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

by James Lindsay

In a particularly egregious example of this form of abuse, consider the following passage from an education paper describing using Drag Queen Story Hour as a generative pedagogical practice. It is undeniable that DQSH participates in many of these tropes of empathy, from the marketing language the programme uses to its selection of books. Much of this is strategically done in order to justify its educational value. However, we suggest that drag supports scholars’ critiques of empathy, rather than reifying the concept: drag performers do not necessarily seek identification with an “other,” but rather to experience ways of embodying and expressing different aspects of themselves. Rather than walking in someone else’s shoes—and trying to understand what it might mean to be a different gender, for example—drag offers a model for participants to try on many costumes and cosmetics to understand how these elements reinforce or alter their own sense of self. In the classroom, this queer dress-up might create more opportunities for young people to experiment with the feeling of how and why seemingly arbitrary changes of clothing and behaviour impact the ways they experience and are interpreted by the world. That is, drag is an imaginative and creative process. It is grounded in building character, both in the sense of constructing a persona and in better understanding one’s own relations to others. This approach can support students in finding the unique or queer aspects of themsel...