From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 2 ("Violence")
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First published in 1970, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is considered one of the foundational texts of critical pedagogy. Combining philosophical, political, and educational theories, and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire’s book is a powerful exploration of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. This conversation reflects upon the seismic impact of Freire’s book in our contemporary era in which neoliberalism has emerged not only as an economic model but also a public pedagogy that permeates everything.
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Brad Evans (BE): You once said that Paulo Freire was one of the most important educators of the 20th century, I wondered if you could expand on this claim.
Henry A. Giroux (HG): Of course. Paulo shifted the paradigm around the relationship between education and democracy. He provided the possibility of taking seriously students, workers, and those who are considered the oppressed, as individuals able to narrate themselves. He understood education as imminently political rather than a mere method or an a priori script you imposed on people. Freire opened up a lot of doors, theoretically, politically, socially, and culturally, that in many ways spoke to my generation of young people. We were trying to find a language in which education was something more than just tests or standards, that attempted to neatly define how education worked and what it was for. So in that sense, Freire was like a lightning strike, his book changed the paradigm. He went beyond a whole range of liberal educators who were far more concerned about individual mobility than they were about social change. He provided a foundation that was taken up later by a whole range of movements, such as the critical sociology movement in England and the United States, cultural studies, and youth studies. All of these movements were vastly in many ways influenced by Paulo.
BE: Can you tell me how you first encountered the work of Paulo Freire and how you became good friends?
HG: I was a high school teacher for about seven years. That was basically my first foray into education. I was teaching in the sixties, and I say this because in many ways, public education was a bit more open than it is now. I had more room to employ progressive methods. I taught Wilhelm Reich’s book The Mass Psychology of Fascism in a high school – imagine that now! This was in a seminar form, with a whole range of students. Then one day I was challenged by a vice principal who basically believed that a militarised mind was the only way to understand education and the rest of the world. Quite soon after this, I came across Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and it basically changed my life. It gave me a language, and it helped me to theorise much of what I was already doing in ways that could be articulated to others. I was no longer collapsing the political and the theoretical into the personal, and that was very important.
Soon afterwards, I wrote a review of one of his books, and he actually sent me a letter in which said he loved my review. I was just so overwhelmed; I was an assistant professor in my first year at Boston University, and I get a letter from Paulo Freire!? Following this we began a long and rich conversation. I met Paulo in the eighties, when he was about to go back to Brazil after eighteen years in exile, and we had a long friendship. We developed a book series together on culture and pedagogy, and together we published the work of almost ninety thinkers and theorists, many of whom didn’t have tenure and were struggling to get published. And yet their work was brilliant, but they were ostracised because they were a little too left for the established publishers.
BE: Do you think there has been any progress in this regard? It appears as though the struggles you’re discussing here are almost the exact same struggles we are facing today.
HG: I actually think that they’re worse today. I think the regression that has taken place with the collapse of neoliberalism and liberal democracy, and the downfall of civic culture, has acutely militarised this society in the interest of a burgeoning fascism. The attack on education, for example, is unlike anything I have seen before: the banning of books, the claims that historical consciousness doesn’t matter, the embrace of a rabid kind of anti-intellectualism, the move towards methods in a post-pandemic world. In many ways, technology has now taken over the educational process. The power has become so much more concentrated in the hands of the right, that I don’t think Paulo’s work has ever been more important than it is now. This is because he not only understood the school as a site of struggle, he also knew that, in some fundamental way, questions of consciousness and questions of literacy were fundamental to a notion of agency in which young people had to learn something about the conditions that dominated their lives. This was the first step in not only recognising those conditions, but recognising the limitations that their situation imposed on them.
This was the first step in being able to gear a pedagogy that was really a social theory, a project that was concerned with domination and how to recognise it within and, crucially, outside of the educational process. This is very important, he wanted people who were informed and critical, and at the same time engaged. He wasn’t just talking about literacy as a form of critical thinking. He was talking about literacy as a form of practice, as a form of critical consciousness.
This is why people who have argued that Paulo’s work is a mere methodology are completely wrong. It’s not a methodology because it’s concerned with questions of justice and power and agency. It’s concerned with how knowledge is linked in some way to the conditions of labour. It’s concerned with what it means to produce people who know how to desire and imagine the future in a particular way. But it’s also concerned with the acquisition of agency and the struggle over agency.
BE: Is there a particular quote from the Pedagogy of the Oppressed that really stands out for you?
HG: There’s a particular quote, as a high school teacher, that really moved me. It’s one of my favourite quotes from Paulo. He says, “I’m a teacher who stands up for what is right against what is indecent, who is in favour of freedom against authoritarianism, who is a supporter of authority against freedom with no limits, and who is a defender of democracy against the dictatorship of the right. I’m a teacher who favours the permanent struggle over every form of bigotry and against the economic determinism of individuals in social classes. I’m a teacher who rejects the present system of capitalism, responsible for the aberration of misery in the midst of plenty. I’m a teacher who’s full of the spirit of hope, in spite of all the signs to the contrary. I’m a teacher who refuses the disillusionment that consumes and immobilises. I’m a teacher proud of the beauty of my teaching practice, a fragile beauty that may disappear if I do not care for the struggle and knowledge that I ought to teach. If I do not struggle for the material conditions, which my body will suffer from neglect, thus running the risk of becoming frustrated and ineffective, then I will no longer be the witness that I ought to be, no longer the tenacious fighter who may tire, but who never gives up.”
The quote is so humble and yet moving. It combines the politics of critique with the politics of hope, with a very expansive notion of freedom. Freedom is not just about political and personal rights, it’s about economic rights. If we don’t have the material conditions in which we can exercise this sense of agency, then rights disappear. If you’re impoverished, as most people are in this neoliberal fascism that dominates the globe, how do you think about voting when you can’t even provide food for your children or for your family, or for yourself, or healthcare, or any of the basic social provisions that make life worth living?
BE: What does a pedagogy of hope look like in the face of neoliberal capital today? I’m wondering whether you can elaborate a bit more on that kind of connection between capitalism, hope, and the materiality of the lived condition for humans today?
HG: I think in many ways, capitalism is wedded not to hope, but to despair and cynicism. It functions through these processes to utterly depoliticise people, operating on the assumption that the only problems that exist are individual problems. At the same time, it concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a financial elite who spread misery all over the globe, who are destroying the planet. I think that Paulo discussed the limits of the situation we currently find ourselves in. History is not determined, it is conditioned. We live in a world that is unfinished, and because of that, we need to think very carefully about our roles in forging a world which isn’t marked by despair, inequality, or attacks on those who are not white supremacists. I think here we begin to understand three things. Firstly, hope is an educational process, and we must move people away from a sense of despair that demobilizes it. Secondly, neoliberalism normalizes itself by saying that hope doesn’t exist and there are no alternatives. Thirdly, hope is not only an educational practice that has to be employed, it is not only about individual salvation, it is about social change and collective struggle. Hope is fundamentally social.
BE: You’ve mentioned before that one of the things you thought was overlooked in Paulo’s work is the importance of consciousness. I’m wondering how this connects to your idea of the radical imagination?
HG: Liberation begins with the notion that we live in a world that’s social and interconnected, and that you can’t separate that notion of the social from matters of economic and communal justice on a global scale. I also think that the question of consciousness is very often downplayed, a lot of the time by the left who are guilty, in some ways, of not making education central to politics, believing that domination is simply about institutional and economic structures and nothing else. There’s very little concern with how the individual can learn to understand, maybe through a different language, both the conditions under which they live and also what it might mean to take charge of those conditions. Domination is not just economic, it’s also pedagogical. It’s also rooted in questions of persuasion and belief and education. I think that you can’t attack a problem until you can understand it.
At the same time, this question of consciousness is now part of an educational ecosystem, so to speak, that’s not just simply about institutional schooling. Education now is a massive phenomenon: C. Wright Mills, Antonio Gramsci, Zygmunt Bauman, and many others have been pointing out, that our neoliberal culture is, crucially, about colonizing consciousness. It is not just simply about consumerism and turning the obligations of citizenship into an act of consuming. It’s about making people feel as if they don’t count. It’s about making people feel that they should disappear. It’s about expanding the notion of oppression to include far more groups than simply the working class. I think that that’s one of the things that Paulo really understood. He understood that agency is central to politics, modes of identification are central to politics. But maybe most importantly, that education was central to politics; we have to be able to understand what we teach, and side by side, organise with people who apply what they learn to the lives that they live. We have to become learners and not just teachers. We have to work with people, not work on them. This opens up a pedagogical space that is protective, fluid, safe, and profoundly radical. For Paulo, hope was a function of radical futurity, a means to imagine something different.
I also want to talk about the civic/public imagination and how it gets undermined, how the question of shared values gets reduced to privatized values, how hope gets reduced to individual salvation. When that happens, civic society begins to collapse. Public imagination is no longer a radical imagination, it’s a privatised imagination, it’s a gated imagination. At the same time, if you don’t have institutions that are public, that open the space for all of us as intellectuals, as artists, as workers in general, to be able to share our vision of a future in which humanity is lifted and expanded, something tragic happens. Despair and death takeover, in the form of fascism.
BE: I’m thinking about the attack on critical race theory, and critical pedagogy more generally. I’m wondering how this connects to what’s happening in Brazil, which I know you’ve said is an attack on the legacy of Paulo.
HG: I want to begin by pointing to two references here. One is the recent comparison between what happened in Brazil and what happened on January 6th is certainly worthwhile. But also, it is interesting that nobody talks about the fact that Bolsonaro’s attack on education, Paulo’s thought, and critical pedagogy, is not unlike what is happening in the United States. That whole attack on consciousness and the possibility of people engaging in forms of pedagogy that are empowering, sort of gets written right out of the script of comparisons, right, in some fundamental way. I think that Paulo’s pedagogy in many ways, was for the global south, and by not understanding that, we lose, in some fundamental way, what it means to talk about education and hope that is rooted in the notion of a global and collective imagination. Neoliberalism, Paulo understood, was a poison, and he knew that democracy and capitalism were not the same.
Paulo was not talking about education in the interest of reform. He was talking about education in the interest of radical transformation, like Martin Luther King was. He also understood that many of these problems that we talk about, these various forms of oppression, they intersected and mutually informed each other. He was looking to link education politically to a larger narrative, namely socialism.
I find it interesting that the attacks on critical pedagogy now are very similar to the attacks that Bolsonaro furthered and the language he used. The idea that critical pedagogy is a form of communism. That this is all Marxist drivel. That it’s really about indoctrination. Can you imagine the people who are banning books and forcing teachers to sign loyalty oaths are talking about how education is neutral and how people who are progressives are on the left are promoting indoctrinating people by trying to make them more critical and make them active, involved citizens who believe that any radical democracy doesn’t exist without an informed citizen. The contradiction is so overwhelming that it’s really hard to believe.
BE: Can you offer a few comments and also maybe some advice for people who are just beginning with critical pedagogy? About the importance of rigor and countering instrumentalising logics?
HG: I think the last thing we want to do is confuse what we do, those of us who are engaged in a project of critical pedagogy, with the kind of instrumentalization that reduces pedagogy to questions of method. Methods of sterile pragmatism, utterly barren reductionism. In doing this, we eliminate questions of power, justice, hope, emancipation, or freedom. I share a certain position with Zygmunt Bauman, who wrote about instrumentalization in a way that far exceeds traditional works on the culture of positivism or on the politics of empiricism. This kind of technological rationality leads to the camps. I don’t want to be too pessimistic here. But it seems to me that as soon as you divorce educational theories, economic practices, social policies from questions of social cost, then you create a terrain in which questions of the ethical grammar of justice and social responsibility begin to disappear. And all of a sudden, you don’t have a language any longer for understanding how deeply repressive and dogmatic this technocratic rationality is. This instrumentalism, it dehumanises, it erases the voices of difference. And it makes justice look like something that’s irreparably old and nostalgic because it can’t be measured. And so it seems to me this is, once again, a very dangerous moment that has echoes of a past that thinkers like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse nailed. And we shouldn’t have to repeat this.
BE: There’s one final question I’d like to ask you. If you could have one more conversation with Paulo, what topic would it be with him about today?
HG: I would have liked to discuss how power and new technologies have merged to create social formations pedagogically, unlike anything we had ever imagined before. I think this question of the media and its technological advances have really created a generation of young people who are not only tied to an image-based pedagogy but are also tied to a culture of immediacy and privatisation. I recognise that there are all kinds of groups that use technology in fundamental ways to offer modes of resistance and to connect with each other. But I think as a dominant paradigm, none of us could have imagined what would’ve helped in terms of the dangers we’re facing today.
I would also like to have known what it would have meant to be able to talk to each other and to create an international movement for the preservation of public goods and socialist democracy. I think that our generation was too tied in some ways to national boundaries. We still hadn’t figured out the importance of the fact that power had become global while politics had become local. The global elite now don’t care about nation states, they just care about profits. I don’t think we had anticipated the potential of the destruction of the planet and what it means for our politics. And it would’ve been interesting to all of a sudden sit down and begin to bring people together from a variety of groups and to be able to make education central to the politics. My friend Stanley Aronowitz started to do that before he died. He had enormous number of insights about what that meant. But much of that generation has passed, and it’s sad because we don’t have a comprehensive politics anymore in the way we had with the Frankfurt school, the way we had with Paulo. I don’t believe in fractured politics, I think it’s deadly. And I think that there has to be a way to talk about unity and diversity, something that Angela Davis and others have been talking about for years, that needs to be rethought in light of the most impending dangers that we face today.
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Henry A. Giroux is a Professor of English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University. His research addresses the cultural politics of neofascism and the corporatization of higher education. He currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest, and has published books on critical pedagogy, education, public values, and authoritarianism.
Brad Evans is a Professor of Political Violence and Aesthetics at the University of Bath, UK. He is the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence, and the online educational ‘Histories of Violence’ project. Brad has published twenty books and edited collections, many of which address international affairs and theorizations of violence.
From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 2 ("Violence")
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