YOUR
COMMENTSSeptember 19th was Paulo Freire’s birthday.
Freire and I worked together for fifteen years, which I consider
one of the most enlightening periods of my life. We co-edited
a book series and along with Donaldo Macedo got many of Freire’s
books translated and published in the English-speaking world.
He wrote the preface for my second book, Theory and Resistance
in Education, and we collaborated together until he died. There
have been and will be many celebrations. Too many of them will
treat him as iconic rather than as the revolutionary he actually
was. In doing so, they will speak of Freire with a kind of depoliticizing
reverence that we often associate with the empty praise reserved
for dead celebrities. Ivy League schools will put out statements
celebrating his work offering themselves as paragons of radical
change, which of course is the opposite of what they believe
in. This diversion is understandable at a time of manufactured
ignorance, the worship of celebrity culture, and an age in which
historical memory becomes dangerous and dissent a curse. Freire
was a revolutionary whose passion for justice and resistance
was matched by his hatred of neoliberal capitalism and loathing
for authoritarians of all political stripes. Put simply, he
was not merely a public intellectual but also a freedom fighter.
The current attacks on him in Brazil by the neo-fascist Bolsonaro
make clear how dangerous his work is even today.
One of Freire’s
most important contributions was his politicization of culture.
He viewed culture a terrain of struggle that both reflected
and deployed power. He rejected the vulgar Marxist notion
that culture was simply a reflection of economic forces. Not
only did he connect culture with social relations that ranged
from producing and legitimating class warfare, ecological
destruction, and various forms of privilege, but he also understood
that culture was always related to power and was an enormously
influential force. This was especially true in the age of
social media with its power to define diverse modes of inclusion,
legitimate consent, produce specific forms of agency, and
reproduce unequal relations of power both within and outside
of nation states. He strongly emphasized the role of language
and values in struggles over identities and resources and
how they worked through different organizations and public
spheres such as schools, the media, corporate apparatuses,
and other social spheres. His work on literacy focused on
how neoliberal cultural practices put certain forms of commercialized
agency in place, defined and circumvented public space, depoliticized
people through the language of commands, while commodifying
and privatizing everything. Culture and literacy for Freire
offered people the space to develop new modes of agency, mass
resistance, and emotional attachments that embraced empowering
forms of solidarity. For Freire, the terrains of culture,
literacy, and education were the terrains on which individuals
acquire consciousness of their position, and the willingness
to fight for dignity, social justice, and freedom. For Freire,
culture was a battlefield, a site of struggle, and he recognized
in the manner of Gramsci that every relationship of domination
was “pedagogic and occurs amongst the different forces
of which it is composed.”
Freire first and
foremost believed that education was linked to social change
and that matters of consciousness and identity were integral
to making pedagogy central to politics itself. For Freire,
education and schooling were part of a larger struggle against
capitalism, neoliberalism, authoritarianism, fascism, and
the depoliticization and instrumentalization of education.
Direct action, political education, and cultural politics
defined for him both new strategies of resistance and new
understandings of the relationship between power and culture
and how it shaped matters of identity, values, and one’s
understanding of the future. Pedagogy and literacy were political
because they were connected to the struggle over agency, ongoing
relations of power, and the preconditions for connecting knowledge
and values to the development of active and engaged critical
citizens. Freire’s great contribution was to recognize
that domination was not only economic and structural but also
pedagogical, ideological, cultural, and intellectual and that
matters of persuasion and belief were crucial weapons for
creating engaged agents and critical subjects. He also refuted
the easy escape route for cynics who equated and collapsed
domination and power. Resistance was always a possibility
and any politics that denied the latter erred on the side
of complicity with the most heinous crimes, however unrecognized.
Freire was a transformative public intellectual and freedom
fighter who believed that educators had an enormous responsibility
to address important social and political problems, to tell
the truth, and to take risks, however inconvenient the consequences.
Civic courage was essential to politics, and he embodied the
best of that conviction.
In making education
central to politics, Freire connected ideas to power, and
critical consciousness and literacy to intervening in the
world in the fight for economic, social, and racial justice.
He never separated the massive suffering and constraints imposed
by inequality from the sphere of politics and in doing so
connected the conditions, however specific, for resistance
to addressing the constraints that bore down on people’s
lives. Freire believed that everyone had the capacity to be
an intellectual, to think critically, to make the familiar
strange, and to fight individually and collectively against
disimagination machines and the zones of ethical, political,
and social abandonment that transformed democracies into updated
versions of the fascist state.
His work was not
about methods, but about fostering individual and social change
in a way that gives voice to the voiceless and power to those
considered disposable. Freire was a freedom fighter, who believed
deeply in a future in which radical democracy was possible.
He was a fearless utopian for whom hope was not simply an
idea but a way of thinking otherwise in order to act otherwise.
Freire’s educational and political work was rooted in
an ethical ideal and sense of responsibility that is under
attack today, which testifies to its importance and the need
to defend it; there is also the need to prevent it from being
appropriated by ruling elites; in addition, there is a need
to extend it to new economic, cultural, and social circumstances
for which it is desperately needed in the fight against the
fascist politics emerging across the globe. Freire believed
that no society is ever just enough and that the struggle
against injustice is the precondition for radicalizing values,
fighting institutional oppression, and embracing a global
politics of shared democratic values. Civic literacy for him
was a weapon for awakening consciousness, emboldening civic
action, and closing down the lure of a fascist politics. Freire
was dangerous and rightly so at a time when history is being
cleansed, those considered disposable are both expanding and
losing their lives, and the need for an anti-capitalist consciousness
and mass social movement more crucial then ever. Freire’s
spirit and politics are not to be celebrated but emulated.
