Sometimes you hear good things about something for a long time, and it’s only when you hear something bad about it that you feel impelled to check it out.
Over the years I’d encountered references to Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, cited as inspiring the popular education and critical pedagogy movements. Being interested in both pedagogy (that is, the theory of education) and social change, I’d always figured this would be an interesting book to read, but it was never a priority.
Then, last year, while watching a YouTube video by Dr. Janice Fiamengo – a professor at the University of Ottawa who’s highly critical of trends in higher education – I encountered a very different take on the book. Fiamengo described how it’s cited as an important influence on many in the academic Left, and held it largely to blame for a decline in support in the academy for such ideas as critical thinking and belief that there’s such a thing as objective truth. She suggested that despite its title, the book actually promotes the idea that “the oppressed have nothing to learn from their oppressors.”
Being very interested in anything to do with helping the masses to become better educated – and, at the same time, very concerned about the trends denigrating the pursuit of knowledge, trends that clearly run counter to the first concern – I now had to see for myself what this book really says, and so I made reading it a priority.
I did so a few months ago, and pretty soon became convinced that Freire was not guilty as charged. His best-known work is focused on ideas he and associates first put into practice in his native Brazil, largely in connection with literacy. Where it differed from conventional approaches, at least conceptually, was in an insistence on the idea that the teacher is also a learner, and the students are also teachers. Rather than seeing the students as passively receiving knowledge from the teacher as something prepackaged, complete, and unquestionable, the teacher and students work together on actively knowing the students' world. Closely related to this is the idea that the purpose of education is not for the oppressed to passively learn to adapt/conform to their world as it is but, rather, to approach it as a challenge that they progressively transform in the process of engaging and increasingly understanding it.
The specific reference to literacy might be considered sufficient proof that Freire isn't saying the oppressed have "nothing to learn" -- although, admittedly, it seems to be assumed that the teachers are typically from the middle layers of society and not from the oppressors, if the latter is understood to mean the upper echelons. Still, there's certainly nothing here suggesting a rejection of knowledge.
The only thing in this book that might, by a stretch, be construed that way is a passage in which it's stated that dialogue between the oppressors and the oppressed isn't possible. But the statement is more nuanced than that. What's actually said is that the oppressors organized as a class cannot have dialogue with the oppressed -- where dialogue is defined as an exchange premised on both parties' fully recognizing each other's humanity. But "the oppressors organized as a class" means, by definition, their constitution as a political party for the purpose of preserving their class privilege -- that is, their domination and exploitation of the oppressed -- and thereby logically excludes fully recognizing the latter's humanity, the prerequisite of dialogue in Freire's sense. So, he is completely right about this.
But this in no way precludes individuals from the oppressor class transferring their allegiance to the oppressed and offering whatever of their knowledge may be of help to the latter. Indeed, Freire repeatedly quotes with approval from revolutionaries like Fidel Castro, who came from the upper layers of society, so he clearly knows that this is possible.
While I found the ideas in Pedagogy of the Oppressed intriguing, I was frustrated by the dearth of concrete examples of their application. So I was glad to see, when I arrived at the end of the book, that he'd written several more, including one in particular that promised to fill that gap, which I have recently finished reading.
Called Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau, it's centered on correspondence Freire wrote to educators and officials of that country shortly after it had attained its independence, with which he and his team collaborated on their adult literacy campaign. It offers considerable detail about how the ideas in his earlier work were applied here.
For instance, "generative words" were employed as thematic springboards for lessons. These were words, such as "rice," that signified something vital in the lives of the students. Not only could they be organically linked to a whole series of other words of similar importance, they could also serve as the basis of linking the intellectual lessons to vital manual activities of the community, thereby further making the lesson meaningful and memorable for the students.
But in addition to fleshing out the concepts in Freire's earlier work as they pertain to literacy, Pedagogy in Process also illustrates the importance of other kinds of learning to a revolutionary perspective. For instance, he approvingly offers this quote from a central figure of the Guinea-Bissau independence movement:
"Our culture must be developed at the national level of our country. And this must be done without holding the culture of others in low esteem [my emphasis -- E.H.]. We must take advantage of all of those things in the culture of others, of all that is good for us and of all that can be adapted to our conditions of life. Our culture must develop on the basis of science. It should be scientific, not based on a belief in imaginary things. Our culture should not allow any one of us to think that lightning is the result of God's anger or that thunder is a voice speaking from the skies or the fury of IRAN. Tomorrow everyone in our culture must know that thunder occurs when two clouds, carrying negative and positive electrical charges, bump into each other. First comes the lightning and then the noise which is thunder." Amilcar Cabral, "Resistencia cultural," in PAIGC -- Unidade e Luta, pp. 198-99, quoted in Paulo Freire, Pedagogy in Process: the Letters to Guinea-Bissau, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016(1978), p. 116, footnote
This, surely, should put to rest the notion that Freire promoted any sort of objectivity-and-science-denying extreme relativism.
Why, then, does Professor Fiamengo think that he did so? She's apparently relying on second-hand information from people who may have motives for distorting Freire's message -- people she herself doesn't trust, and for good reason. In her videos she cites many examples of academics in the humanities and social sciences practicing selective scholarship and ignoring inconvenient facts in support of trendy theories. (In one, for instance, she quotes from a feminist scholar who describes Canada's 19th-Century seduction laws as reflecting the denial of "women's cultural and legal control over their own bodies," completely disregarding that it was only men who were imprisoned under these laws.)
Fiamengo is also not wrong to suggest that when many scholars deride concepts like objectivity and rationalism as nothing but tools of social control by dominant groups, this may help create an environment in which, increasingly, students feel entitled to engage in disruption or even violence to stop others' saying things they consider "oppressive." And it's the very same devaluing of open-minded inquiry, and the very idea of objectivity, that makes it entirely believable that people taking this attitude might quote Freire selectively, or even paraphrase him inaccurately, to support ideas that were not his, and that they would do so with no compunction whatever. It seems likely to me that this is just what has happened
But it would be quite unfair to pin that on Freire -- just as it would be wrong to blame Charles Darwin for the pseudoscience of so-called social Darwinists in the last century who tried to use his ideas to justify racism and imperialism -- or to blame Jesus of Nazareth for the Inquisition. Such misuse is the inevitable fate of any great thinker when he's no longer around to defend himself. To the contrary, I have no doubt that Paulo Freire helped a lot of people become better grounded in reality and better equipped to transform it, and that through his writings and example he will continue to do so.
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