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The true nature of Man is that he is a maker of History, says Marx, a process from which the underclass is excluded by structural oppression and estrangement from their true nature as such. Freire sees this creative process as downstream from being regarded as a knower, and it is just a bourgeois conceit and matter of politicized definitions of “knowledge,” “knowing,” “knower,” “literacy,” “reading,” “education,” and so on that prevent the “illiterate” from realizing their true nature.
True education, Freire insists, has little to do with learning to read “disconnected symbols” or “memorizing” irrelevant simple sentences, like “Ava saw a grape” (English speakers might see this sample sentence in a similar light as “See Dick run”) and should instead educate “learners” (no longer “students”) in the context of their lives and the political ramifications of that context. These are to be interpreted by the “educator” (no longer “teacher”) through a Marxist lens of class antagonism with the goal of awakening class consciousness.
This process is carried out through the three methodological points referenced previously, most immediately, the utilization of “generative” words and concepts to awaken political literacy.
Therefore, the process of changing the objective world according to the subjective vision of Man is humanizing that object—making it more human through the subject-object dialectic at the heart of the Marxian theology.
Humanizing Man allows him to be in his true nature as a knower who can “speak the word to transform the world” into an even more hominized form.
fact, actual education is a worse state of affairs for Freire because education enables oppressed people to turn around and become oppressors instead of becoming revolutionaries because they haven’t thrown off the underlying logic of a class-based society. (This is a Critical Marxist Theory of education, by the way—the Marcusian analogue would be the desire to rise up the ladder and become a manager or setter of culture.)
The contemporary concepts of “epistemic injustice,” “epistemic oppression,” and “epistemic violence” promulgated by Social Justice scholars like Miranda Fricker, Kristie Dotson, and their followers echo these Freirean concepts. It’s mainstream Woke Marxist thought in education that without a radical political education put forth on their terms, certain “learners” and “knowers” are marginalized and domesticated by the existing knowledge and education systems while others are privileged.
One, the approach must be utopian.
Two, in being utopian, it must use the appropriate critical disposition and method, which technically defines it as being utopian. Of note, Freire identifies utopianism as the defining characteristic of the Left and impossible for the Right, by definition. Indeed, it is the defining characteristic of the Dialectical Left that is ultimately committed to the Marxist vision of transforming society into its dream of a perfected stateless, classless global community.
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”).
The New Society, even as it emerges, you see, is already the right-wing of the ongoing transformational process; it’s the new “status quo.” He then goes on to explain that the revolution must be perpetual to be authentic so that it never becomes a (necrophiliac, “death loving”) status quo, which will be imposed upon everyone by the power-elites who benefit from it.
Critical Theory can only be correctly applied from that “gnosiological attitude” and a “historic commitment” to its transformational praxis.
Conscientization is the chief goal of the Freirean educational program.
broad method I’ll refer to as “Freirean” that proceeds in three steps: (1) identifying the relevant context of the “learner” to discover “generative themes”; (2) presenting back to the learner images or other abstract representations of his context (“codifications”) represented in the generative themes; and (3) problematization of those representations and the context they represent in the “learners’” lives (“decodification”) to “conscientize” them to the “real conditions” of the “political context” of their lives.
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.”
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 .
Lifton, like Freire on conscientization, also explains that the primary purpose of the thought-reform (brainwashing) process in Chinese Communist prisons is to effect a psychic death and rebirth.
Of note, a Marxist Theory of Knowing replicates and scales in a way that no other strain of Marxist thought can. Any field or domain of thought, from education to physics, from medicine to rock climbing, from economics to environmental science, from food science to theology, can be immediately flung into a Marxist conflict model by claiming that domain of thought unjustly recognizes certain privileged knowledges, knowers, and ways of knowing while excluding and marginalizing others to its own benefit.
What a utopian project looks like—or, rather, doesn’t—is another central issue of Freire’s thoughts on conscientization. The political Right, he repeatedly makes clear, cannot be utopian, by definition. Furthermore, if a movement knows what it is announcing, it will find itself on the Right by default.
As the new world that is announced is brought into being (by nothing more than denouncing the old one in the Critical Theory way), it is already becoming the new old world that has to be denounced so an ever newer one can be announced (because the denunciation came from a critically conscious place). This means that critical consciousness must always deepen. You must “do the work” eternally, as a lifelong commitment to an ongoing process, one might say. In fact, Robin DiAngelo specifically says that, and now we understand why.
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. It’s much more accurately seen as a form of pervasive psychological destruction. Even so, thanks to Paulo Freire’s cult guidance, it is exactly the kind of psychological destruction its victims are led to feel good and proud about.
Freire tells us. That is why the utopian character of our educational theory and practice is as permanent as education itself, which for us is cultural action. Its thrust toward denunciation and annunciation cannot be exhausted when the reality denounced today cedes its place tomorrow to the reality previously announced in the denunciation.
the Freirean method of education essentially proceeds through what he called a “generative themes” approach. A generative theme is something that a Freirean educator identifies as being relevant to the “real context” of the learners’ lives. That is, they are themes drawn from the lived experiences of the learners, or strategically introduced to them (especially with children), that have perceived and manipulable social, emotional, and political relevance to their lives.
The real goal of the Freirean method is “political literacy,” which means conscientization. That is achieved by using generative themes to trigger priority for political discussions, allegedly as “mediators” to academic learning, and these discussions are to be facilitated by Marxist thought reformers using “lenses” like equity, inclusion, and sustainability.
What counts are those themes in their lives that evoke the kinds of discontented and aggrieved emotional responses useful to Marxist conscientization. In short, they’re meant to evoke feelings of injustice, unfairness, suffering, and misery, or hope in utopian possibility.
The Drag Queen Story Hour program, recall, bills itself unambiguously as a generative method that induces the dialogue by which the Freirean process (here, with regard to norms, sex, gender, sexuality, and so on) proceeds toward queer conscientization.
A particular angle on this might be to try to get students to explain what it would feel like to be, say, a poor black person who believes the reason they are poor is systemic or structural racism. This forces the children to enter into a state of believing systemic racism is real instead of a particular (and purposed) interpretation of the world through their emotions, which easily deny logic and evidence.
Decolonizing the curriculum means replacing articles of “formal education” or “literacy” (bourgeois intellectual property) with that which conscientizes in the Freirean (Woke) sense. The English literature curriculum has to be “decolonized” by removing Shakespeare because extant cultural objects that represent being educated have to be removed and replaced with something else that can be leveraged to raise a critical consciousness.
A Marxist Theory of Knowing holds that certain people have privileged themselves as knowers so as to exclude and marginalize other potential knowers and their “ways of knowing” and “knowledges” from the mainstream center of society so as to maintain their own advantage.
In many respects, a Freirean approach to pedagogy proceeds upon the unlikely Marxist assumption that the privileged will always just succeed, no matter what. They are, after all, privileged, which, decoded from the Marxian, means that the system has been rigged by an elaborate, hidden conspiracy theory that ensures their success and essentially everyone else’s failure.
equity, often forwarded as the goal of a Freirean education model, equalizes downward by lowering outcomes for everyone so as to minimize differences.
all Ladson-Billings did was repackage Freire into a racial context and pare down on the overt Marxism. I have defined culturally relevant teaching as a pedagogy of opposition not unlike critical pedagogy but specifically committed to collective, not merely individual, empowerment. Culturally relevant pedagogy rests on three criteria or propositions: (a) Students must experience academic success; (b) students must develop and/or maintain cultural competence; and (c) students must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order. (“But
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The process proceeds by “codifying” a generative theme, concept, word, etc., according to these special rules and “reading” it, then “problematizing” it, and then “decodifying” it. (These correspond to the three-step dialectical approach underlying all of Marxism, wherein some phenomenon is rendered abstract, then critiqued through a negative critique, and then made concrete by attaching it to the lived “reality” of the situation.)
Codification Codification—essentially, presenting something “real” and generative as abstract—is the first step after identifying a generative theme.
Because the generative and even codified material is often (though not always) unobjectionable, challenges to the Freirean approach are often rebuffed successfully through gaslighting and public-relations attacks. For instance, challenges to a Freirean codification might be answered with “this is just teaching about slavery,” “you just want to ban books about slavery (so you can go back to it),” or “you don’t want people to develop empathy for LGBT people,” all of which (intentionally) obscure the deeper purpose of the codified lesson and program of thought reform of which it is the second
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In practice today, Transformative Social-Emotional Learning is almost certainly at the center of this process of connecting the feelings evoked through the earlier stages of the method to the learners themselves. That is, it is unambiguously Freirean pedagogy, which is to say Marxist thought reform.
Appealing back to Plato and Socrates while saying they did it wrong because they didn’t use it to raise critical consciousness, Freire insists that true and proper education must be “dialogical,”
For Freire, a “banking model” education—meaning any approach to education that isn’t dialogical on Freirean terms—robs people of what makes them truly human, which is recognizing themselves as knowers who can use their (political) knowledge to transform the world. It also cannot do the real necessary work of education, which is to conscientize learners to become Marxist activists to transform the world in exactly this way.
when educating someone fails to produce elite success for them, the privileged can claim that it is somehow the fault of the learner, not the teacher, the system, or the allegedly bogus things it considers knowledge. The failed learner can be accused of being lazy, stupid, or otherwise deficient—giving birth to another term common in today’s Freirean education programs, the deficit model, which explains student failures in terms of certain deficits, such as a stable home life or neighborhood condition.
