Paulo Freire

A Critical Encounter

Peter Leonard, Peter McLaren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415087926
• eBook ISBN: 9781134881895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Paulo Freire is one of the century's great thinkers on education and the politics of liberation. Known mostly for his literacy campaigns in Latin America and Africa, and for his seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, his thinking continues to be rediscovered by generations of teachers, scholars, community activists and cultural workers in Europe and North America. While his name is synonymous with the practice of Critical Literacy' and A Pedagogy of Liberation', his work has been appropiated in many diverse fields of discipline and site-based projects of social reform. This volume represents a pathfinding analysis of Freires work and in many cases it offers an extension of his thinking in order to make it more applicable to first world contexts. Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard have brought together a divergent group of scholars widely recognized for their contributions to critical theory and critical pedagogy. Themes addressed include Freier's relation to feminist critique, his philosophical roots and an evaluation of his ideas from postmodernist and postcolonialist perspectives. The collection will be essential reading for anyone interested in the radical sociology of education and the politics of liberation.

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Paulo Freire's Radical Democratic Humanism

Stanley Aronowitz

The Fetish of Method

The name of Paulo Freire has reached near iconic proportions in the United States, Latin America and, indeed, in many parts of Europe. Like the cover comment by Jonathan Kozol on the US edition of Freire’s major statement Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1990), his work has been typically received as a ‘brilliant methodology of a highly charged political character.’ Freire’s ideas have been assimilated to the prevailing obsession of North American education, following a tendency in all the human and social sciences, with methods —of verifying knowledge and, in schools, of teaching, that is, transmitting knowledge to otherwise unprepared students. Within the United States it is not uncommon for teachers and administrators to say that they are ‘using’ the Freirean method in classrooms. What they mean by this is indeterminate. Sometimes it merely connotes that teachers try to be ‘interactive’ with students; sometimes it signifies an attempt to structure classtime as, in part, a dialogue between the teacher and students; some even mean to ‘empower’ students by permitting them to talk in class without being ritualistically corrected as to the accuracy of their information, their grammar, or their formal mode of presentation. Or to be punished for dissenting knowledge. All of these are commendable practices, but they hardly require Freire as a cover.

Consequently, Freire is named a master teacher, a kind of Brazilian progressive educator with a unique way of helping students, especially those from impoverished families and communities. The term he employs to summarize his approach to education, ‘pedagogy,’ is often interpreted as a ‘teaching' method rather than a philosophy or a social theory. Few who invoke his name make the distinction. To be sure, neither does the Oxford dictionary.¹ Yet, a careful reading of Freire’s work combined with familiarity with the social and historical context within which it functions, obliges the distinction: nothing can be further from Freire’s intention than to conflate his use of the term pedagogy with the traditional notion of teaching. For, he means to offer a system in which the locus of the learning process is shifted from the teacher to the student. And this shift overtly signifies an altered power relationship, not only in the classroom but in the broader social canvas as well.

This type of extrapolation is fairly typical of the US reception of European philosophy and cultural criticism. For example, after more than a decade during which many in the humanities, especially literature, made a career out of working with the concept Reconstruction’ as formulated by Jacques Derrida, treating the French philosopher as a methodologist of literary criticism, one or two books finally appeared that reminded the American audience that Derrida is, after all, a philosopher and that his categories constituted an alternative to the collective systems of Western thought.² Some writers have even begun to grasp that Derrida may be considered as an ethicist. Similarly, another philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, has been taken up by sociology as well as a small fraction of younger philosophers and literary theorists and read in terms of their respective disciplines. What escapes many who have appropriated Habermas’s categories is his project: to reconstruct historical materialism in a manner that takes into account the problem of communication and especially the non-revolutionary prospect of the contemporary world (Habermas 1979). Whether one agrees or disagrees with this judgement, the political configuration of his theoretical intervention ought to be inescapable, except for those bound by professional contexts.

None of these appropriations should be especially surprising. We are prone to metonymic readings, carving out our subjects to suit our own needs. In all of these cases, including that of Freire, there are elective affinities that make plausible the ways in which these philosophers and critics are read. For example, with the progressive education tradition, Freire rejects the ‘banking' approach to pedagogy according to which teachers, working within the limits imposed by their academic discipline and training, open students’ heads to the treasures of civilized knowledge. He insists that no genuine learning can occur unless students are actively involved, through praxis in controlling their own education (here ‘praxis’ is understood in the sense employed by several strains of Marxism—political practices informed by reflection). He is firmly on the side of a pedagogy that begins with helping students achieve a grasp of the concrete conditions of their daily lives, of the limits imposed by their situation on their ability to acquire what is sometimes called ‘literacy’, of the meaning of the truism ‘knowledge is power.’ Freire emphasizes ‘reflection,’ in which the student assimilates knowledge in accordance with his/her own needs, rather than rote learning and is dedicated, like some elements of the progressive tradition to helping the learner become a subject of his/her own education rather than an object of the system’s educational agenda. Like many progressives, Freire assails education that focuses on individual mobility chances while eschewing collective self-transformation.³

There are enough resemblances here to validate the reduction of Freire to the Latin John Dewey. Accordingly, if one adopts this analogy, his frequent allusions to revolutionary left-wing politics can be explained as a local phenomenon connected to the events of the 1960s and early 1970s, especially the advent in Brazil of the military dictatorship in 1964, the resistance to it, and the powerful popular social movements, particularly in Chile, with which he worked. Presumably, given a more thoroughly democratic context such as that which marks the political systems of North America and Western Europe, the core of Freire’s teaching, the Method, would become apparent.

Similarly, while Dewey wrote on science, ethics, logic, and politics among a host of other topics, outside the tiny band of Dewey specialists within schools of education, educational theory and practice routinely ignores the relationship between his general philosophical position and his education writings. And, until very recently he was virtually unread by professional philosophers. Once at the center of American philosophy, his ideas have been deployed (in the military sense) by an insistent minority in full-scale revolt against the prevailing analytic school. Needless to say, just as Freire’s revolutionary politics are all but dismissed in the countries where he has been elevated to a teacher/saint, Dewey’s engaged political liberalism is generally viewed as a (surpassed) expression of the outmoded stance of public intellectuals at the turn of the century until the immediate postwar period. What can professional Dewey scholars say about his role in the founding of the American Federation of Teachers in 1916, or his role as chair of the commission that investigated the murder of Leon Trotsky?

Since American education has been thoroughly integrated into the middleclass cultural ideal that holds out the promise of individual mobility to those who acquiesce to the curriculum, engaged intellectuals like Dewey and Freire remain ‘relevant’ to the extent that they can be portrayed within the dominant paradigms of the social sciences upon which educational theory rests. It is not surprising that Kozol can refer to Freire’s ‘methodology’ given the depoliticization of educational theory and practice in the United States, that is, the relative isolation of education issues, at least until recently, from the wider economic, political, and cultural scenes. Seen this way his characterization of Freire as a ‘highly charged politically provocative character’ seems almost an afterthought, or more to the point, a personal tribute not crucially intertwined with the ‘brilliant methodology.’

Ivan Illich’s statement on the same cover that Freire’s ‘is a truly revolutionary pedagogy’ comes closer to capturing what is at stake in his writing. The modifier ‘revolutionary’ rather than ‘progressive’ signifies an intention that is carefully elided by many of Freire’s followers and admirers in schools. Or, the term must be instrumentalized to mean that the pedagogy itself, as a methodological protocol, represents a radical departure from banking or rote methods of instruction. Therefore, it is possible, if not legitimate, to intepret the significance of Freire’s work not in the broader connotation of a pedagogy for life, but as a series of tools of effective teaching, techniques that the democratic and humanist teacher may employ to motivate students to imbibe the curriculum with enthusiasm instead of turning their backs on schooling.

True, Freire speaks of ‘method’, especially in Chapter 2 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In the early pages of this chapter, Freire seems to focus, in the narrow sense, on the ‘teacher-pupil’ relationship as if to valorize the tendency of much educational theory toward microanalysis. For example, he provides a detailed ‘list’ of characteristics of the banking method. Aside from obvious choices such as who speaks and who listens, Freire makes his central point: ‘the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the student.’ From this and the other specifications issues the conclusion that in the banking method ‘the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are the mere objects’ (Freire 1990:59).

To this ‘method’ Freire counterposes ‘problem-posing education’ where ‘men [sic] develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation’ (Freire 1990:71). This is where most American educators stop. Taken alone, the tacit thesis according to which Freire, notwithstanding his political provocation, is essentially a phenomenological progressive who uses language not too distant from that of psychologists working in this tradition such as, say, Rollo May seems to be justifiable. There is reference here to see life not as a static state of being but as a process of becoming. This spiritually laced education talk might be found as well in the writing of George Leonard and other American educators. American educators influenced by phenomenology are, typically, concerned with saving individuals from the dehumanizing effects of what they perceive to be an alienating culture. With few exceptions, they have adopted the implicit pessimism of most of their forebears which, despairing of fundamental social transformation, focuses on individual salvation.

But I want to argue that the task of this revolutionary pedagogy is not to foster critical self-consciousness in order to improve cognitive learning, the student’s self-esteem, or even to assist in ‘his’ aspiration to fulfill his human ‘potential.’ Rather, according to Freire,

Problem posing education is revolutionary futurity. Hence it is prophetic.... Hence it corresponds to the historical nature of man. Hence it affirms men as beings who transcend themselves.... Hence it identifies with the movement which engages men as beings aware of their incompletion—an historical movement which has its point of departure, its subjects and its objective.

(Freire 1990:72)

It is to the liberation of the oppressed as historical subjects within the framework of revolutionary objectives that Freire’s pedagogy is directed. The ‘method’ is developed within a praxis, meaning here the link between knowledge and power through self-directed action. And contrary to the narrow, specialized methodologically oriented practices of most American education, Freire’s pedagogy is grounded in a fully developed philosophical anthropology, that is, a theory of human nature, one might say a secular liberation theology, containing its own categories that are irreducible to virtually any other philosophy. What follows is an account of this philosophical intervention and its educational implications.

Freire's Humanism

To speak of a philosophical anthropology in the era of the postmodern condition, and a poststructuralism which condemns any discourse that betrays even a hint of essentialism seems anachronistic. Indeed, any superficial reading of Freire’s work can easily dismiss its theoretical scaffolding as quaint, however much it may be sincere. For example, we read:

The Pedagogy of the oppressed animated by authentic humanism (and not humanitarian) generosity presents itself as a pedagogy of man. Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interests of the oppressors (an egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes of the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and embodies oppression. It is an instrument of dehumanization.

(Freire 1990:39)

Now, we have already learned about the ‘fallacy of humanism’ from the structuralists, especially Althusser and Lévi-Strauss. In Althusser’s critique, humanism defines the object of knowledge ‘man’ as an essential being, subject to, but not constituted by, the multiplicity of relations of a given social formation (Althusser 1970). In adopting the language of humanism, Freire’s debt to the early Marx and to Sartre is all too evident. He relies heavily on Marx, the Feuerbachian, whose materialism is severely tempered and reconfigured by a heavy dose of philosophical idealism. Recall Feuerbach’s critique of religion in which human suffering is displaced to God’s will (Feuer-bach 1964). Feuerbach argues that religion is made by humans and the problems to which it refers can only be addressed here, on earth. As if to underscore his own formation by this ‘flawed’ tradition, Freire goes on to argue that the pedagogy he advocates addresses the problem of the authentication of humans by means of their self-transformation into a universal species:

The truth is...that the oppressed are not ‘marginals’, are not men living ‘outside’ society. They have always been ‘inside’—inside the structure that made them ‘beings for others’. The solution is not to ‘integrate’ them into the structure of oppression but to transform the structure so they can become ‘beings for themselves’.... They may discover through existential experience that their present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human…. If men are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them and then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation.

(Freire 1990:61–2)

Echoes of Hegelianism here. Freire invokes the familiar humanistic Marxian project: the revolution’s aim is to transform what Frantz Fanon terms ‘the wretched of the earth’ from ‘beings for others’ to ‘beings for themselves,’ a transformation that entails changing the conditions of material existence such as relations of ownership and control of labor and the lordship-bondage relation which is the psychosocial expression of the same thing.

Freire invokes the notion of the ‘ontological vocation’ to become human. In a brief dialogue with Lukács who, in his tribute to Lenin (Lukács 1970), endorses the role of the political vanguard to ‘explain’ the nature of the oppression to the masses, since their consciousness has been victimized by commodity fetishism Freire emphasizes the idea of self-liberation, proposing a pedagogy whose task is to unlock the intrinsic humanity of the oppressed. Here the notion of ontological vocation is identical with the universal, humanizing praxis of and by the most oppressed rather than ‘for’ them. For a genuine liberatory praxis does not cease even with the revolutionary act of self-liberation. The true vocation of humanization is to liberate humanity, including the oppressors and those, like teachers, who are frequently recruited from among the élite classes to work with the oppressed, but who unwittingly perpetuate domination through teaching.

Note here that Freire theorizes the class struggle, not as a zero sum game in which the victory of the oppressed constitutes a defeat for the oppressor, but as a praxis with universal significance and, more to the point, universal gain. For, as Freire argues, as oppressors of their fellow humans, the ‘dominant elites’ lose their humanity, are no longer capable of representing the general will to complete the project of humanization. This is the significance of working with the most oppressed, who in Brazil and the rest of Latin America, are poor agricultural laborers and the unemployed huddled in the city’s flavellas, shanty towns, which in São Paulo, for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on the contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Editors' introduction Absent discourses: Paulo Freire and the dangerous memories of liberation
• 1 PAULO FREIRE'S RADICAL DEMOCRATIC HUMANISM
• 2 EDUCATION IS POLITICS: PAULO FREIRE'S CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
• 3 KNOWLEDGE UNDER SIEGE: THE BRAZILIAN DEBATE
• 4 DECENTERING PEDAGOGY: CRITICAL LITERACY, RESISTANCE AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY
• 5 FUNCTIONAL LITERACY FROM A FREIREAN POINT OF VIEW
• 6 FROM THE PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED TO A LUTA CONTINUA: THE POLITICAL PEDAGOGY OF PAULO FREIRE
• 7 BELL HOOKS SPEAKING ABOUT PAULO FREIRE—THE MAN, HIS WORK
• 8 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND STATE WELFARE: INTELLECTUAL ENCOUNTERS WITH FREIRE AND GRAMSCI, 1974-86
• 9 A DIALOGUE WITH PAULO FREIRE
• 10 PAULO FREIRE AND THE POLITICS OF POSTCOLONIALISM
• Name index
• Subject index