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

by James Lindsay

One of the great merits of the Chinese Cultural Revolution was its rejection of static, antidialectical, or overconservative concepts of China’s history. Here there seems to be a permanent mobilization of the people in the sense of consciously creating and re-creating society. In China, to be conscious is not a slogan or a ready-made idea. To be conscious is a radical way of being, a way characteristic of humanity. (The Politics of Education, p. 106) Of course, aside from teaching children to destroy Chinese historical culture and shame and kill their parents, the method of education and re-education established by Mao Zedong to achieve this “success” is precisely the thought-reform (brainwashing) process he employed to reorient people to the “people’s standpoint.” Freire reoriented it, moved it into schools, and called it a pedagogy of the oppressed.