The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire's Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education

by James Lindsay

94% of Providence students aren’t proficient in math. 86% can’t read or write on grade level. Legislators who never talk about student outcomes proudly use students during school hours as foot soldiers for their activism.2

education has been stolen right out from under us and from our children. This theft of education has a purpose; it enables a counterfeit to replace it. The mechanism and description of this gigantic educational ripoff can be summarized in a single sentence: Our kids go to Paulo Freire’s schools.

This is what Freire’s educational theory is designed to achieve. Students are meant to be “facilitated” into Leftist political activism, and other student achievement outcomes are quite literally an afterthought. Education is a pretext; Marxist activist grooming is the point.

Learning to read (or achieve academically in any subject) has always been little more than a palatable cover for Freire’s actual objective: raising Marxist political consciousness for the purposes of creating a cultural revolution.

For Freire, political literacy clearly matters, not just actual illiteracy. Indeed, as we will see, actual literacy is, at best, a secondary concern. He feels this way because, in keeping with Karl Marx, whose theology he adopted in full, man’s true nature lies in gaining the power to transform the world (into a socialist utopia through relentless critique of what is), and his ability to participate in this process of political activism and transformation is the most fundamental aspect of his being and his key human right.

Paulo Freire is recognized as the third most-cited scholarly author in all of the humanities and social sciences by authoritative metrics.

What this means is nothing short of the theft of education. Something that looks like education remains, but it is no longer education. It is political brainwashing to see the world “on the side of the oppressed.”

Students are transformed into learners who learn virtually nothing except two things: (1) how to view the world from the “standpoint of the oppressed,” and (2) to denounce the “dehumanizing conditions” of the world, as seen from that perspective, in a way that simultaneously announces the potential for something “better” (read: more Socialist, equitable, and Socially Just).

Freirean approach by no later than 1995, and the intervening quarter century has seen enough turnover of the teachers to have fundamentally remade our schools and thus education itself. Kids still go to school, but school isn’t school anymore. The teachers have been replaced with activists, and education has been turned into “conscientization,” the process of seeing the world from the so-called standpoint of the oppressed.

Freire doesn’t want education that teaches people how to be successful in a society he wants to see cast down.

Paulo Freire was not merely an educator. He was a postcolonialist radical and a Marxist. He must also be understood as a religious figure, specifically a Liberation Theologian, or at least a devotee to Liberation Theology, which is best summarized by saying it is Marxism pretending to be Catholicism.

To say Freire “Marxified” education isn’t to say that Freire injected Marxist ideas into education, and it is also not to say that Freire adapted education into a form of Marxist indoctrination, as we’d usually understand it. Freire changed the theory of education (pedagogy) itself into a Marxist theory of pedagogy. He even changed what it means to be educated (or literate) at all in the same way. Freire created a Marxist Theory of knowing that runs beneath his entire theory of education, and he built a Marxist praxis of thought reform around it. That is his legacy.

Nevertheless, thanks to the relentless efforts (“praxis”) of Critical Marxist educators, most of all his disciple and evangelist Henry Giroux, who is openly a Communist, Freire’s work was eventually welcomed into the heart of the North American academic educational canon. This occurred significantly because of the tireless work of Giroux and other Critical Pedagogues in the 1970s and 1980s. Giroux deserves the most blame for this unlikely feat, however, since he personally worked through the first half of the 1980s to see that at least one hundred Critical Marxists were tenured as professors in colleges of education.

This Girouxian praxis was, in turn, facilitated by the relentless work of countless Critical Marxists—including many former members of the radical terrorist organization called the Weather Underground. These “sixties radicals,” in the wake of the failures of the neo-Marxist revolutions of the late 1960s, turned away from radical direct activism and made their way into K–12 education activism and the universities, especially the colleges of education.

“To the question: ‘Where did all the sixties radicals go?’, the most accurate answer,” noted Paul Buhle (1991) in his classic Marxism in the United States, “would be: neither to religious cults nor yuppiedom, but to the classroom” (p. 263). After the fall of the New Left arose a new left, an Academic Left. For many of these young scholars, Marxist thought, and particularly what some refer to as Western Marxism or neo-Marxism, and what I will refer to as the critical Marxist tradition, was an intellectual anchor. As participants in the radical politics of the sixties entered graduate school and moved into faculty positions and started publishing, the critical turn began to change scholarship throughout the humanities and social sciences. The field of education was no exception. (p. 1)

Herbert Marcuse. He indicated it was the most fruitful direction for achieving an eventual revolution via the “long march through the institutions” in his desperate 1972 book, Counter-revolution and Revolt. He puts it this way, To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working in them, but not simply by “boring from within,” rather by “doing the job,” learning how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one’s own consciousness in working with the others. (p. 55)

I have stressed the key role which the universities play in the present period: they can still function as institutions for the training of counter-cadres. The “restructuring” necessary for the attainment of this goal means more than decisive student participation and nonauthoritarian learning. Making the university “relevant” for today and tomorrow means, instead, presenting the facts and forces that made civilization what it is today and what it could be tomorrow—and that is political education. For history indeed repeats itself; it is this repetition of domination and submission that must be halted, and halting it presupposes knowledge of its genesis and of the ways in which it is reproduced: critical thinking. (p. 56)

Put otherwise, by two women’s studies professors from Arizona State University, Breanne Fahs and Michael Karger, education should be turned into a vehicle for “viral” replication of the ideology, which can then go on to “infect” other domains of life by going with the reprogrammed students out into the world. That is, just as viruses hijack and steal a cell’s machinery to make more viruses, this vision hijacks and steals education to create activists and ideologues who will go out into the professional world to infect disciplines, institutions, and industries with Marxism.

His program is unabashedly radical, as he summarizes neatly in Pedagogy of the Oppressed in an oft-quoted passage in modern education books: [T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side. (p. 39)

Oddly for a paradigm-shifting education book, this book is frequently this explicitly religious in character. As noted, for example, in chapters 8 and 10, Freire explicitly claims that to be effective, teachers must personally live through a kind of existential “Easter” that awakens them to a full Marxist political consciousness (otherwise, they are “necrophiliac,” death-loving, as used by the neo-Marxist psychologist Erich Fromm, whom Freire cites).

To accomplish this, he specifically calls upon educators to die to the existing order of society and resurrect themselves as people with (Marxist) consciousness.

The Liberation Theologians in South America, including the infamous Marxist “Red Bishop” of Freire’s own Recife, Brazil, Dom Hélder Câmara (whom Freire defends by name in a footnote in The Politics of Education), are clearly among his chief influences. Incidentally, as it happens, Câmara had at least two other remarkably famous proteges who were profoundly influenced by his take on Liberation Theology: the Argentinian who would later become Pope Francis and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum and political protege of Henry Kissinger, Professor Klaus Schwab.

The blatantly religious tone is consistent throughout Freire’s work. For example, we have already mentioned Freire’s insistence that education should be about “learning to speak the word to proclaim the world,” which is the unique role of God in the Bible. Freire is quite explicit about this role being the role of the man who wishes to transform society according to Marxist Theory, though. Take the way he opens chapter 3 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he touches upon this subject specifically: As we attempt to analyze dialogue as a human phenomenon, we discover something which is the essence of dialogue itself: the word. But the word is more than just an instrument which makes dialogue possible; accordingly, we must seek its constitutive elements. Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed—even in part—the other immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world. An unauthentic word, one which is unable to transform reality, results when dichotomy is imposed upon its constitutive elements. When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah.” It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and th...

In the West, we have accepted a liberal—not Leftist—theory of man and the world, which, most importantly, contains within it liberty of conscience (enshrined in the American First Amendment). Leftism, notably, does not afford that liberty and therefore must not be confused with liberalism, which is the philosophical school the United States was founded upon.

Paulo Freire Marxified education itself. That is, he turned pedagogy into a Marxist Theory and turned the very concepts of education, literacy, and knowledge into sites of Marxian social analysis. This is not equivalent to inserting Marxism or Marxist ideas into curricula, nor is it the same as revamping education into a Marxist indoctrination, as many believe. It is a far deeper shift in the theory of education that has redefined how we educate our students throughout the United States and now around the world. As noted, the closest parallel is to the brainwashing thought reform in Maoist re-education prisons and schools. The theft of education we have been discussing is enabled by precisely this Marxification, which repurposes education from within.

For Marx, the special property was capital. Its ideology was capitalism, a caricature of market economies. Its winners are the bourgeoisie and its losers the working class, who become a proletariat when awakened to class consciousness. The structure of this society is enforced by structural classism which is materially deterministic. The goal of Marx’s economic-material Marxism is the abolition (or transcendence) of private property.

In Critical Race Theory, as I argue in Race Marxism, the special property is whiteness. Its ideology is white supremacy. Its winners are whites and white-adjacents. Its losers are people of color. Either of these can become antiracists when awakened to race consciousness (instead of colorblindness). The structure of this society is enforced by systemic racism, which is both materially and structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition (or transcendence) of whiteness.

In Queer Theory, the special property is normalcy. Its ideology is cisheteronormativity, that it is regarded as normal to be straight and not trans. Its winners are cisheterosexuals and people who pass as such. Its losers are the abnormal. These can become allies or queer when awakened with queer consciousness. The structure of this society is enforced by homophobia, transphobia, and other bigotries of normativity, which are both materially and structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abo...

For Freire, the special property is formal education or literacy. Its ideology is one of “educated society,” which values being educated and literate in ways acceptable to the existing system. Its winners are the formally educated and literate, regarded as knowers, and its losers the illiterate, who are actually knowers in their o...

In Marxist Theory, those with privilege won’t let it go easily, though, so this transition from “oppressive” and “domesticating” artificial selection to “liberating” and “utopian” (Marxist) artificial selection must proceed via revolution and an enforced, administered State ruled by the now-conscious underclass—a dictatorship of the proletariat. In Critical Race Theory, a functional dictatorship of the antiracists, as described by Ibram X. Kendi, for example, in Politico Magazine fulfills this goal.12 In Queer Theory, relentless deconstruction of all categories and norms through queer activism does. In Freirean education, all education becomes a political education, with educators as facilitators into (critical, or Marxist) consciousness, so that all knowledge becomes political knowledge understood on Marxist terms. In fact, Freire goes on in The Politics of Education to explain that true education is political education (specifically, true “literacy” is political literacy) “facilitated” by conscientized teachers. This is what the Marxists have achieved in our schools over the last forty years.

What we see Freire constructing here is a Marxist Theory of knowing, literacy, and education. Literally. In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teachers existence—but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher. (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 72) “Knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those they consider to know nothing” is a Marxist Theory of knowing.

What society currently regards as “education,” to Freire, is therefore a process of social and political grooming into maintaining the existing elite class, either by grooming its next generation of oppressors or by conditioning its next generation of oppressed to accept the terms of the existing society. This creates an oppressive social structure between the educated and uneducated that is established by that upper caste to benefit themselves and imposed upon the lower, putting them intrinsically in class conflict across the educated/illiterate line. The goal of a genuine education for Freire, then, is the awakening of the critical consciousness of this state of affairs in the underclass together with their own revolutionary consciousness by which they will eventually overthrow the unjust system. Everything else is false education that should be replaced by his own (Marxian) methods.

Specifically, teaching someone to read so that they can get a good job, for Freire, merely enables them to participate in the existing system, which is bad.

Freire’s pedagogy aims to seize control of the development of Man and Society for “humanizing” ends. It’s just a reproduction of Marxism. As Freire explains, For men, as beings of praxis, to transform the world is to humanize it, even if making the world human may not yet signify the humanization of men. It may simply mean impregnating the world with man’s curious and inventive presence, imprinting it with the trace of his works. The process of transforming the world, which reveals this presence of man, can lead to his humanization as well as his dehumanization, to his growth or diminution. These alternatives reveal to man his problematic nature and pose a problem for him, requiring that he choose one path or the other. Often this very process of transformation ensnares man and his freedom to choose. Nevertheless, because they impregnate the world with their reflective presence, only men can humanize or dehumanize. Humanization is their utopia, which they announce in denouncing dehumanizing processes. (The Politics of Education, p. 70)

Here’s how Marx put that in his 1844 “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. (p. 1)

Freire’s objective in invoking this view of the world is clear; it’s to make the case that his understanding of the purpose of education is the only possible legitimate one: In truth, there is no humanization without liberation, just as there is no liberation without a revolutionary transformation of the class society, for in the class society all humanization is impossible. Liberation becomes concrete only when society is changed, not when its structures are simply modernized. (The Politics of Education, p. 136)

This is the education system that has been brought to our kids because our kids, like the kids in Providence, now go to Paulo Freire’s schools. It is a Marxified educational program (thought reform) that teaches our kids that they are trapped in a dehumanizing system and only through Marxist consciousness and activism can they hope to escape it—and set everyone else free in the process. Reading, writing, mathematics, science, history are all cast to the side in the quest for “humanization.”

(Marx said alienation arises when workers are made or paid to do work consistent with the subjective vision in someone else’s head rather than that in their own.)

Freire characterizes as intrinsically dehumanizing. But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or “sub-oppressors.” The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of “adhesion” to the oppressor. … In this situation the oppressed do not see the “new man” as the person to be born from the resolution of this contradiction, as oppression gives way to liberation. For them, the new man or woman themselves become oppressors. Their vision of the new man or woman is individualistic; because of their identification with the oppressor, they have no consciousness of themselves as persons or as members of an oppressed class. It is not to become free that they want agrarian reform, but in order to acquire land and thus become landowners—or, more precisely, bosses over other workers. (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pp. 45–46)

Having established what Freirean education is, we’re going to begin to transition into why it is employed and then how it works (insofar as it does work, i.e., for conscientization). We’ll begin by clarifying that Freire sees education as an intrinsically political phenomenon upon which one must take a side. This framing isn’t a mere question of values, as discussed previously, but a question of the entire concept of man and the world that inform values-driven education. For Freire, there is only one legitimate side: Dialectical Leftism, which he equates with the pursuit of liberation through his own Marxist methods. Thus, for Freire, there is only one purpose to education, which is establishing the preconditions for a bid for liberation through Critical Marxist cultural revolution.

Banking education inhibits creativity and domesticates (although it cannot completely destroy) the intentionality of consciousness by isolating consciousness from the world, thereby denying people their ontological and historical vocation of becoming more fully human. (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pp. 83–84) Again, note well that while Freire specifies banking education here, which seems mostly to exaggerate and criticize the Prussian model, it implicates all pedagogical approaches other than his.

Nonetheless, it’s now very obvious why students who would attend a school based in Freirean Critical Pedagogy would be far less likely to achieve academic mastery of any subject.

a Freirean educational approach must adopt and communicate the underlying Marxist machinery, themes, purpose, and ideology in service of the Marxist goal of seizing the means of production of the society (thus man and the world) and transforming the world accordingly (humanizing it). Astute readers will recognize that Freire says this requires a gnosiological attitude, which is what Marxists often call their theory of knowledge. (Christians will again shudder as they realize this indicates that Marxism is ultimately a Gnostic heresy running within a diabolical man-as-gods software routine.)

In Woke Marxism, accepting “other ways of knowing,” so long as those are rooted in the broad Critical Theory method and its intrinsic “teleological character” (expression of some ultimate purpose), is that “gnosiological” attitude—one that preserves his critical spirit and scientism (religious faith in what gets passed off as “science”). It claims to arise from a glimpse of absolute knowledge (gnosis) of the reality of Man and Society, which it posits lies in the lived experience of oppression.

To be clear, it isn’t that Freire just Marxified education and that it doesn’t include Marxist indoctrination as well. Freire unapologetically uses his Marxified educational theory (Critical Pedagogy) to teach a Critical variation of Marxist Theory, too. He is absolutely clear (and devotes chapters of his books) to the objective of his educational program: to raise a Marxist or critical consciousness in “learners” so that they might engage in revolutionary struggle to overthrow the existing system.

Thus, we see the strong turn to the phenomenological concept at the heart of much of Woke Marxism: “lived experience.” His disposition toward Liberation Theology explains his appeals to hope (that Marxism will work this time) and love (epitomized, apparently, in Che Guevara) as well as the overtly religious character of his view of conscientization as the purpose of education. Che Guevara is an example of the unceasing witness revolutionary leadership gives to dialogue with the people. The more we study his work, the more we perceive his conviction that anyone who wants to become a true revolutionary must be in “communion” with the people. Guevara did not hesitate to recognize the capacity to love as an indispensable condition for authentic revolutionaries. … [Guevara] became a guerrilla not out of desperation but because, as a lover of men, he dreamt of a new man being born in the experience of liberation. In this sense, Guevara incarnated the authentic revolutionary utopia. He was one of the great prophets of the silent ones of the Third World. … In citing Guevara and his witness as a guerrilla, we do not mean to say that revolutionaries elsewhere are obliged to repeat the same witness. What is essential is that they strive to achieve communion with the people as he did, patiently and unceasingly. Communion with the people—accessible only to those with a utopian vision, in the sense referred to in this essay—is one of the fundamental characteristics of cultural action fo...

Critical Marxist Herbert Marcuse, who wrote in 1969, Negative thinking draws whatever force it may have from its empirical basis: the actual human condition in the given society, and the “given” possibilities to transcend this condition, to enlarge the realm of freedom. In this sense, negative thinking is by virtue of its own internal concepts “positive”: oriented toward, and comprehending a future which is “contained” in the present. And in this containment (which is an important aspect of the general containment policy pursued by the established societies), the future appears as possible liberation. It is not the only alternative: the advent of a long period of “civilized” barbarism, with or without the nuclear destruction, is equally contained in the present. Negative thinking, and the praxis guided by it, is the positive and positing effort to prevent this utter negativity. (An Essay on Liberation, p. 89)

Hope, for Freire, lies in the fact that we can denounce the existing world and take action to disrupt and dismantle its processes and ways of knowing (so, Marcuse’s “negative thinking”).

Marx, some will note, was explicitly against utopianism, but this is mostly another intellectual or linguistic swindle on his part. By saying he’s against utopianism while describing the final state of Society and Man as existing in a utopian condition, all he’s saying is that the perfected society (the Utopia) can be realized and thus isn’t technically a Utopia, which literally means “No-place,” i.e., outside of the realm of the possible. Marcuse and Freire, with Giroux behind him, explicitly reclaim the term for the eventual society for which they advocate, however.

Conscientization Works But Does Not Educate A more accurate presentation of this three-step process would be: (1) data-mining the students by one method or another to discover what might radicalize them; (2) presenting radicalizing material through the established curriculum; and (3) grooming students’ responses to this material to ensure it radicalizes them into Marxist “critical consciousness.” That is, it is a process of thought reform. Recall what the researchers investigating Freirean approach saw in Nigeria: Stage Two: The Selection of Words from The Discovered Vocabulary From the discussions of the learners, the Generative Words written by the team of facilitators were: resources, money, abundance, crude oil, stealing, pocket, begging, plenty, poverty, suffering, frustration, crying, hunger, crisis, dying, death. These words were later depicted in pictorial form showing the concrete realities and situations in the lives of the people. The pictorial display provoked an emotional state of pity and anger among the discussants, some of them could not talk, while most of them were moved to tears asking the question: Why! Why! Why! Why!