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

by James Lindsay

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.