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

by James Lindsay

Occasionally, especially with regard to sexuality and gender—or drag queens—books introduced to children in schools today are obviously inappropriate to any reasonable observer. These are clear provocations meant to evoke certain lines of programming. Take, for example, the book Gender Queer, which is to be found in countless school libraries in the United States. It depicts adult themes and pornographic cartoons while communicating the idea of young people navigating a confused and fluid sexuality in parallel to navigating the tumults of puberty. This book’s generative potential in the domain of Queer Theory is as obvious as bringing “generative” drag queen into the classroom or library to read provocative stories to children.

In many cases, especially under the auspices of Social-Emotional Learning, these sorts of generative themes are not just used politically but to evoke emotional discussions about the themes. This is consistent with Robert Jay Lifton’s italicized remark that the penetration of the brainwashing materials into the emotional lives of the prisoners is the outstanding fact of thought reform. Students will be asked how it must have felt to be Ruby Bridges, or a person (who looks) like Ruby Bridges, or a person (who looks) like the racists who owned or sold slaves or someone who discriminated against racial or sexual minorities. 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.

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...

The generative themes approach is little more than a way that Freirean Marxist “Critical Pedagogues” have been able to steal education right out from under us. Like the bag of sand Indiana Jones uses to attempt to swipe the gold idol at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark it is the enabling tool of the theft of education. It also enables the vast majority of their false justifications for including inappropriate curriculum, like Drag Queen Story Hour, and the pretext for much within the torrent of lies deployed claiming subjects like Critical Race Theory aren’t being taught in schools. Generative themes enable education to look like education on the surface while being replaced by a program of Marxist conscientization just underneath, thus subjecting our kids to thought reform while the “clever” pedagogues behind the heist laugh at parents who don’t know how they’re being cheated and abused. While we argue with them about the flashes of glinting light on the surface of the rippling lake, they’re programming our kids in the murky depths. Understanding generative themes allows us to get beneath the lies on the surface and expose the theft of education from our children and societies.

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. This is to be accomplished through presenting “culturally relevant” materials (i.e., “generative” materials) instead. Those materials are “decolonized” materials. Mathematics therefore has to be replaced with “ethnomathematics” (and even the wildly nonsensical “mathematx”) for the same “decolonization” purpose.

In other words, “decolonizing” the curriculum, an apparently mysterious educational fad that’s done incredible damage in just a few years’ time, means replacing existing curriculum, especially when it reinforces the (Western) culture at hand, with potentially generative materials that challenge the existing culture and its terms. Not only is it an attempt at cultural destruction (what the Cultural Marxists called “aufheben der Kultur,” abolish the culture), it is also a means to introduce the maximum amount of Freirean generative material possible for the purpose of repurposing the curriculum for engaging in cultural thought reform.

Stage Two: The Selection of Words from The Discovered Vocabulary From the discussions of the learners, the Generative Words written by the team of facilitators were: resources, money, abundance, crude oil, stealing, pocket, begging, plenty, poverty, suffering, frustration, crying, hunger, crisis, dying, death. These words were later depicted in pictorial form showing the concrete realities and situations in the lives of the people. The pictorial display provoked an emotional state of pity and anger among the discussants, some of them could not talk, while most of them were moved to tears asking the question: Why! Why! Why! Why! Notice the themes are largely relevant to the Nigerians’ lives in the sense that they expose suffering, misery, or a perception of injustice. When those concepts are then codified and fed back into the “generative” educational milieu, they do not induce education but calamity. Those emotional reactions are very useful for inducing people to cult adherence and to take urgent action, but they prove predictably terrible for fostering interest in education.

Freire’s purpose with the generative concepts approach is to hijack academic lessons and turn them into opportunities to have discussions about politically relevant topics on his own Marxist terms. That is, the lesson itself, be that reading, writing, history, mathematics, science, religion, or otherwise, merely becomes a pretext and a vehicle for introducing ideas that will then be discussed in order to facilitate the “conscientization” process and thus the Marxification (psychological damage or destruction, followed by brainwashing) of the student. A real education is a political (Marxist) education, remember, and the purpose of such an education is to conscientize the “learner.” This is only possible if class time is largely, if not wholly, devoted to talking about politically relevant topics, and this is most easily achieved by hijacking existing curricula to enable it.

CODIFICATION

Overview

Codification itself, then, enables the educator to connect what’s happening in reality around the learners to the “theoretical context,” which is its Marxist interpretation. It then allows the educator to present this poisoned fruit to the learners “as a knowable object” that mediates the conscientization process. Academic content in a Freirean school is a prop, and that prop has a very specific purpose. It is to reinterpret triggering aspects of “lived reality” through some Marxist lens and then to thought-reform “learners” into accepting it as the right interpretation of their “lived experience” and thus the more profound nature of reality itself. Of course, anyone familiar with Transformative Social-Emotional Learning just realized what that entire program is; it’s this.

The “generative” potential of drag queens, in specific, is therefore visible. They are “fun,” both drag queens themselves and public officials (including Attorney General Dana Nissel of Michigan) tell us. As Freire has it, they’re “neither overly explicit nor overly enigmatic.” The gender and sexual provocations are obvious but at the same time tucked within a blatant clown. A stripper would be too explicit (while reifying gender instead of calling it into question); a passing and professional gay, lesbian, or trans individual would be overly enigmatic. Drag queens are simple in their complexity and offer various decoding possibilities. That enables the facilitators using them to have plausible deniability about their real purposes—here, about LGBTQ “representation” and “empathy”; in CRT, “we’re just teaching honest history,” for example. They do not, however, avoid the brainwashing tendencies of propaganda; they are that.

Decodification

The

DQSH performers demonstrate a refusal to be told what to do. In their demonstration of strategic defiance, drag storytellers engage in a more finely tuned kind of resistance that many children practice all the time. This embodied pedagogy teaches that, in unjust situations, people can use strategic tactics to push back against harmful actions. Drag may be especially well-positioned as a form of cultural production that, to paraphrase the writer and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara, serves to “make revolution irresistible.” If I might be blunt, I cordially invite any decent person to try to convince me the people engaging in providing this “learning experience” don’t belong in prison for what they’re willfully and intentionally doing with children.

Our kids currently go to Paulo Freire’s schools. These schools are unambiguously Marxist (unless we split hairs and call them neo-Marxist or Woke Marxist) in their architecture, pedagogy, methods, and goals. They have abandoned the idea of educating American children to grow toward becoming successful and prosperous adults in American society because they want to undermine, destroy, and replace American society. Rather than teaching literacy, numeracy, or other educational basics, Freirean schools use subject matter like reading, writing, mathematics, history, social studies, and science lessons to teach Marxist consciousness of one or more forms at a time. As a result of more than a decade of this practice, American schoolchildren are almost universally failing in basic competency in virtually every subject at virtually every grade level. They are more “politically literate,” in the Freirean sense, than ever before, though. There’s no other way to put this than that their education has been stolen from them and what replaces it is meant to be weaponized against the society upon which their futures depend.

The Freirean approach to education is based off the work of the Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire, who is most famous for his 1970 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This book is the third most-cited source in all of the social sciences and humanities and enjoys pride of place and curricular centrality in virtually every college of education in North America. The Freirean method, called “Critical Pedagogy” because it makes a Critical Theory (Neo-Marxist Theory) out of education itself, lies beneath, behind, or relevant to virtually every pedagogical trend in education over the last 20 to 30 years, including Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), Culturally Relevant Teaching, Comprehensive Sexuality Education, and project-based learning schemes. Culturally Relevant Teaching is unambiguously and unapologetically a direct repackaging of the Freirean approach into the context of “cultural competence” and American identity politics. Freire’s pedagogy is a disaster for education and our children and has no place in our schools.