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

by James Lindsay

Stage Three: The Actual Process of Literacy Training After the completion of stage two, it came as a great surprise to the facilitators, that the discussants were not willing to participate in the literacy teaching/training process. They were in a state of emotional wreck. They were furious, angry, shouting and restless. They were shouting Change! Change! Change! Cursing furiously those who have, in one way or the other, contributed to the suffering of the people. The bottom-line: acquisition of basic literacy skills did not make any meaning to them and in fact was irrelevant, with some of them asking the facilitators: “What have you people, who are learned, done to change the situation, rather you (have) worsened the situation when you yourself get to the position.’’

Conscientization as Thought Reform There’s another way to understand conscientization that is positively chilling and stubbornly difficult to discount once the connection is made. Conscientização is the process of thought reform, which is the translation psychologist Robert Jay Lifton gave to the Mandarin Chinese term for “brainwashing” in Maoist re-education prisons in Communist China . (Cult/political grooming would be another acceptable term.) Consider the following passages from Lifton’s 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China. [Quoting a released prisoner, Dr. Charles Vincent] “In the cell, you work in order to recognize your crimes. … They make you understand your crimes are very heavy. You did harm to the Chinese people. You are really a spy, and all the punishment you received was your own fault. … In the cell, twelve hours a day, you talk and talk—you have to take part—you must discuss yourself, criticize, inspect yourself, denounce your thought. Little by little you start to admit something, and look to yourself only using the ‘people’s judgment.’” (p. 27) For eight days and nights, Vincent experienced this program of alternating struggle and interrogation, and was permitted no sleep at all. Moreover, he was constantly told by his cellmates that he was completely responsible for his own plight. (“You want the chains! You want to be shot! … Otherwise, you would be more ‘sincere’ and the chains would not be necess...

Both Dr. Vincent and Father Luca took part in an agonizing drama of death and rebirth. In each case, it was made clear that the “reactionary spy” who entered the prison must perish, and that in his place must arise a “new man” resurrected in the Communist mold. Indeed, Dr. Vincent still used the phrase, “To die and be reborn”—words which he had heard more than once during his imprisonment.

For Freire, you are reborn into conscientization, and your identity emerges in solidarity with the oppressed as a conscious, knowing Subject and maker of History. It’s the same process in two different settings.

The Stages of Conscientization Conscientization, again, is the chief goal of the Freirean educational program. It’s a big word that means exactly what it seems to imply: the process of awakening critical consciousness, which is neo-Marxist activist consciousness. It is becoming “conscious” to one’s political context as a Critical Marxist (or, today, a Woke Marxist); it is learning to “recognize” the conditions of your life from the oppressed standpoint as well as your role in perpetuating them and potential for overthrowing them.

Marxist thinkers, neo- or otherwise, especially since the 1920s have been primarily concerned with the process of becoming conscious to the “realities” of society and the “need” to create systemic change. Marx, they realized, had been wrong. Consciousness won’t spontaneously arise (from the preaching of the Communist gospel and intolerable working conditions). Worse, when push comes to shove, say in the eruption of a World War, workers of the world stop uniting and hole up in their national identities. Consciousness has to be raised, deliberately and carefully. This gave rise to a whole new chapter in Marxist thought: Cultural Marxism, which sought to address these issues. Perhaps most notably among Marxist Theorists in this regard is the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács, who developed the concept considerably in his 1923 book (arguably his magnum opus), History and Class Consciousness.

In short, we could summarize the stages of conscientization this way, as a series of beliefs one has to be reformed or groomed into believing (though these are my labels and descriptions, not how Lukács or Freire describes them): Class Awareness—Awareness that you are a member of a class in a class society. The Nature of Class Society—Class society dehumanizes those whom it oppresses. Holistic Understanding—All classes are part of a broader whole of society, which implies that “oppression” is a verb occurring within a structural dynamic between oppressors and those whom they oppress, all of whom are dehumanized by the process: there is no marginalized without marginalization and no marginalization without a marginalizer. Conscious Subject in History—You are a potential maker of History who has been prevented from knowing this about yourself through your oppression. Standpoint Knowledge—As one of the oppressed, you possess a special role in the making of History, as the dialectical negation to the conditions of oppression; that is, you have to be a revolutionary who changes History. Class Consciousness (First Real Marxist Consciousness)—You are in class solidarity within your class by virtue of your oppression and have a role to play in ending oppression entirely through revolution. But! Class society itself is the problem, following Marx, a profound contradiction. Up to this point, the progression agrees with Lukács. Critical Consciousness (Second Marxist Consciousness; Cr...

Consider an example. In a 2021 education paper titled “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood,” the authors, Harper Keenan (who is trans) and “Lil Miss Hot Mess” (real name Harris Kornstein, who is a drag queen integral to the Drag Queen Story Hour brand and program), present a “drag pedagogy,” which is a theory of education rooted in drag performance. They describe it explicitly as a generative practice that brings up themes of identity to young children in the early childhood education environment. In recent years, a programme for young children called Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) has risen to simultaneous popularity and controversy. This article, written collaboratively by an education scholar and a drag queen involved in organizing DQSH, contextualizes the programme within the landscape of gender in education as well as within the world of drag, and argues that Drag Queen Story Hour provides a generative extension of queer pedagogy into the world of early childhood education.17 DQSH raises questions and dialogue that are then used to present lessons from within Queer Marxist Theory under the programmatic branding of Comprehensive Sexuality Education. Their agenda is explicitly stated not as to increase empathy for LGBT issues, but to use a generative (Freirean) pedagogical approach to encourage children to learn to “live queerly” (italics theirs), which is defined as a (Marxist-style) opposition to any and all norms or conceptions o...

Unlike men, animals are simply in the world, incapable of objectifying either themselves or the world. They live a life without time, properly speaking, submerged in life with no possibility of emerging from it, adjusted and adhering to reality. Men, on the contrary, who can sever this adherence and transcend mere being in the world, add to the life they have the existence which they make. To exist is thus a mode of life that is proper to the being who is capable of transforming, of producing, of deciding, of creating, and of communicating himself.

For Freire, what sets men apart from animals is that they can envision what they want to create in the world, including in terms of themselves and their own society, and then bring it into being. Of course, Freire is just repeating Marx here, namely the creative subject-object relationship that Marx said gives rise to man’s “species-being,” which is something like his true nature.

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.

Sleepwalking Toward Dystopia In a Freirean education, then, learners are taught to believe that nothing is ever good enough. No matter how much activism they have done or whatever they may have achieved with it, good or bad, there are further problems to be uncovered and denounced, and nothing can possibly be left well-enough alone. Freirean conscientization is therefore a process of being insatiable in one’s thirst to complain about things and make them change somehow accordingly—specifically without any clear idea what they should change into. In no sense whatsoever can this be called a method of education. In fact, it probably barely qualifies as being thought reform