The Critical Turn in Education: Chapter 1 Analysis
Paulo Freire: The spiritual inspiration of Critical Pedagogy
Conventional wisdom among Critical Educators is that Paulo Freire started the “critical turn” in America. Though Gottesman argues convincingly that this is not the case, it is incontestable that Freire had an enormous impact on the people who brought Marxist and Postmodern thought into the theory of education that became Critical Pedagogy. In the first chapter of TCTiE, we learn about the progression of Freire’s career, the intellectual traditions that he comes from, his unique contributions to Marxist and pedagogical thought, as well as the activities of other Marxists in education who were contemporary with Freire. Gottesman tends to jump around between these different areas, so I’ve done my best to treat each one separately.
To sum up Freire’s importance: he was the person who breathed life back into a dying Marxian ideology by synthesizing three distinct strands of Marxist thought and pointing it at the field of education.
Summary: Revolutionary Movements
While Freire’s work is certainly seminal to Critical Pedagogy, he isn’t the true origin point. Freire had relatively little influence on education until more than 10 years after his most important work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed,1 was translated to English. As a Brazilian Marxist, much of Freire’s early influence was in his homeland and other South American countries. Even after his work was brought to America, it took some time to take root. Credit again to James Lindsay’s New Discourses podcast for some excellent episodes on Freire.2
Major Events in Freire’s Life
Freire spent a great deal of time working on adult literacy in several South American countries. During this time, he worked with numerous socialist Catholic priests who would ultimately help him get to America. In America, he began to work with Henry Giroux who helped integrate Freire’s ideas into American education.
It wasn’t until Freirean thought was added to preexisting Marxist circles in education that Critical Pedagogy was born. Freire brought a unique combination of ideas that ultimately revitalized Marxism in American education. In 1968, Freire published Pedagogy of the Oppressed in Portuguese, and the book was translated to English in 1970. It did receive some praise among the radical left but made no real inroads into schools of education. The 1980s and 90s saw an enormous increase in how often Freire’s work was cited in journals of education. Today, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the third most cited work of all time in the social sciences.3
Freire’s Intellectual Influences
The Marxist revolutionaries, Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg, Regis Debray, and Che Guevara were all figures who impacted Freire’s early development in what Gottesman calls a “vibrant conversation” of radical Marxist thought. It is noteworthy that, by this point, the radical Marxists seem to have come to terms with the fact that the Soviet Union was not in fact, “the future” and it didn’t, in fact, “work.”4 That said, the nightmares of Maoist China, Cambodia, Cuba, Bolivia, and Venezuela (to name a few) had yet been reckoned with, so revolutionary Marxism still had legs.
Names like Horkheimer, Adorno, Lukacs, Marcuse, and Gramsci were mentioned as additional influences on Freire. These men were largely of the Neo-Marxist (also referred to as the Critical Marxist) school of thought rising during this period. Originating from the Institute for Social Research (The Frankfurt School), these Marxists were grappling with the fact that communist revolutions weren’t occurring in capitalist nations as Marx had predicted. In fact, the lives of the working class seemed to be improving in nations that were embracing market economies and free trade, while their existence only ever seemed to get worse in communist countries.
Rather than question the Marxian assumptions about the nature of capitalism, the Neo-Marxist tradition concluded that the capitalist system was merely hiding the ways it exploited the lower classes. It became the goal of the Neo-Marxists to find other means to drive the oppressed classes to revolution. The avenue they proposed was to use cultural institutions, including education, to form a revolutionary base and generally blame capitalism for every ill in the world.
Liberation Theology is a lesser appreciated influence on Freire’s development, probably because it represented a departure of traditional atheism among influential Marxists. Gottesman acknowledges that the Catholic Church impacted Freire, and even mentions the connection between Marxism and Catholicism.5 However, I don’t think Gottesman fully appreciates the importance of Liberation Theology in how Freire formulated the concept and process of Marxist Revolution. Sometimes considered an offshoot of traditional Catholicism, Liberation Theology was driven by Catholic Socialists who believed that Marxism was a political avenue by which they could aid the poor and downtrodden as their beliefs demanded. Liberation Theology is best thought of as a synthesis of Marxist and Christian ideas. It was most popular among Catholics in South America and contributed to many of the socialist “experiments” on that continent. A Brazilian archbishop and Liberation theologian, Hélder Câmara, was cited by Freire as a strong influence on his thinking. Câmara not only had an impact on Freire, he is also credited with being a spiritual mentor for Klaus Schwab, mastermind of “The Great Reset,” and a strong influence on the current Pope. I believe that the most important aspect Freire would take from Liberation Theology is a sense of spiritual commitment and belief that would be sorely (and rightly) lacking among Marxists in the wake of the global failures of socialism.
Synthesizing Marxist Traditions
Ultimately, Freire was able to join important elements of the three Marxist traditions that influenced him in his early years, while setting aside aspects that were not conducive to his goals. Put concisely, he kept the goal of the revolutionary Marxists, while discarding the baggage of their failures around the globe. But rather than wait for capitalism to collapse as the early revolutionaries predicted, Freire advocated for the tactics of Neo-Marxists, while avoiding the deep sense of despair that pervaded their ideas and those of their postmodern followers. Liberation Theology brought an almost spiritual commitment to do anything necessary to advance Marxism, while discarding the historical and political consequences of being an organized religion. It was truly a remarkable feat of “aufheben der Marxismus.”6
In Gottesman’s words, Freire’s core theoretical contribution was the idea that “critical education should be the central feature of revolutionary movement building.”7 The goal is still ultimately a political revolution, but the aim would be a takeover of the cultural institution of education to lay the groundwork and make the culture more sympathetic to Marxist ideas—revolutionary goals, Neo-Marxist tactics. The main assumption behind Freire’s vision is that education is fundamentally a political act, meaning that the purpose behind the interaction of teacher and student was not to pass on knowledge or prepare the student for life in the world, it was to build a Revolutionary movement. Pedagogy of the Oppressed was not meant to be a guide increasing the knowledge and skills of oppressed or marginalized peoples such that they could improve their lives through increased competence and experience, it was a guide to turn them into Marxists so they could “improve themselves” through a communist revolution.
Freire also had a key practical contribution to Critical Pedagogy (and ultimately, all strands of Critical Social Justice)—his conception of praxis. Praxis was essential to Freire’s vision of education in that he saw both teachers and students as actors who should be working to transform the world through “common reflection and action (see the Crossover Terms section for a more detailed analysis of this idea).”8 It’s this constant interplay between action and reflection that makes the revolution an ongoing process. In his own words: “To be authentic, revolution must be a continuous event, otherwise it will cease to be a revolution, and will become a sclerotic bureaucracy.”9 While subtle, this is a key distinction between Freire’s vision and that of revolutionary Marxists before him. On this view, the revolution never reaches its end. It is a process that the revolutionaries engage in to be virtuous and give meaning to life. And it never stops. The process of revolution is less a political goal than it is a personal commitment for the revolutionaries. It’s not even clear that there is an end goal. When pushed, a follower of Freire would probably indicate that eventually they would reach a society of utopian communism, but it’s not at all clear how their process of perpetual revolution gets there. There is a parallel to the way in which the practice of Christian virtues is not directly tied to the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. Christians attempt to be virtuous to show their spiritual commitment to God rather than because they see a connection between their actions and an eventual utopia. So too with Freire’s perpetual revolution—praxis is the method by which a person demonstrates their spiritual commitment to “doing the work” or “being on the right side of history” as it’s commonly put today. This perspective most certainly comes from Freire’s background in Liberation Theology rather than that of revolutionary or Critical Marxism.
Other Marxists in Education
While the book covers other prominent Marxists in education later, Gottesman gives us a glimpse at what some of these people were doing before Freire’s work started to be taken seriously. In 1976 Bowles and Gintis (covered in chapter 2), Harvard-trained Marxist economists, published Schooling in Capitalist America10 where their argument was “The educational system, basically, neither adds nor subtracts from the degree of inequality and repression originating in the economic sphere.”11 These two were much more in the classical Marxist camp that saw class disparities as the origin of strife and oppression that then flowed into other institutions. As such, they did not view education as something that could improve one’s status or quality of life—it was merely preparation to participate in an oppressive system. Furthermore, they did not seem to view education as something that served as a bulwark against Marxist revolution, nor as an institution that could be targeted in the attempt to bring about revolution.
Around the same time, Michael Apple (the focus of chapter 3) was taking a more Neo-Marxist approach. Apple criticized the ideas of Bowles and Gintis as “crudely mechanistic” and argued that a more rigorous analysis, “…must be grounded in a tradition which has taken as its root problem the investigation of how the form and content of popular and elite culture are dialectically related to economic power and control.”12 Apple tends to be rich on buzzwords and low on clarity, but his basic purpose is to advance the Critical methods of the Neo-Marxists to analyze education and the role it supposedly plays in perpetuating capitalist oppression.
Both elements get more coverage later, but the big idea to take from their inclusion in this chapter is that multiple Marxist strains were laying the foundation for Freire’s ideas. I would argue that Freire wasn’t taken seriously in education and never would have been had these different Marxists not been fertilizing for at least a decade prior to Freire having any influence.
The Spiritual “Prophet” of Critical Social Justice
Towards the end of the chapter Gottesman gives us a few ideas about why Freirean thought took time to root in American education. Looking at when and why Freire came to his position of prominence can tell us about the changes to both education and leftism in America.
His focus on adult literacy rather than on K-12 education made intellectuals and prominent journals less receptive to his ideas; it seemed his focus was different. Additionally, the revolutionary rhetoric was a bit much for American educators at the time. Freire’s assumption that the existing social order was inherently unjust did not resonate even with many on the left who still believed that the social changes they wanted could be achieved within the American system through reform. Lastly, works like The Pedagogy of the Oppressed did not offer specific courses of action, but rather a sort of spiritual inspiration. According to Kathleen Weiler (one of the subjects of chapter 5), Freire had a:
“…tendency toward inspirational, but decontextualized generalizations. His pronouncements frequently invoke universal themes such as justice, love, and freedom—terms that can be appropriated by writers from a number of different traditions.”13
The initial problem with Freire’s ideas was that he wasn’t what intellectuals in education needed. They were looking for ways to improve American schooling, not to reformulate education to produce little Marxist revolutionaries.
But things change. The presence of competing schools of Marxist thought in education would ultimately make the field more receptive to the idea that the purpose of education is to pave the way for revolution rather than prepare young people to engage in productive lives. The Marxist strains of thought faced little principled opposition in universities and even less in departments of education, which were widely seen as the part of the university with the least competent faculty and students. In the 1930s for example, Harvard president Lawrence Lowell likened his university’s Graduate School of Education to, “a kitten that ought to be drowned.”14
More importantly, through the 1970s and 80s those on the left began to lose the conviction that Marxism was the way of the future. The fact that every communist experiment seemed to be more brutal and destructive than the last led to a pervasive sense of despair among the left. Some embraced the despair and walked down the path of postmodernism, but Freire offered a different way forward. By making an individual commitment to perpetual revolution through Critical praxis, he gave leftists a sort of spiritual sacrament that revived their hope that Marxism could be successful. Rather than offer Utopia at some distant point in the future as the ideal to strive for, Freirean Marxism holds a perpetual commitment to endless revolution as an ideal to be attained. Again, it is unclear what the ultimate reward for this perpetual revolution is, but Freire did advocate for what he called “Critical Hope,” which seems to amount to the idea that this time a communist revolution will succeed.
Freire didn’t offer much specific advice about how to turn education into a process of raising critical consciousness, but he clearly set that out as the goal, and with it, he brought hope and faith that by engaging in a process of identifying and tearing down oppression, a just society could be achieved. It is that sense that spread to all branches of Critical Social Justice and continues to drive the movement to this day.
Crossover Terms
A great deal of Freire’s appeal comes from his ability to use concepts that are tied to The Enlightenment ideal of liberty. However, these ideas are twisted in such a way that they are used to attack and subvert those Enlightenment values. To this day, we see ideas like Oppression, Freedom, and Liberation abused by the Woke to advance their leftist agenda. Freire also emphasized the idea of Reflective Action, which has a surface appeal to those who see the value of introspection, but as with so many concepts abused by the Woke, this too has been twisted beyond all recognition.
Oppression/Oppressed
Motte: The act of using force or the threat of force against people to exert a large measure of unwanted control over their actions. On this view, the oppressed are the individuals who have political power wielded against them unfairly.
Bailey: The fact that a person’s actions may be constrained, or their desires may be thwarted by factors outside their control. On this view, the oppressed are those who are less well off than those who have more. Taken to its logical conclusion, things like the cost of food and shelter, the necessity of employment, and the fact that some skills are more valuable for a functioning society than others can and will be taken as forms of oppression. While rarely explicitly stated, the fact that the values needed to thrive are scarce quantities to be produced and traded for is the ultimate source of oppression.
Strategy: The idea here is to conflate inequalities (ability, effort, wealth, and random chance) with oppression. Indeed, for many of the Woke the very fact that inequities exist among different groups of people serves as evidence that some form of oppression is taking place. By these standards, any disparities of wealth, performance, status, or privilege can only result from the unfair use of power and is thus a form of oppression. Using force or threats of force is justified to rectify the oppression that is apparently present everywhere.
Seizing the Motte and Bombing the Bailey: Political oppression is a real thing that is pervasive in many societies today and even has a growing number of advocates among nations with a tradition of freedom. While it’s often difficult and open to debate whether certain government or corporate actions can be characterized as oppressive, the mere fact of socioeconomic inequality or the necessity of working is not sufficient proof that a system, institution, or group of people is oppressive.
Freedom
Motte: A state in which a person or group of people is not forcibly restrained from taking actions or arbitrarily compelled to take certain actions.
Bailey: A state of Utopia in which no person’s actions or desires are constrained for any reason.
Strategy: It’s worth noting that this term is not as commonly used as “Liberation” because freedom and liberty, as achievable end goals, do not integrate with the process of perpetual revolution that Freire advocates. When he does refer to the idea of freedom, he seems to be indicating a vision of a world free from oppression after the revolution has achieved its ends. In this sense, Freire is using freedom as an alternative to the worn-out concept of Utopia. He means that only when the oppression of scarcity has been abolished will we have true freedom. However, he sidesteps the skepticism about Utopian visions and appeals to the fundamental political value of The Enlightenment. In this sense his followers can justify their ideas and actions as being in pursuit of true freedom, which is never actually attainable.
Seizing the Motte and Bombing the Bailey: Freedom is the absence of forcible compulsion, not the absence of need. Just as the necessity of supporting one’s own existence is not oppression, a post-scarcity world is not a prerequisite of freedom.
Liberation
Motte: The state in which freedom has been protected by limiting the ways in which forcible compulsion is legally allowed to be used.
Bailey: The process by which one identifies and opposes the oppressive ideas, institutions, and people in one’s society.
Strategy: It’s important to note that for the Woke, liberation is not primarily a state that a society or culture reaches, it is a process that, like Freire’s perpetual revolution, is always ongoing. For Freire and his followers, liberation is the act of recognizing that inequity is oppression, and that revolution is required to combat the oppression. In this sense, liberation is not just the process of attaining equity in a society, it is attaining equity through revolutionary means. In practice, this will result in the appointment of commissars whose goal it is to seek out and uproot any inequities they find. An example of such a group would Ibram Kendi’s “Department of Antiracism” that would have the stated goal of:
“…preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”15
Ironically, it is the creation of such groups that would bring about true oppression. It’s often argued that such measures would only be temporary until society is conditioned to act correctly, at which point, to use Marx’s words “the state would wither away.”16 The historical record of such attempts to reengineer society speak for themselves.
Seizing the Motte and Bombing the Bailey: Liberation is the removal of compulsion through the rule of law, not the imposition of countless new barriers to engineer a perfectly equitable, Marxist society. Political actions that restrict freedom, or legislate acceptable ideas are not liberation, they are true oppression.
Reflective Action
Motte: To examine the effects of one’s past actions, consider the reasons those effects came about, and refine the principles of knowledge, morality, or politics that one operates on if needed. Reflection on one’s fundamental convictions is perhaps the most essential part of reflective action—nothing should be off limits.
Bailey: Reflect on how effective the actions were in moving closer to the objective of Marxist revolution with the goal of changing them to be more effective in the future. Reflective action is the final step in the praxis of Critical Pedagogy and other branches of Critical Social Justice. It is important that the fundamental convictions of Marxism are taken as primary and beyond question.
Strategy: Giving reflective action such a prominent role in education makes Critical Pedagogy seem more reasonable than it is. Indeed, genuine reflection on what one has learned is an indispensable part of being educated. But in the context of Critical Pedagogy, reflection loses its value because the one thing forbidden to reflect upon is the truth or falsity of the underlying Marxist assumptions. Not only are these assumptions never questioned, but the process of reflective action is changed such that the goal is to advance the ideas of Critical Marxism more effectively, not to determine whether Marxist ideas are true.
Seizing the Motte and Bombing the Bailey: To engage in truly reflective action is to examine the fundamental convictions and standards that one is acting on. Genuine reflective action for Critical Marxism would involve acknowledging the role that Marxian ideals, goals, and methods played in some of the worst atrocities in human history. It would involve questioning Marxism down to its very foundation. Freire’s concept of reflective action fails to properly challenge his Marxist premises, and in fact only further reaffirms the Marxist moral and political positions that have led to so much destruction around the globe.
Questions
After reading this chapter, I became more interested in the details of Liberation Theology, something I don’t know a great deal about. Just touching on it briefly raised the question in my mind: In what ways has Marxism extended its influence into different religions? Despite Marx’s contempt for religion as “the opiate of the masses,” Catholicism, one of the largest religions in the world, formed a substantially Marxist branch. To what extent have such Marxist strains formed in the other Abrahamic religions? In peripherally related study, I have seen the claim that numerous Islamic jihad and dictatorial regimes have taken inspiration from Marxist ideals and methods.17 I am interested to learn more about these connections.
At one point Gottesman gives two sources that funded the various organizations that helped Freire spread his ideas: The Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation. I wonder if Marxists like Gottesman or Freire appreciate the extent of their own parasitic nature? Do they get that it was the immense wealth generated by the steel and automobile industries that allowed Freire to spread his ideas to America? Or do they just never think about it?
If you found this useful or interesting, please share it, and leave comments below if you have questions or disagreements. I would be particularly interested to get some feedback on the connection of Liberation Theology to Critical Social Justice, and the nature of Freire as, effectively, a religious figure for this movement.
Freire, Paulo, and Myra B. Ramos. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1970.
https://newdiscourses.com/2022/01/paulo-freires-politics-education-new-hope/
https://newdiscourses.com/2022/02/paulo-freires-prophetic-vision-education/
https://newdiscourses.com/2022/04/paulo-freires-politics-of-education/
https://newdiscourses.com/2022/04/paulo-freire-educating-to-proclaim-the-world/
https://globalcenters.columbia.edu/news/paulo-freire-initiative-columbia-university
Lincoln Steffens, an American journalist in the early 20th century, went to the Soviet Union in 1919 and commented in a letter that, “I have seen the future and it works.” This quote would age almost as poorly as the work of Walter Duranty.
http://www.quotecounterquote.com/2010/06/i-have-seen-future-and-it-works.html
Gottesman, Isaac H. The critical turn in education: from Marxist critique to poststructuralist feminism to critical theories of race. p. 14 New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.
“Aufheben” is German word that simultaneously means “to abolish” and “to lift up.” It was widely used by G. F. W. Hegel in his dialectic philosophy. Oversimplifying a bit, it describes a means be which contradictory elements in a thesis and antithesis are combined without ever resolving the contradictory claims. It’s a way to have your cake and eat it too when it comes to ideas.
TCTiE p. 10
TCTiE p. 13
TCTiE p. 14
Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic Books, 1976.
TCTiE p. 22
TCTiE p. 23
TCTiE p. 27
https://quillette.com/2020/08/12/look-whos-talking-about-educational-equity/
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hardcastle/1946/wither_away.htm
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/utopia-and-terror-in-the-20th-century