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

by James Lindsay

The overwhelmingly primary reason 94% of Providence students are failing mathematics and 86% cannot read or write at grade level but can turn out by the hundreds to a left-wing political demonstration at the Rhode Island Statehouse during school hours is unambiguous once understood: 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.

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.

the lesson presented by the educator is a mediator of learning. It is not something to be learned in and of itself; it is something that facilitates learning on the terms Freire is setting.

This is not what education should be about, and it cannot be what education is about in any nation that hopes to survive long into the future. In fact, it isn’t education at all. It is, in a phrase, thought reform, which Robert Jay Lifton gave as the formal translation for the Mandarin Chinese , which literally translates as “wash brain,” or, more commonly, brainwashing. Another apt term in our more contemporary context is (cult) grooming. By

sacrosanct. It has accordingly been incredibly influential. Because of his incredible sway in North American colleges of education, Paulo Freire is recognized as the third most-cited scholarly author in all of the humanities and social sciences by authoritative metrics. It exaggerates none at all to state that Paulo Freire is at the theoretical center of everything happening in colleges of education today, and from there our nations’ schools.

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).

unintended result of applying Freire’s pedagogy. For example, Freire’s approach does not directly intend to cause the readily observed widespread underperformance of students across virtually every grade level in virtually every core academic competency (reading, writing, mathematics, scientific literacy, historical literacy,

Yet further others draw upon or are direct consequences of Freire’s pedagogy as it is put into application, even including Social-Emotional Learning, which otherwise has a distinct pedagogical genealogy (or two) but has been explicitly Freirean in approach for at least a decade, if not reaching back to its formal establishment out of “whole-child education” in 1994.

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. The religious notes of Freire’s pedagogy—in the theology of Marxism—are not merely incidental and do not just run as a current in the background. They are utterly central to his work, which therefore must be recognized as a form of explicitly and intentionally religious instruction.

In the end, the simplest summary of Paulo Freire’s extensive body of work is that he Marxified education and, in turn, made it into a form of religious instruction that our state currently fully endorses, funds, supports, promotes, and demands.

little is said directly about the enormous impact of Paulo Freire’s disastrous ideas, which cannot lead to academic success no matter how much money is dumped into pushing them. In fact, we have every reason to believe that the better these approaches are funded, the worse educational outcomes can be expected to be.

The fact that Freire cites or references virtually no educational scholarship but bases his work directly upon the likes of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Rosa Luxemburg, Ivan Illich, Dom Hélder Câmara, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel should have been disqualifying enough to prevent the widespread adoption of his work.

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.

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.

This shift out of the streets and into the classroom occurred at least in part following the strategic advice of the most significant Critical Marxist of the 1960s and 1970s, Herbert Marcuse. He indicated it was the most fruitful direction for achieving an eventual revolution via the “long march through the institutions”

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)

Herbert Marcuse, 1972. This strikes me as a parallel to Opus Dei.

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)

'Critical thijking' isn't critical thinkiing.

It is in this sense—that education can either reproduce the existing system or create the conditions for its demise in (Marxist) revolution—that Freire “Marxified” education, at least on the surface. Education is immediately split by this dirty trick into two. The existing education is framed as false, ideological, if not chauvinist (or bigoted), and the Marxist education program becomes the only possibility for freedom. This moralizing false choice is the basis for the entirety of the Freirean educational fraud that follows

Throughout his published works, most importantly his two most famous books, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and The Politics of Education (1985), he reveals enough of his character through the names he repeatedly invokes: Karl Marx, G.W.F. Hegel, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and, in pride of place, Che Guevara. Few, if any, theorists of education (pedagogues) are ever named, referenced, or put into application.

thrown down in a perpetual cycle of destruction.

There's no way forwards in this ideology; if it's 'turtles all the way down', then there can be no endgame or destination. How could anybody be convinced by this? The concept is preposterous.

He was particularly aggrieved at colonialist outreach programs, wanting to inspire the peasants of Brazil to rise up on their own terms and take their lives back.

The drty secret about peasant revolts is tht it is never the peqasants who conspire btoxlead nthrm.

Rather blatantly following the ideas of the father of Cultural Marxism, the Hungarian György Lukács,7 as written in his 1923 book, History and Class Consciousness, Freire recognizes the Cultural Marxist axiom that power lies at the center of society, from which the entirety can be viewed and moved.

(Pause to think of how often you have heard the terms “center” and “decenter” in education-speak in ways that didn’t quite seem to make sense before this.)

Center/Decenter Terms that harken to Lukacs, the founder of Cuktural Marxism

Thus, the standard Marxist conspiracy theory rears its head beneath Freire’s project. Freire posits that certain people declared themselves in possession of a special kind of cultural property that privileges them in relation to others, in this case “being educated” or “literate.”

That Freire’s entire pedagogy begins from a postcolonialist mindset helps us make sense of an otherwise confusing trend in education today: the decolonization phenomenon.

Leftism since Rousseau has been extremely skeptical of the civilized world order—“man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains,” being one of Rousseau’s most famous remarks—and has fascinated itself with the concept of the noble savage.

These concepts, both in abstract and under colonial realities, are the root of the noble, innocent-as-oppressed character, from the savages of Rousseau through the proletariat of Karl Marx to the minority identities of Woke Marxists.

they share several deep commonalities central to Leftist thought. They see man as inherently dualistic, with an uncorrupted “true” form trapped inside of the socially conditioned and physically constrained “human being” on the outside (this is “the ghost in the machine”).

Yet ecen this conception of Man as having a true nature when unsullied by corrupt, power-based society is being actively bundermined by bWokism. When it isnt even clear what a woman is (you're a woman if you feel you are… morr turtles all thebway down.)

All are therefore in the driver’s seat of the great dialectical process of History, which is the defining character of Leftism at least since Hegel’s death in 1831: savages made to live in cities (Rousseau), Man made (Socialist) to live in Society (Marx), individuals remade to live in society (Critical Marxists), and individual people with group identities made to live as global citizens (Woke Marxists).

This “educational” process in which education and politics are dialectically synthesized into one activity is instrumental to Marxism in the free, liberal West because, frankly, that structural oppression isn’t actually there, at least not significantly. You have to be groomed into seeing it through an “educational” process, and that’s what Freire offers.

In my opinion, this chapter foreshadows the widespread implementation of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), particularly “Tranformative SEL” (which matches Freire’s terminology, tone, and intention quite closely),

Chapter 5: On the Politics of Education

The sine qua non the apprenticeship demands is that, first of all, they really experience their own Easter, that they die as elitists so as to be resurrected on the side of the oppressed,

Oh, yippy, we get to become Allies. Freire, Politics…, chapter ten

This isn’t, then, a mere question of whether education is “values-neutral,” as Critical Pedagogues often assert it cannot be (and their critics are often forced to accept, putting them on Marxist turf). This is a question of the insertion of an entire worldview, not mere values, on what amounts to a complete intellectual swindle (standard for Marxism).

Our capacity for reason makes us human, and therefore the state cannot dictate to us what our capacity for reason is purposed for, if anything, whether that be to serve and glorify God, submit to Allah, transcend worldly suffering through the Eightfold Path and reach Nirvana, or ascertain the subject-object dialectic so that we realize ourselves to be transformative subjects working to build the world into a Marxist Utopia.

Liberalism, not Leftism

Now, having gained some idea of who Paulo Freire is and what his work entails, we turn our attention to the major concepts of his pedagogy. The essentials can be captured in five of Freire’s key concepts: what I refer to as the “Marxification” of education, “conscientization,” the “generative themes” approach, “codification and decodification,” and the “dialogical method.”

First, because those with access hope to maintain it and to keep it exclusive, society is separated into oppressors, who have the privilege of access to the special property, and the oppressed, who are excluded from it.

Those with access constitute a “superstructural” layer of society, which means they have access to shape the future course of history. Those excluded access constitute the human capital base of society (man reduced to animal or machine through the division of labor), which defines its functional “infrastructure” that makes it work and produces most or all of the legitimate value that drives society.

These are in “dialectical” relationship—fitting into the human component of a vast mythology of reality called “dialectical materialism” that allegedly explains the evolution of everything in the universe, including man and society. The superstructure rests upon the base and defines its...

This relationship is therefore inherently antagonistic and dynamic and generates a pervasive “structure” of society that orders its affairs and defines its social relations—something like a materialist “spirit”...

Those who are oppressed within the dynamic are conditioned to accept their oppression because the range of their imagination is limited to the world they’re forced to occupy. This steals what makes them essentially human from them and forces them to live in an “alien,” thus alienating, world. Lacking comprehension of that world prevents them from being able to change it, especially since they are not in the superstructural layer of society from which society’s direction is determined.

Those in the privileged class are either naively or willfully blind to the arrangement they benefit from and are therefore also limited in their subjective range in a way that only the oppressed could possibly cure them of (oppression confers gnosis of Man’s true Social nature).

Man’s role in this is to realize his true nature, to understand the “concrete” conditions of his structured life, and to change these conditions toward the Socialist. This society-changing activity is called “praxis,” which derives from the Greek root for the word “practice.”

Marxism can be thought of as a philosophy of learning to see the world in terms of this allegedly self-perpetuating, stable social cycle and then destabilizing it and seizing the means of its production in order to redirect it toward the desired end, Communism, which Marx believed captures Man’s true nature as a fully social “species-being,” from which he has been estranged by the division of society caused by the establishment of a special form of property and a myth of privileged access to it (for him, the division of labor and private property).

The goal, however, as Marx and Engels note in The Communist Manifesto can be summarized in the single idea of “abolition of private property” of this special kind.

Marxists seem to understand this in their usual backwards way. That can be glimpsed in the fact that they call everything else a form of eugenics because they think we live in an artificially selected social environment that benefits the few at the expense of the many—it’s always already happening through the “bad” people unless the means of production are seized by the “good” people. (Also of course, this reveals Marxist thought to be a gigantic conspiracy theory.) Because they believe they alone chart the path to ending all such ideological drives, they think their eugenics program doesn’t count and is therefore the only true anti-eugenics program possible since we simply cannot return to a primitive state of Nature.

In Critical Race Theory, a functional dictatorship of the antiracists, as described by Ibram X. Kendi, for example, in Politico Magazine fulfills this goal.

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 p...

There’s being able to read a text, and there’s being able to read a society and its conditions, for Freire.

Freire's redefinition of literacy. This is connected with the first half of his defnition of 'word'.

the ability or inability to read them, maintain an oppressive state in society is another form of illiteracy (it is sometimes called “hermeneutical injustice” today).