Reinventing Paulo Freire

A Pedagogy of Love

Antonia Darder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317199267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

One of the most influential critical educators of the twentieth century, Paulo Freire challenged those educational inequalities and conditions of injustice faced by oppressed populations. In this new edition of Reinventing Paulo Freire, Antonia Darder re-examines his legacy through reflections on Freirean pedagogy and the narratives of teachers who reinvent his work. The fully revised first part provides important historical, political, and economic connections between major societal concerns and educational questions raised by Freire and their link to the contemporary moment, including questions tied to neoliberalism, coloniality, and educational inequalities. At the heart of the book is a critical understanding of how Freire's pedagogy of love can inform, in theory and practice, a humanizing approach to teaching and learning.

Powerful teacher narratives offer examples of a living praxis, committed to democratic classroom life and the emancipation of subaltern communities. The narratives clearly illustrate how Freire's ideas can be put concretely into practice in schools and communities. These reflections on Freirean praxis are sure to spark conversation and inspiration in teacher education courses. Through a close theoretical engagement of Freire's ideas and key insights garnered from lived experiences, the book speaks to the ways Freire can still inspire contemporary educators to adopt the spirit of liberatory pedagogy, By so doing, Reinventing Paulo Freire is certain to advance his theories in new ways, both to those familiar with his work and to those studying Freire for the first time.

1

THE PASSION OF PAULO FREIRE

Reflections and Remembrances

What inheritance can I leave? Exactly one. I think that it could be said when I am no longer in this world: “Paulo Freire was a man who lived. He could not understand life and human existence without love and without the search for knowledge. Paulo Freire lived, loved, and attempted to know. For this very reason, he was a human being who was constantly curious.”

Paulo Freire,
Pedagogy and the City (1993)

I live my life intensely. I am the type of person who loves his life passionately. Of course, someday, I will die, but I have the impression that when I die, I will die intensely as well … with an immense longing for life, since this is the way I have been living.

Paulo Freire,
Learning to Question (1989)

For Paulo Freire, life was unquestionably his most enduring passion. As I reflect on his life and his great passion, with every turn of ideas, I’m brought back to the intensity of his love and its manifestation in our work and our lives. Here, let me say quickly that I am speaking neither of a liberal, romanticized, or merely feel-good notion of love that so often is mistakenly attributed to this term, nor the long-suffering and self-effacing variety associated with traditional religious formation. Nothing could be further from the truth. If there was anything that Freire consistently sought to defend, it was the freshness, spontaneity, and presence embodied in what he called an “armed loved—the fighting love of those convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce, and to announce” (1998a, p. 41); a love that could be lively, forceful, and inspiring, while at the same time critical, challenging, and insistent. Thus, Freire’s brand of love stood in direct opposition to the insipid “generosity” of teachers or administrators who would blindly adhere to a system of schooling that fundamentally transgresses every principle of cultural and economic democracy.

Rather, I want to speak to the passion of his love as I came to understand it through my work and friendship with Freire. I want to write about a political and radicalized form of love that is never about absolute consensus, or unconditional acceptance, or unceasing words of sweetness, or endless streams of hugs and kisses. Instead, it is a love without constriction, rooted in a committed willingness to struggle persistently with purpose in our life and to intimately connect that purpose with what he called our “true vocation”—to be human. In Freire’s world, to be passionate and to love in the midst of all our fears, anxieties, and imperfections truly constituted powerful expressions of our humanity—the humanity we had to courageously embrace as educators committed to the practice of freedom.

A Commitment to Our Humanity

A humanizing education is the path through which men and women can become conscious about their presence in the world. The way they act and think when they develop all of their capacity ties, taking into consideration their needs, but also the needs and aspirations of others.

(Freire and Betto, 1985, p. 14–15)

For Freire, a liberatory education could never be conceived without a profound commitment to our humanity. Once again, I must point out that his notion of humanity was not merely a simplistic or psychologized notion of “having positive self-esteem,” but rather a deeply reflective interpretation of the dialectical relationship between our cultural existence as individuals and our political and economic existence as social beings. From Freire’s perspective, if we were to solve the educational difficulties of students from oppressed communities, then educators had to look beyond the personal. We had to look for answers within the historical realm of economic, social, and political forms, so that we might better understand the forces that give rise to our humanity as it currently exists. In so many ways his work pointed to how economic inequality and social injustice dehumanizes us, distorting our capacity to love each other, the world, and ourselves. In the tradition of Antonio Gramsci before him, Freire exposed how even well-meaning teachers, through their lack of critical moral leadership, actually participate in disabling the heart, minds, and bodies of their students—an act that disconnects these students from the personal and social motivation required to transform their world and themselves.

There is no question that Freire’s greatest contribution to the world was his capacity to be a loving human being. His regard for children, his concern for teachers, his work among the poor, his willingness to share openly his moments of grief, disappointment, frustration, and new love, all stand out in my mind as examples of his courage and unrelenting pursuit of a coherent and honest life. I recall our meeting in 1987, six months after the death of his wife, Elza. Freire was in deep grief. During one of his presentations, he literally had to stop so that he could weep the tears that he had been trying to hold back all morning. For a moment, all of us present were enveloped by his grief and probably experienced one of the greatest pedagogical lessons of our life. I don’t believe anyone left the conference hall that day as they had arrived. Through the courageous vulnerability of his humanity—with all its complexities and contradictions—Freire illuminated our understanding of not only what it means to be a critical educator, but also what it means to live a critical life.

In the following year, I experienced another aspect of Freire’s living praxis. To everyone’s surprise, Freire remarried a few months later. Many were stunned by the news and it was interesting to listen to and observe the responses of his followers in the states. Some of the same radical educators who had embraced him in his grief now questioned his personal decision to remarry so quickly after the death of Elza. Much to my surprise, the news of his marriage and his public gestures of affection and celebration of his new wife, Nita, were met with a strange sort of suspicion and fear. Despite these reverberations, Freire spoke freely of his new love and the sensations that now stirred in him. He shared his struggle with loneliness and grief and challenged us to live and love in the present—as much personally as politically.

Fear and Revolutionary Dreams

The more you recognize your fear as a consequence of your attempt to practice your dream, the more you learn how to put into practice your dream! I never had interviews with the great revolutionaries of this century about their fears! But all of them felt fear, to the extent that all of them were very faithful to their dreams.

(Shor and Freire, 1987, p. 57)

Challenging the conditioned fears with which our dreams of freedom are controlled and the “false consciousness” that diminishes our social agency are common themes in Freire’s work. In pedagogy of the oppressed (1970), he wrote of the fear of freedom that afflicts us, a fear predicated on prescriptive relationships between those who rule and those who are expected to follow. As critical educators, he urged us to question carefully our ideological beliefs and pedagogical intentions and to take note of our own adherence to the status quo. He wanted us to recognize that every prescribed behavior represents the imposition of one human being upon another—an imposition that moves our consciousness away from what we experience in the flesh to an abstracted reality and false understanding of ourselves and our world. If we were to embrace a pedagogy of liberation, we had to prepare ourselves to replace this conditioned fear of freedom with sufficient autonomy and responsibility to struggle for an educational praxis and a way of life that could support democratic forms of economic and cultural existence.

Freire often addressed the notion of fear in his speeches and in his writings. In his eyes, fear and revolutionary dreams were unquestionably linked. The more we were willing to struggle for an emancipatory dream, the more apt we were to know intimately the experience of fear, how to control and educate our fear, and, finally, how to transform that fear into courage. Moreover, we could come to recognize our fear as a signal that we are engaged in critical opposition to the status quo and in transformative work toward the manifestation of our revolutionary dreams.

In many ways, Freire attempted to show us through his own life that facing our fears and contending with our suffering are inevitable and necessary human dimensions of our quest to make and remake history, of our quest to make a new world from our dreams. Often, he likened our movement toward greater humanity as a form of childbirth, and a painful one. This labor of love constitutes a critical process in our struggle to break the oppressor-oppressed contradiction and the conflicting beliefs that incarcerate our humanity. Freire’s (1970) description of this duality is both forthright and sobering.

The oppressed suffer from the duality that has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized. The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting him; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices; between being spectators or actors, between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being silent, castrated in their power to create and recreate, in their power to transform the world.

(Freire, 1970, p. 32–33)

Freire firmly believed that if we were to embrace a pedagogy of freedom, we had to break out of this duality. We had to come to see how the domesticating power of the dominant ideology causes teachers to become ambiguous and indecisive, even in the face of blatant injustice. Critical educators had to struggle together against a variety of punitive and threatening methods used by many administrators to instill a fear of freedom. Because if this domesticating role were not rejected, even progressive teachers could fall prey to fatalism—a condition that negates passion and destroys the capacity to dream—making them each day more politically vulnerable and less able to face the challenges before them.

Fatalism is a notion that Freire refused ever to accept. At every turn, he emphatically rejected the idea that nothing could be done about the educational consequences of economic inequalities and social injustice. “If the economic and political power of the ruling class denied subordinate populations the space to survive, it was not because it should be that way” (Freire 1997a, p. 36). Instead, the asymmetrical relations of power that perpetuate fatalism among those with little power had to be challenged. This required teachers to problematize the conditions of schooling with their colleagues and students, and with parents, and through a critical praxis of reflection, dialogue, and action become capable of announcing justice. But such an announcement required a total denouncement of fatalism, which would unleash our power to push against the limits, create new spaces, and begin redefining our vision of education and society.

Capitalism as the Root of Domination

Brutalizing the work force by subjecting them to routine procedures is part of the nature of the capitalist mode of production. And what is taking place in the reproduction of knowledge in the schools is in large part a reproduction of that mechanism.

(Freire and Faundez, 1989, p. 42)

The question of power is ever present in Freire’s work, as is his intimacy with the struggle for democracy. At this juncture, it is vitally important that we turn to Freire’s ideological beginnings—a dimension of his work that often has been negated or simply ignored by many liberals and progressives who embraced his pedagogical ideas. A quick scan of the writings cited in Pedagogy of the Oppressed clearly illustrates that Freire’s work was unabashedly grounded in Marxist-socialist thought. Without question, when Freire spoke of the “ruling class” or the “oppressors,” he was referring to historical class distinctions and class conflict within the structure of capitalist society—capitalism was the root of domination. His theoretical analysis was fundamentally rooted in notions of class formation, particularly with respect to how the national political economy relegated the greater majority of its workers to an exploited and marginalized class. However, for Freire the struggle against economic domination could not be waged effectively without a humanizing praxis that could both engage the complex phenomenon of class struggle and effectively foster the conditions for critical social agency among the masses.

Although heavily criticized on the left for his failure to provide a more systematic theoretical argument against capitalism, Freire’s work never retreated from a critique of capitalism and recognition of capitalist logic as the primary totalizing force in the world. This is to say that he firmly believed that the phenomenon of cultural invasion worldwide was fundamentally driven by the profit motives of capitalists.

During my early years as a critical educator, I, like so many, failed to adequately comprehend and incorporate this essential dimension of Freire’s work. Critical educators of color in the United States saw racism as the major culprit of our oppression and insisted that Freire engage this issue more substantively. Although he openly acknowledged the existence of racism, he was reticent to abandon the notion of class struggle and often warned us against losing sight of the manner in “which the class factor is hidden within both sexual and racial discrimination” (Freire, 1997a, p. 86).

Our dialogues with him on this issue often were lively and intense because in many ways, Freire questioned the limits of cultural nationalism and our blind faith in a politics of identity. At several different conferences, where educators of color called for separate dialogues with him, he told us that he could not understand why we insisted in dividing ourselves. With true angst, Freire explained to us: “I cannot perceive in my mind how blacks in America can be liberated without Chicanos being liberated, or how Chicanos can be liberated without Native Americans being liberated, or Native Americans liberated without whites being liberated.” He insisted that the struggle against oppression was a human struggle in which we had to build solidarity across our differences if we were to change a world engulfed by capitalism. “The lack of unity among the reconcilable ‘different’ helps the hegemony of the antagonistic ‘different,’” he said. “The most important fight is against the main enemy” (Freire, 1997a, p. 85). As might be expected, many of us walked away frustrated. Only with time, I came to understand the political limitations of our parochial discourse.

The world economy has changed profoundly since the release of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, yet Freire’s message remains more relevant than ever. As capital, labor, and knowledge increasingly are conceived of in global terms, the influential role of capital is expanded exponentially, and the “globalization” of national and local economies is changing the underlying basis of the nation-state (Carnoy, 1997). These structural changes are reflected in the theories and practices of public schooling. As a consequence, “There is now a radical separation in the curriculum between the programs that do the most concrete training for jobs and the programs that do the most critical reflection. Such job separation reduces the capacity of workers to challenge the system” (Shor and Freire, 1987, p. 47).

In his preface to Pedagogy of the Heart, Ladislau Dowbor (1997) argues that we must remove the blinders and see capitalism as the generator of scarcity, for we cannot afford to ignore the growing wealth gap between the rich and the poor caused by an economic polarization that belies neoliberal theories of the trickle-down effect. And despite an abundance of technological devices flooding the marketplace, clean rivers, clean air, clean drinking water, chemical-free food, leisure time, and public spaces for adults and children to socialize freely has diminished. “Capitalism requires that free-of-charge happiness be [replaced with] what can be bought and sold” (p. 26). Yet seldom do we find, along with the resounding praises paid to technology, a discussion of how technological revolutions have exposed the wretchedness of globalized capitalism—millions of people dying from starvation alongside unprecedented wealth. And more disconcerting is its deleterious impact upon the social and environmental interests of humanity—interests that seem to receive little airplay next to the profit motives of transnational corporations.

Challenging Our Limitations

In order to achieve humanization, which presupposes the elimination of dehumanizing oppression, it is absolutely necessary to surmount the limit-situations in which men [and women] are reduced to things.

(Freire, 1970, p. 93)

Although Freire’s historical, regional, and class experiences were different from many of ours, his political purpose was clear and consistent. To achieve a liberatory practice, we had to challenge the conditions that limit our social agency and our capacity to intervene and transform our world. Freire’s frequent response to questions about factors that perpetuate educational injustice was to challenge us to consider the nature of the limits we were confronting. He urged us to consider how we might transcend these limitations in order to discover that beyond these situations, and in contradiction to them, exist untested feasibilities for person...