it is to lead to genuine knowledge, cannot be merely an intellectual “game.” Critical intellectual life, for Freire, involves striving to know through a constant process of interaction with others and an ever-changing world. The quest to know is simultaneously a commitment to a certain mode of acting and being. This, as Chapter 2 will show, is not merely a “rational” process.

Specific intellectual dispositions such as a questioning frame of mind are, from a Freirean perspective, inseparable from broader human virtues. These include humility, commitment, openness, hope, tolerance, and love (see Freire, 1972a, 1998a, 1998c, 2004, 2007; Escobar et al., 1994). The last two of these have special significance in the present context and will also be discussed in more detail in subsequent chapters.

The importance of love as a key theme in Freire’s view of education and intellectual life cannot be overemphasized (see Fraser, 1997; McLaren, 2000; Darder, 2002, 2003). Freire saw love as a revolutionary virtue. “Love” takes on multiple meanings in Freire’s work. Freire once said that after he met Marx he continued to meet Christ at the corner of the street, and this claim hints at the way he built the concept of love into a theory of social action. Freire never wavered in his support for Christ’s call to “love one’s neighbor as oneself.” He was, however, much more willing than some of his intellectual contemporaries to see this principle as a call, in some circumstances, for radical, perhaps even revolutionary, social change. Love, Freire shows in Pedagogy of Indignation, is often connected with anger. Both anger and love can provide motivation to struggle for change (Freire, 2004, pp. 58–59). Freire also regarded love as central to the process of dialogue. Indeed, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed he maintains that love is “at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself.” “No matter where the oppressed are found,” Freire says, “the act of love is commitment to their cause—the cause of liberation. And this commitment, because it is loving, is dialogical.” Freire is adamant about the importance of love as a condition for dialogue: “If I do not love the world—if I do not love life—if I do not love men [and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Pedagogy, Politics, and Intellectual Life: Freire in the Twenty-First Century
• 2 Reason and Emotion in Freire’s Work
• 3 Freire and the Problem of Defining Literacy
• 4 Freire and Political Correctness
• 5 Critical Literacy, Breadth of Perspective, and the University Curriculum: A Freirean Perspective
• 6 Freire and Dostoevsky: Uncertainty, Dialogue, and Transformation
• 7 Conscientization in Castalia: A Freirean Reading of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game
• 8 Bridging East and West: Freire and the Tao Te Ching
• References
• Index
• Credits
• About the Author