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

by James Lindsay

Indicative of this kind of political posturing, just two days later, on May 26, Democratic State Senator Tiara Mack (“she/her”) of Rhode Island, who bills herself as a “queer educator,” “donut lover,” and “abortion fundraiser” on her Twitter profile and who later became (in) famous for a viral self-promotional “campaign” video of her standing on her head in a bikini and twerking upside-down,

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

Haunting the scene of the activist stunt promoted by Mack—no doubt organized and facilitated by activist teachers—there’s a story of abysmal academic failure in Providence schools. Children in Rhode Island seem to be learning almost nothing except that when something big happens in the news, it’s time to pull a performative political stunt in order to attempt to get one’s political way, nearly always for left-wing causes.

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.

In turn, these children are being “conscientized” as activists for causes useful to Marxist political agenda items.

The overwhelming adoption of Paulo Freire’s crackpot theory of education, which has become known as “Critical Pedagogy,” may relate to but cannot directly explain the rise in school shootings, inexplicable failures of law enforcement, or many other tragedies. It does, however, almost completely explain why our schools are failing to teach our children basic skills like reading, writing, and mathematics while succeeding at turning them into a new activist class for Leftist—and only and explicitly Leftist—causes. 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.

Much of the theory and practice of education (pedagogy) employed today in North American schools is derived directly, with certain contextual updates and modifications, from the work of a Brazilian Marxist radical by the name of Paulo Freire.

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

A succinct way to phrase the consequences of his influence on education is that our kids go to Paulo Freire’s schools. 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).

The mechanism for this theft of education was straightforward and generational: capture and transform the colleges of education; mold a generation of teachers; program every generation of students thereafter. Colleges of education were captured almost entirely to the 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.

Many of the major seemingly faddish but broadly dominant developments in education today have roots that can be traced back in whole or in part to Paulo Freire. These include, especially, the abysmal performance in achieving at-grade-level competency in most subjects in most classes in most schools, misplaced curricular emphases, the rampant data-mining of children through relentless surveys and assessments (though these serve other purposes as well), Culturally Relevant (and Responsive) Teaching, “decolonizing” the curriculum, student-led project-based learning, and Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), especially “Transformative” Social-Emotional Learning. Other programs, like Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE)—including the abominable practice of Drag Queen Story Hour, in which drag queens (adult men dressed as clown-form sexualized women) do drag performances for children while reading to them in s...

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,

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.

This, in my opinion, is the chief reason American schools are failing so completely at teaching children to read, write, do mathematics, understand history and civics, and become scientifically literate, even at grade level, despite substantial and ever-increasing public and other resources being dedicated to the task of education. The purpose of what Freirean schools consider “education” isn’t any of that. Instead, it’s making Marxists out of your children.

Throughout the United States, the failure of academic achievement in public schools in particular is utterly condemning, even by somewhat paltry standards as considered internationally. Though it varies by subject, grade level, and state, at-grade-level academic achievement in U.S. public schools is often well below half of students and is often below a third of them. Illiteracy and innumeracy are increasingly the expectation, not a deviation from it, to be dealt with through increasing demands for programs, money, and “equity,” another Marxist end. None of these will succeed so long as Freirean pedagogy stays at the heart of education. Setting the money on fire would be a better use of it (as would letting people keep it!).

This is because Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy is an abject anti-educational failure that should be ripped out of our Pre-K–12 schools and colleges of education as soon and as thoroughly as possible. Indeed, it never should have been adopted in the first place, and the people who saw to it that it was should be held accountable for the unbelievable damage it has caused in the intervening forty years. These ideas were terrible and unfounded when they were written down in the 1960s and when they were accepted in North America in the 1980s, and they haven’t improved one iota in the intervening decades. Their adoption and inclusion in North American colleges of education first, and primary and secondary schools second, should be considered one of the greatest academic scandals in the history of the world. Indeed, the “Critical” theft of education should be considered nothing short of a crime against humanity.

(Incidentally, or perhaps ironically, the quasi-Marxist school reformers in the “social reform” movement that preceded Critical Pedagogy—Dewey, Counts, Vygotsky—may be responsible for much of the apparent need to overhaul a failing educational methodology.) The scope of the scandal and what it stole from our societies is so incredible as to be difficult to communicate.

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. Thus, by the time Paulo Freire’s 1985 book The Politics of Education burst onto the North American scene following a favorable review in the Harvard Educational Review in that same year, the Critical Pedagogy runway was laid, and the plane carrying this failure of an educational model could land in the North American education scene.

This Girouxian praxis was, in turn, facilitated by the relentless work of countless Critical Marxists—including many former members of the radical terrorist ...

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 t...

“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)

This infiltration of the educational sphere—at all levels—Marcuse says should run along in parallel to establishing a Leftist media, and these objectives therefore depend heavily upon turning education. He’s quite explicit about this plan.

Freire devotes an entire chapter in The Politics of Education to “the process of political literacy,” which he places as the center of the purpose of education. As such, much of Freire’s work can be understood as a profound current within this neo-Marxist course of thought and activism: a project to take over everything from within by getting inside of it, “doing the job,” and bringing consciousness into the new role.

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.

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 and enables the total theft of education from its primary beneficiaries and stakeholders: society, parents, and our kids.

In the faith bearing that hope, Freire calls repeatedly, dozens upon dozens of times, for an outright and perpetual cultural revolution by which all “dehumanizing structures” will be thrown down in a perpetual cycle of destruction.

(These men met again later in Geneva while Freire was on appointment to the World Council of Churches and Câmara was visiting Switzerland thanks to Klaus Schwab’s risky 1974 invitation to the third annual meeting of the European Management Forum, later renamed the World Economic Forum, in Davos.)

This assumption of colonized and “decolonizing” curriculum makes its way prominently into education today largely because of Freire (significantly through the work of a later Critical Pedagogue, Joe L. Kincheloe).

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 are the innocents before the Fall of Man, which for Marx arrived with the invention of private property and the division of labor and for the radical postcolonialists came in with the establishment of European civilization as “civilization” itself.

Though the different philosophies of Rousseau and Marx (and others) deal with these points somewhat differently, 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”).

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). It

Freire, the man, was first brought to the United States in 1967 by two priests, Monsignor Robert J. Fox and Father Joseph Fitzpatrick (who was later embroiled in a child sex-abuse scandal),

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.

Freire, then, is in a meaningful sense the father of Woke because going Woke means learning to see structural oppression in virtually everything in order to denounce it, like a process of waking up to a hidden, horrible world. Freireans assume the oppression is there and then aim to groom “learners” to see it.

It is at this point that I must remind you that Freire’s intention with this unsettling Easter passage is to insist that this Marxist “Easter” is a necessary precondition for any who want to be religious leaders or educators. He then says it is the educator’s role to bring this cult-religious transformation through rebirth to their student “learners.” This is the unambiguous replacement of education with what the Chinese Communists termed “brainwashing.” Thus, it is at this point that I must also remind you that this is written in the book that changed the course of North American colleges of education and our legally secular public education system to make them into what they are today. It is on the back of this instruction that our education system has been remade (in the “real Easter” of “historical praxis” that “the bourgeois mentality” cannot accept) such that almost all of our kids go to Paulo Freire’s schools.

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.

This basic structure of Marxism repeats itself through every evolution of Marxist Theory. 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 t...

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.

Being

Humanizing

Formal

PREPARING

Of course, that “‘intention’ toward the world” is the intention to transform it into a Marxist “Utopia,”15 as Freire states repeatedly throughout all of his works. So here Freire makes his intentions completely explicit. If you actually educate students, you are engaging in a “dominating task.” On the other hand, if you want to “liberate” and “humanize” them, you have to groom them into an “intention” toward remaking the world by applying Marxist analysis and activism to generate a perpetual cultural revolution—no exaggeration.

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. Despite claims that his approach is a vehicle to subject mastery, it’s simply not the point. Neither is it the point in derivative modes of education that follow from the Freirean method, like Culturally Relevant Teaching and Social-Emotional Learning, whatever lip-service they pay to academic achievement. It’s also obvious why products of these programs would be far more likely to become know-nothing activists who think everything in the world is extremely problematic and in need of radical transformation than educated, productive citizens. Making them into activists is the point. This is what you get when your kids go to Paulo Freire’s schools.

Radical

Conscientization

In truth, “generative themes” are concepts Marxists can use to evoke powerful emotional reactions from their students in order to groom them through a process of thought reform into a Marxist consciousness. Trigger warning! In a real sense, they are triggering themes because they are “generative” in the sense of generating emotional reactions that facilitators can use to radicalize (that is, conscientize). 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.

In the modern context, this process is conducted through a conduit of emotional manipulation known as “Social-Emotional Learning (SEL),” in which educators as some combination of teacher, unlicensed social worker, unqualified psychologist, and “facilitator” teach their students how to navigate the social realities and emotional responses they have to them after discovering and being carefully fed these generative themes. Those generative themes are discovered in an SEL setting by means of surveying (that is, data mining) students, introducing provocative material and gauging student reactions, and through dialogue on political or sensitive social and emotional subjects under the pretext of understanding the underlying social and emotional context in which the students might encounter impediments to learning, especially with regard to social and emotional subjects (including outright Leftist identity politics).