Hello, everyone.I'm Stephen West.This is Philosophize This.Thank you to everybody who takes the time to support the show on Patreon.I could never do this without you.Patreon.com slash Philosophize This.I hope you love the show today.
So I want to tell you about a book today called The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by the philosopher Paulo Freire. Pedagogy, as a word, means we're talking about education and teaching.Oppressed, as a word, meaning, well, we'll get into that.
But I feel the need to say here at the start that people write to me sometimes and say that part of what I want when I listen to a podcast like this, Stephen West, is if there's a work of philosophy that's so influential it could get brought up by people that aren't even really that into philosophy, then that's something I want covered on the show.
I want it broken down in a way where I could explain it to someone at a party, And I won't be the person that people slowly inch away from, say, hmm, interesting, and then they never talk to me again at the party.
I don't want to just explain my philosophy to my stuffed animals for the rest of my life.Well, I heard your request, folks out there, and I did one thing right today, I think.
This book we're talking about, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is by one measurement that was taken the third most cited book in all of the humanities and social sciences.
Meaning that when people in academia give citations for what works they took ideas from that inspired their new ideas and they cite it in the bibliography, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire comes in number three of all time.
Meaning at the very least, this book that was written in 1968 in Brazil has gone on to change the way that people think about education across the entire world. No doubt if you're listening to this, unless if you're one of our much older listeners.
Shout out to you folks, by the way.Thanks for paving the way.But if you're not one of them, you've likely had teachers all throughout your time in school that were inspired by this book by Paulo Freire.
So I want to do what I always do and try to give you the philosophy behind it as it's intended by the philosopher.
But in the interest of you not being blindsided when you bring this book up to someone at a party like that, gotta warn you, that depending on who you're talking to, some people are in love with this book, and some people loathe it entirely.
Some people will say this book is a work of genius that's on a level that's so good, it's actually difficult to even find issues with.
On the other hand, we got people that blame this book and its influence for everything, from a recent decline in educational standards to the grooming of an entire generation of students in the West that view themselves fundamentally through the lens of oppression rather than through the lens of reality.
Now, we'll get to why Frary would think both of these takes on his work are pretty off.And I think a good way to start us on this line of thinking is to ask a question that Frary would have appreciated.What is it to be someone who is truly educated?
Just a general question.And some people might say back to that question, well, to be educated is to be in possession of a whole bunch of knowledge.
You know, to educate people, you make sure they have access to a lot of information, and then you try to find ways to get that information delivered into their head somehow.
But hypothetically, just to give some pressure back to that sort of take, what if there was a person, you know, with way too much time on their hands, who knew almost nothing about anything, but one day they decided they were going to sit around the house and memorize the terms and conditions screen.
You know, that thing you accept when you agree to a service, it's eight miles long, bunch of legal jargon so the company doesn't get sued.Imagine a person who knows basically nothing
Except 40,000 pages of terms and conditions from their toaster manual, or their TV user guide, their smartphone, would you say that is someone who is educated?
Most people would say no, that there's something missing there from when we call someone educated.
And maybe they'd say, one little caveat I want to add on is that the knowledge someone has must be relevant in some way to the lives of people somewhere.It can't just be legal jargon that you press yes or no to. Okay, fair point.
But what if somebody knew practically everything there was to know about people, but the people they knew about were the people in Rome in the year 38 AD?
Imagine this person knows everything about Caligula, Roman medicine, economics, down to what kind of tunics people were wearing.I'll take Shakespearean footwear for $800, Alex.
As impressive as that would be for someone to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all that stuff, if they knew next to nothing else about the world, would we consider them to be an educated person? Well, no, there's clearly more to it than that.
So what is it that earned someone this distinction we like to give out of being educated or not?Now, let's pause on that question for a minute as we build a case for Paulo Freire's answer to it.
And to get to the bottom of what being an educated person is, it might be best to start with what Paulo Freire thinks a person even is.
He has a great line that he uses at multiple points throughout his career where he says that when it comes to people, the ontological vocation of a human being is to become more human.
Now, to Freire, to become more human is going to mean to become more self-determining, autonomous, and free.
But saying that would imply that he thinks a lot of people living in the world are not as self-determining and free as they otherwise could be.So why is that?
Well, in part what he's referencing is an idea you can find all throughout existentialist philosophy, but notably from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre.The idea is that we're born, we come into the world as people,
And we come to realize the sheer number of possibilities that there really are in the universe.Just how much freedom we have at our disposal.We realize this and are very quickly overwhelmed by the weight of all these possibilities.
Because as Sartre thinks, with a lot of freedom, if you think about it, always comes a lot of responsibility.It's not comfortable feeling responsible for the things that are going on in your life and the world around you.
To feel appalled that you should be doing something about it.We don't want to feel like that all the time.It's pretty uncomfortable. So to start, we find a way to survive.Sometimes we make excuses for ourselves.
Sometimes we attach ourselves to some external authority out there, some set of ideas that gives you all the answers.Ideology, religion, nationalism, consumerism.And in exchange for limiting the confusion we feel about the complexity of the world,
We trade giant pieces of our identity in the process that become reflections of these external authorities that we rely on.
What I'm saying is, at the bottom of Paulo Freire's worldview is a set of existentialist assumptions that if you listen to this podcast frequently, you'll be familiar with.
We start out in life completely free, then we internalize certain ideas, ideologies, limited ways of viewing things, but that these limiting ideas always end up limiting you as a person right along with them.
So if the ontological vocation of a human being, as he says, is to become more human, and to become more human is to be more self-determining, then finding ways to overcome these limited ways of viewing ourselves and our place in the world appears to be a very important part of that whole process.
And for the record, it's starting to get us a bit closer to what we mean when we say that someone is educated. Real quick, think of some examples of these limiting stories at even the most basic personal level.
We all know people who think in this sort of way.Someone could say, you know, my dad died of a heart attack, my grandpa died of a heart attack, I'm probably going to die one too, so why bother even worrying about taking care of my health?
Or how about saying, look, since the second grade, I've been failing in school.My teachers have been telling me I'm not very smart.So whenever there's new stuff I got to learn in my life and it's not coming easy for me, I'm not even going to try.
Why bother?Or how about saying, I was born into a bad neighborhood.You know, stealing is the only way you can survive.All the other kids are doing it.Might as well do the same thing myself.Not like I have any other options.
Take these, or 10 million other examples out there, whatever it is.
If you care about people, you just wish for these people saying these sorts of things to be able to see through the assumptions they're making that are causing their lives to be worse than they could otherwise be.
Everybody listening to this can think back to a time in your life when you were stuck on a limiting belief about something. And at the time, it may have felt to you like it was just the reality you lived in.
But in hindsight, you can see now that there was a totally different way of viewing it, that you wish you could go back and tell yourself at that time.
Well, at the end of the day, to Paulo Freire, there's a word he'd use to describe these kinds of limiting ideas.To hold them as part of your worldview is downright dehumanizing.
meaning they're a class of ideas that prevent people from being as self-determining or as human as they could be.
In fact, this type of limiting idea, you could say, if you wanted to give a word to it, to Freire is a type of oppression that's being inflicted upon someone's existence. Now, don't let the word oppression throw you off too much here.
We're obviously not talking about ancient Egyptian slaves pulling around limestone in the desert.But this is a crucial piece of our existence that's easy to forget, that Freri thinks we need to pay closer attention to.
That as people, we are always positioned somewhere in an ongoing dialectic in our lives between oppression and liberation.
For the sake of explaining this to anybody not familiar with dialectics, it's comparable to, but not the same, as any other ongoing process you experience.
Think of how, as a human being, you are always oscillating between feeling hungry and feeling satisfied, or between feeling tired and well-rested.You're always existing somewhere between these two oppositional forces.
Well, in a similar way, none of us are totally without limiting beliefs.
A reality of our lives is that there are always forces in the world, in ourselves, that are oppressing us, and there are always forces in the world, or in ourselves, that are liberating us.And to Freire, he wants to be entirely clear here.
There is never going to be a world where oppression doesn't exist.We're never going to be living in some utopia where we've removed it from things entirely.
Oppression and liberation are two ever-present factors in our reality that are unique to our reality. and we can be living in varying levels of awareness of them as they're going on.
And once you've accepted that, a series of questions just starts to make sense to be asking.
First, just like you overcame that thing that was limiting you at some earlier point in your life, what is it that you're currently working on and in the process of overcoming now?
More importantly, what does that process of recognizing the thing and overcoming it even look like when you're in it?And here's the important question that comes up for Frary when it comes to education.
If we wanted to give people the tools to be able to overcome these ways of seeing existence that have become oppressive to them and others, what sorts of tools would we give them?How would we give it to them?
And beyond that, we have to ask, what is it that we're doing in our societies that's leading to the creation of so many people that internalize these toxic ways of viewing themselves and just blindly accept them?
Well, to get his answer to all of these questions, we have to turn to what Frary calls the banking model of education, or the typical method we've used to teach students over the years when we sit them down in a classroom and decide we're going to try to give them an edumacation.
Sit down and listen.Because what does a typical classroom look like prior to the year 1970, and many classrooms since then it should be said?
Well to Paulo Freire, back then there was always a clear dynamic that existed between teacher and student, where the student is listening and the teacher is transmitting knowledge into the brain of that student.
Protocol is simple here, teachers at the front of the classroom, students sit in desks, the teacher gives the students a lesson, students take notes, memorize the facts that are given to them, and then take a test at the end of the week to see how much they've memorized.
This is what Paulo Freire calls the banking model of education, where these students are essentially bank accounts that are brought into the classroom, sitting passively, and having knowledge deposited into them.
And this metaphor, where the students are dehumanized and made into these passive containers, this is going to be the move that's being made for Freire in the way that we used to educate people. Now to him, he says credit where credit's due.
All right, this way of educating people is very effective at doing some things.First of all, it's very efficient when it comes to distributing knowledge to most of the people out there statistically.
I mean, if all you wanted to do was make sure that most people had internalized a collection of knowledge that's predetermined by some authority, if that's the goal of your education policy, then there's something really to be said for the banking model of education.
That said, it is a one-size-fits-all kind of approach.So what that means is that it's an approach that's much easier on the teacher side of education.
Teacher doesn't really have to consider different ways to educate people that learn in different ways.
More than that, and probably most significantly, it's an extremely good way of educating people if the ultimate goal is to get most people to choose the right answers on a standardized test that you give them.
You really can train people well to be able to give certain answers you want them to have. But there are also downsides to the banking model of education.
For example, if you look around you in the world and think part of the problems we're facing have to do with having a population of people that watch media, mindlessly internalize a way of looking at the world, and then whenever they're confused about something, uncritically search around for answers from authority figures to help heal this feeling of confusion that ails them so,
Well, I'm sure you can see where this is going.To Paulo Freire, what else would you expect people to do when this is the way they've been taught to learn from the time they're four years old?
And here's where this is headed as we get deeper into the book of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
To Paulo Freire, we're not just talking here about limiting beliefs that are holding you back from your potential, you know, from starting that business or cutting back on your partying.
These things at an individual level are part of what he's talking about, no doubt.But Freire is a dialectical thinker.
And the idea of only viewing yourself as an individual, or for that matter, of only viewing yourself in terms of a collective, race, gender, class, etc., both of these extremes are massively oversimplifying the multidimensional nature of what it is to be a human being.
In dialectics, we exist at all of these levels simultaneously, each one of them interdependent upon the others for what they even mean to us as labels.
To Freire, you are simultaneously an individual, a member of a family, a member of a nation, a member of an economic class, a member of a gender, and all the rest of them.
To ignore any one of these, to do what might be tempting in a liberal society and say, what I am fundamentally is an individual.That's the sole criteria of my existence.
To do that is to ignore other important aspects of your identity that are having an impact on your life, whether you're acknowledging them or not. Now, you can choose to not pay attention to any of them.
But what happens more frequently is that because of the banking model of education, people are more often not aware of how these different aspects of their identity intersect with reality and make up the borders of what's possible for them to do as a person.
To Paulo Freire, the pedagogy of the oppressed is something that's not just going to apply to limiting beliefs at an individual level, but as he says, for understanding contradictions at a social, political, and economic level as well.
So we're not just talking about a self-help book here.We're talking about a book that's pointing people towards a type of political action, specifically in the direction of anti-authoritarianism of all kinds.
We'll get into it more, but the point for right now is to be someone who willfully internalizes one of these messages from an authority and then lives their life asymmetrically clinging on to one of these aspects of your identity as though it's all of you.
That instantly shows your hand as someone who's a product of the banking model of education. It reminds me a little bit of concerns some people bring up about parenting.
Like, they ask, is the best way to parent a young adult to just be an authoritarian?To give them a bunch of rules, tell them it's just because I said so, and then punish them if they ever step out of line?
I mean, in one sense, that's a really good way to create a little foot soldier.Somebody that'll follow rules super well, from every boss they ever have, friendships or relationships they're in, to the society they're a part of.
But what that doesn't do is create people that are capable of questioning why those rules exist, how to enforce them, and how to make new rules for themselves when a new set of circumstances emerges.
Well, same thing with the banking model of education.We are brainwashing people to seek answers handed down by authority figures,
instead of helping people to build the skills to critically engage with the way the world works, to use their own brain and actively engage with the material in a way that produces someone capable of understanding their place in a complex world.
If we could do that, then that would be more along the lines of being educated, to Paulo Freire. The term Freire uses to describe this sort of critical, engaged orientation towards the world is consciênciação.It's a Portuguese word.
Sounds really cool when somebody from Brazil says it.I can't say it like that.You guys know me.I'm a lot of things in this world. but the guy that can perfectly pronounce words in other languages, just not me.
What I can do, though, is talk a little bit more about this word and highlight something interesting about it that's important to know.
The word consciênciação is often translated into English as critical consciousness, which is what I'm just going to call it from now on, thank God. And that could lead someone speaking only in English to think that critical consciousness is a noun.
It's a thing you're supposed to acquire.I learn things about the world, I receive knowledge, and then I acquire this critical consciousness.
But something interesting about consciênciação, when it's used in Portuguese, is that it's more of a verb than it is a noun. To have critical consciousness, to Frary, is to be engaged in a process.It's an activity.
By the way, this is pretty face-up on the table, a clear inspiration that Frary has taken from the work of the philosopher Eric Fromm and his thoughts on love, which we did an entire episode on.
If you remember, to Fromm, love is not something where you fall into it and now I'm just in love and I'm going to bask in it for a few decades.You don't fall in love with someone
And you know, now that I have it, I'll just sit around for years doing absolutely nothing and then act surprised when the person says they've fallen out of love with me.Note to Fromm, love is an active process that someone's engaged in.
Love is an orientation towards the other for him, combined with an ongoing set of commitments and actions in relation to that other.
The second you stop putting in the work when it comes to love, I mean, I don't know what you call it at that point, but to Eric Fromm, you wouldn't call it love. Well, think of critical consciousness in the same sort of way.
You don't have critical consciousness, DeFreri.You're in critical consciousness, actively.So, just to recap here, we're born into the world incredibly free, always changing and in a state of flux.
But then we internalize these limiting ideas that dampen our ability to be free and self-determining.
So in that kind of world, an important part of education has to be teaching people the skill of critical consciousness that they can then use to liberate themselves from these ideas that otherwise oppress them and hold them back.
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The link is in the episode description box.Up next, this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.So today we're talking about Paulo Freire and the pedagogy of the oppressed.
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I mean, if you believe that a fundamental piece of our world is that there are oppressive forces that are holding people back that constantly need to be engaged with, then it's not surprising some people might come at that from a place of anger.
You can almost hear them.For anybody out there who's oppressing anyone else in this world, with all due respect, sir or ma'am, Screw you and all your oppression.You're a bad person.
And when we find you, we're going to punish you for oppressing all these people over the years.So what we got to do is gather around people.Let's find all these oppressive people.Let's put them into a room.
And then we'll find a way to, you know, limit their freedom in a way that seems appropriate. Do you see the obvious problem that emerges here?
When this critical consciousness comes from a place of anger, it often just results in the people who are oppressed becoming the oppressors themselves, thus finding their new place in that ongoing dialectic between oppression and liberation.
This is what you'd expect. But Paulo Freire saw all this coming, which is why he thought it's not enough to teach people this critical consciousness and just call that education.
No, no, we also need to be teaching people how absolutely crucial it is to come at this critique driven fundamentally by a feeling of love. And before you vomit into your government-issued philosophizes barf bag, hear me out for a second.
This isn't love like My Little Pony, eee, kind of love.This is, again, building from the pretty sophisticated concept of love from the work of Eric Fromm, where love is fundamentally an act of commitment oriented towards the other.
Because when you look at the dialectic between oppression and liberation from a place of love, and then within that, when you look at the relationships that emerge of oppressor and oppressed within that dynamic, when you look at that through the lens of truly caring about the well-being of the other, then to Freire, what you find is that both the oppressor and the oppressed end up being dehumanized in that sort of situation.
Now you can hear that and be like, wait, I mean, I get why the oppressed would feel dehumanized.But how was the oppressor being dehumanized here?Sounds pretty good to be getting a back rub, subjugating people all day.It's nice.
But is it really nice to have such a big piece of your identity tied to this ability to have power and control over people?When your self-worth is connected to a process where you're limiting somebody else's ability to be fully human,
When the way that you survive in the world is built around a scaffolding of needing to manipulate people or coercing people into a situation that's not good for them, does a used car salesman that knowingly sells people bad cars sleep well at night?
No, they don't.They end up living their life coming mostly from a place of fear.
In fact, both the oppressed and the oppressor, to Paulo Freire, even if they're told about this ongoing dialectic that they're playing a part in, sometimes both of them find reasons to stay in this master-slave situation because both of them have reasons to fear the day when they're not part of this kind of relationship anymore.
To Freire, on the one hand, the oppressed person can fear the responsibility and dizziness of being free from the oppressive force.
I mean, imagine feeling responsible for what happens in the world and not having the oppressor as an excuse for why you can't do anything.
Now on the other hand, the oppressor can fear no longer having that power and control over the oppressed that maybe huge pieces of their life and identity have been built around for a long time.
Ultimately though, for Frary, both parties are better off without being in this type of relationship to other people all the time.
And it's the job of the oppressed to identify where these relationships are going on, which actually leads nicely into the next point he makes in the book.
Because you may be thinking, all this talk about oppressors and oppressed, OK, that may be all well and good.But we still haven't answered one basic question that needs to be addressed.
If the banking model of education is so flawed and produces such bad results, what are the adjustments to the way we should be teaching people that would lead to better outcomes?If not the banking model, what model should we be using?
Well, one name that's been thrown around in relation to Frary's work is the problem-posing model of education, where there are several key differences.Let's take them on one at a time.
One of the big changes is going to be centering education around dialogue amongst the teacher and students, rather than just having the teacher giving a monologue in the form of a lecture.This would be dialogical as opposed to monological.
Let me give an example of this.You ever had a teacher gets up in front of the class and instead of giving a lecture, maybe they start by asking a question.Maybe they say, you know, who here can tell me why alligators are so ornery?
Let's see the lessons about alligators today.The teacher searches the room for an answer from someone.They raise their hand.Yes, yes, you, my child, you.They say, mama says alligators are so ornery because they got all them teeth and no toothbrush.
Teacher says, OK, OK.Writes it up on the board.Says, anybody else got an answer as to why alligators are so ornery?Call on somebody else.They say, alligators are so ornery because they got an abnormally large medulla oblongata."
Teacher writes that one up on the board.Now everybody listening to this has had a teacher run a classroom in this way, and the teacher is not doing this because they went out the night before and forgot to plan a lesson.
The point of doing this is to engage the students in a dialogue rather than a monologue.
In Paulo Freire's version of this in particular, the teacher and student would be more or less on an equal playing field, meaning the teacher may know a lot more than the students currently.
They may have had this particular conversation hundreds of times, which makes them particularly suited for leading the dialogue and asking good clarifying questions, knowing the common objections when the students bring up their points.
But the switch here for Freire is that when the relationship between these students and teachers is more equal, students are going to learn from the discussion by participating and thinking it through, and the teacher is also going to set out with the intent to learn along with the students as they give the lesson.
To use Freire's term, there is a co-creation of knowledge that starts to happen between the teacher and student.
that there doesn't always need to be a parent in the room and a child in the room all the time, that there are ways for adults to come together through mutual respect and produce good things through dialogue.
In fact, even very early on in education, it's possible to apply this line of thinking from Paulo Freire in an age-appropriate way. For example, first graders.
You obviously wouldn't expect them to construct an entire worldview out of, you know, Peppa Pig and Bluey.But in the classroom, if you wanted to follow this lead, you could ask the kids to weigh in on very simple things.
Like, say somebody leaves colored pencils out on the floor during art time.You could ask first graders, why do you think rules are important to have?
Why is it important to have a rule that colored pencils go in the colored pencil container, rather than spread out all over the floor?
You can prime people, even from a very early age, to be thinking in terms of why the world is set up in the way that it is.You can even get them to come up with new rules of their own, or whatever the exercise.
The point is, dialogue and critical thinking is where this sort of thing happens. Now, recognize that his point here is not that there's never any room for a teacher to give students a set of facts for them to have these critical discussions around.
Certainly there are contexts for that kind of thing would make sense at all grade levels and into adulthood.
The point is that the dialogical aspects of education are severely lacking in most settings when he writes this book, as are the skills that are required to question the fundamental assumptions of the facts you're getting, as are the skills to create a coherent picture of what the world is in relation to those facts.
We ultimately want our education systems to produce the kinds of people that can solve the difficult problems that come up in the world.
So when teachers put in the effort to facilitate the best dialogue possible, and when they do that by posing problems for the students to critically work through, rather than just spewing information for them to memorize, the result is not only that it fosters a kind of mutual respect between people, but it's also getting people to critically examine their knowledge about the world and think it through in a way that's directly relevant to them.
And by the way, the presence of the different philosophical inspirations of Freire are on full display here.
You have Immanuel Kant and his famous essay, What is Enlightenment?, where Kant dares people to think for themselves, to not outsource their understanding of the world to some external authority.
You have Husserl represented in his concept of turning toward experience, where we're not just examining the contents of our experience, but we're paying attention to the ways in which we experience them.
The conclusion of all these ideas, when they come together, is to produce a critically engaged person, motivated by love, by this commitment to preserving the humanity of the other.
And it's a person where, when they're being taught something new by someone who claims to be an authority, they become somebody who by default is always asking the question, how am I being potentially brainwashed here in learning this?
What is it this person wants me to think about the world?Why might they be wanting me to think that way?How does what I'm learning here potentially interfere with the ability for myself or others to be as self-determining as possible?
In other words, it's an education model that produces, in theory, a subject that is deeply anti-authoritarian on the other side of it.
Now, there's a million different ways teachers over the years have tried to democratize the classroom, to apply this line of thinking from Paulo Freire and others influenced by him.
A lot of different teaching styles that no doubt you've all encountered before.
And while there's plenty of interesting questions about how we might be able to use this problem-posing method of education better, a different question somebody might ask at this point in the conversation is, if the goal of this is to protect against people from being willfully brainwashed and then passing it off as an education, then why are so many people in the world willfully brainwashed calling it education?
I mean, doesn't that fact of the situation we're in serve as evidence that Paulo Freire's method here has failed?
But a common response back to that argument is, look, the reality of most education systems in the world is that you got a ratio of 30 students to one teacher if you're lucky.
That even if a teacher is trying to include the students, a lot of students in practice don't really need to be using those critical muscles in the classroom.
It's still possible to sit at the back of the class and try to blend into the wall, like you're a potted plant or something.
And now extend this into adulthood, and there's plenty of reasons people wouldn't voluntarily choose to critically engage with the media they're consuming.Confirmation bias is still a hell of a drug.
So a question someone forward-thinking might be asking is, is there a way to make it mandatory for the students to critically engage with the material?Somebody could say back to that, well, what about AI?
Personalized education is gonna be a thing here soon.And in theory, when each student has their own teacher that's asking them these personalized questions, then they'll have no choice but to be learning these critical skills.
And that idea sounds great, but I think a lot of people would say that are trying to navigate the world we're actually in at this point, is that because we're still in a place where we have that 30 to 1 ratio of teacher to students, AI in the world we live in actually ends up being a hindrance to teaching people these skills we're talking about.
The same way somebody who uses a calculator all the time gets less good at doing basic math up in their head, Students are using AI these days to think for them when their teacher gives them a question or an assignment.
Teachers are reporting this happening all the time these days.In other words, AI also has the ability as a tool to allow people to think even less than they have in the past.Now we're still not done with Frary's Pedagogy of the Oppressed yet.
We've put a lot of the pieces together. combined ideas from a lot of great different thinkers.But there's still one more big influence on Freire that needs to be added to this to get the full picture of what he's talking about.
And that's going to be the philosophy of Karl Marx and the movement of liberation theology that was going on in Brazil at the time that Freire was doing his work.
The first part of Karl Marx's work that's going to be immediately visible in the work of Freire is the action component in all this talk about education.
One of the most well-known aspects of Marx's work is his famous quote that it's not enough to interpret the world, the point is ultimately to change the world as well.
So this is going to line up perfectly with Freire's concept of critical consciousness and how it's an active process that you always need to be engaged in.Sitting in a classroom or at home thinking about how these forces of oppression are going on,
You know, sitting around making fun of a person on TV that can't get past these limiting views about themselves.Or reading yet another giant book of theory about how people are being oppressed all over the world.
That isn't going to be enough to Paulo Freire.To be in critical consciousness requires the taking action side of this as well. Now, what that action looks like specifically is not something Paulo Freire feels comfortable making prescriptions about.
He's an educator, not a politician or a revolutionary.He definitely doesn't feel it's appropriate for him to be calling for any sort of revolution, so he never does.
But at the same time, his work is directly at odds with authoritarian forces that exist in the world.
So it's no doubt, if followed in the way that he writes it, it's always going to be producing people that want to revolutionize authoritarianism that they see. And for what it's worth, this is another similarity between him and the work of Marx.
People will sometimes criticize Marx for not laying out more of a concrete plan as to what the class of society should be specifically looking like on the other side of a communist revolution.
They'll say, how do you just say nothing in regards to that?How do you just leave that for people to do? But again, from Marx's perspective, he's a dialectical thinker.
One of the mistakes of earlier political philosophy, he thinks, is this idea that we can come up with some rigid set of parameters of what a society should look like, some social contract that's going to work great no matter what kind of world you try to implement it in.
Marx understood technology changes, material conditions change, the specific needs of the people change.How could he, a guy living at the end of the 1800s, ever claim to know how some totally different world should be structuring their society?
To him that would be delusional, and for him that burden would have to fall on the shoulders of the specific people creating a classless society.This is why it's more accurate to call it Leninism and Stalinism and Maoism and not Marxism.
Well, it's a similar place that Frary's coming from by not suggesting any sort of specific revolutionary action, or any plan for the classroom for that matter, that is rigid and detailing how exactly the pedagogy of the oppressed should be carried out.
He doesn't provide those things, because to him, so many different factors, specific to a situation, would require people to adapt the pedagogy to the needs of the people that were being educated at the time.
A fan of Frary might say that one part of his work that's so beautiful is just how adaptable it is to different circumstances that education is required in, from children to adults, from his time period to the time we're living in now.
That's part of the strength of the work. The last big piece of Marx's work that will be visible in the work of Freire is something that no doubt will be obvious by this point in the episode.
That when you're looking for these forces of oppression in the world, and you're doing it at all these different scales we talked about before, individual, family member, employee, race, gender, citizen of a nation, well, some of these oppressive forces that you end up coming across are possibly going to be things that exist at a structural level.
In other words, at the level that Karl Marx is famous for saying we need to be examining in our societies more. And some of those oppressive forces might be related to economic or cultural identities you embody.
And it's possible to Freire, there are going to be things you uncover in this process that have been around for so long that they're just baked into people's lives in a way that they don't even see.
And this was the case, Freire thought, of his culture of Brazil towards the end of the 1960s when he's writing this book.That although the colonialism that defined his region in the recent past was nowhere to be seen physically,
People still had internalized through education ways of viewing themselves and others that were based on assumptions from a colonial society.How do you get rid of that?
Well, it's by people being more aware of these sometimes not-so-obvious forces of oppression that successive generations are mindlessly internalizing. Now, I said I'd talk about the people that love this work by Frary and the people that despise it.
And hopefully the critiques just brought up throughout the episode debunk this as some sort of shining, glowing, perfect work of philosophy that's beyond all criticism.You know, Frary himself wouldn't have agreed with that assessment.
But how about this other side of it though?That Paulo Freire's work has groomed an entire generation of young adults that hate the society they're a part of.
That they view the world fundamentally through the lens of oppression, and that this causes them to not only ignore how much progress has really been made in the world, but to see oppression even where it doesn't exist in the world.
that inspired by Frary's work, radical political actors have embedded themselves into academia as professors, they've indoctrinated students to see themselves in terms of some group identity, usually some immutable characteristic about themselves, they've turned them into foot soldiers for their cause, and then they tell these kids that the goal of their lives should be to tear down the existing institutions in Western society that are fundamentally based on the oppression of innocent people.
How would Paulo Frary respond to this sort of criticism of his work? Well, he'd probably start by saying that nothing about that situation you just described even remotely describes his work or anything that he calls for in it.
But for the sake of argument, let's say that reality that we just described there is true.Students have been indoctrinated by radical professors and are tearing down Western society in the name of fighting oppression.
Well, the irony is that's a very Paulo Freire pedagogy of the oppressed style analysis of the ways that those students in their education have been co-opted by authoritarian forces.
I mean, ironically, if you think this is what's going on, the type of self-reflection a student would need to recognize they were caught up in that sort of process is exactly the kind of critical engagement Freire's calling for in the book.
I think he'd say if these students really exist, they are not in fact reflections of the type of education he's calling for.
And if somebody, anybody out there was evoking his work, using his terminology to promote a form of political action that was oppressing people in the name of liberating others, well that would be the exact kind of contradiction that his pedagogy would aim to dismantle.
So anyway, I hope this introduction to his work has been helpful.Always appreciate everyone that supports the podcast.Thanks to the people who come back to supporting after taking a break.It really helps.
Patreon.com slash philosophize this could never do this without you.And as always, thank you for listening.I'll talk to you next time.
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