Another reason why U.S. ed schools are so
awful: the ongoing influence of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire
Like the more famous Teach for America,
the New York Teaching Fellows program provides an alternate route to
state certification for about 1,700 new teachers annually. When I met
with a group of the fellows taking a required class at a school of
education last summer, we began by discussing education reform, but the
conversation soon took a turn, with many recounting one horror story
after another from their rocky first year: chaotic classrooms,
indifferent administrators, veteran teachers who rarely offered a
helping hand. You might expect the required readings for these
struggling rookies to contain good practical tips on classroom
management, say, or sensible advice on teaching reading to
disadvantaged students. Instead, the one book that the fellows had to
read in full was Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Brazilian
educator Paulo Freire.
For anyone familiar with American schools of education, the choice
wasn’t surprising. Since the publication of the English edition in
1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status
in America’s teacher-training programs. In 2003, David Steiner and
Susan Rozen published a study examining the curricula of 16 schools of
education—14 of them among the top-ranked institutions in the country,
according to U.S. News and World Report—and found that Pedagogy
of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned texts in
their philosophy of education courses. These course assignments are
undoubtedly part of the reason that, according to the publisher, almost
1 million copies have sold, a remarkable number for a book in the
education field.
The odd thing is that Freire’s magnum opus isn’t, in the end, about
education—certainly not the education of children. Pedagogy of the
Oppressed mentions none of the issues that troubled education
reformers throughout the twentieth century: testing, standards,
curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects
should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the
most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students. This ed-school
bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the
overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless
societies. Teachers who adopt its pernicious ideas risk harming their
students—and ironically, their most disadvantaged students will suffer
the most.
To get an idea of the book’s priorities,
take a look at its footnotes. Freire isn’t interested in the Western
tradition’s leading education thinkers—not Rousseau, not Piaget, not
John Dewey, not Horace Mann, not Maria Montessori. He cites a rather
different set of figures: Marx, Lenin, Mao, Che Guevara, and Fidel
Castro, as well as the radical intellectuals Frantz Fanon, Régis
Debray, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and Georg
Lukács. And no wonder, since Freire’s main idea is that the central
contradiction of every society is between the “oppressors” and the
“oppressed” and that revolution should resolve their conflict. The
“oppressed” are, moreover, destined to develop a “pedagogy” that leads
them to their own liberation. Here, in a key passage, is how Freire
explains this emancipatory project:
The pedagogy of the oppressed [is] a pedagogy which must
be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples)
in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity. This pedagogy makes
oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and
from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the
struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will
be made and remade.
As the passage makes clear, Freire never intends “pedagogy” to
refer to any method of classroom instruction based on analysis and
research, or to any means of producing higher academic achievement for
students. He has bigger fish to fry. His idiosyncratic theory of
schooling refers only to the growing self-awareness of exploited
workers and peasants who are “unveiling the world of oppression.” Once
they reach enlightenment, mirabile dictu, “this pedagogy ceases
to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the
process of permanent liberation.”
Seldom does Freire ground his description of the clash between
oppressors and oppressed in any particular society or historical
period, so it’s hard for the reader to judge whether what he is saying
makes any sense. We don’t know if the oppressors he condemns are North
American bankers, Latin American land barons, or, for that matter,
run-of-the-mill, authoritarian education bureaucrats. His language is
so metaphysical and vague that he might just as well be describing a
board game with two contesting sides, the oppressors and the oppressed.
When thinking big thoughts about the general struggle between these two
sides, he relies on Marx’s standard formulation that “the class
struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat [and]
this dictatorship only constitutes the transition to the abolition of
all classes and to a classless society.”
In one footnote, however, Freire does mention a society that has
actually realized the “permanent liberation” he seeks: it “appears to
be the fundamental aspect of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.” The millions
of Chinese of all classes who suffered and died under the revolution’s
brutal oppression might have disagreed. Freire also offers professorial
advice to revolutionary leaders, who “must perceive the revolution,
because of its creative and liberating nature, as an act of love.”
Freire’s exemplar of this revolutionary love in action is none other
than that poster child of 1960s armed rebellion, Che Guevara, who
recognized that “the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of
love.” Freire neglects to mention that Che was one of the most brutal
enforcers of the Cuban Revolution, responsible for the execution of
hundreds of political opponents.
After all this, murkiness may be the least of the book’s problems,
but it is nevertheless worth quoting the book’s opening rumination:
While the problem of humanization has always, from an
axiological point of view, been humankind’s central problem, it now
takes on the character of an inescapable concern. Concern for
humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not
only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality. And as
an individual perceives the extent of dehumanization, he or she may ask
if humanization is a viable possibility. Within history, in concrete,
objective contexts, both humanization and dehumanization are
possibilities for a person as an uncompleted being conscious of their
incompletion.
Roughly translated: “humanization” is good and “dehumanization” is
bad. Oh, for the days when revolutionary tracts got right to the point,
as in: “A specter is haunting Europe.”
How did this derivative, unscholarly book
about oppression, class struggle, the depredations of capitalism, and
the need for revolution ever get confused with a treatise on education
that might help solve the problems of twenty-first-century American
inner-city schools? The answer to that question begins in Pernambuco, a
poverty-stricken province in northeastern Brazil. In the 1950s and
sixties, Freire was a university professor and radical activist in the
province’s capital city, Recife, where he organized adult-literacy
campaigns for disenfranchised peasants. Giving them crash courses in
literacy and civics was the most efficient means of mobilizing them to
elect radical candidates, Freire realized. His “pedagogy,” then, began
as a get-out-the-vote campaign to gain political power.
In 1964, a military coup struck Brazil. Freire spent some time in
jail and was then exiled to Chile, where—inspired by his work with the
Brazilian peasants—he worked on Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Hence the book’s insistence that schooling is never a neutral process
and that it always has a dynamic political purpose. And hence, too, one
of the few truly pedagogical points in the book: its opposition to
taxing students with any actual academic content, which Freire derides
as “official knowledge” that serves to rationalize inequality within
capitalist society. One of Freire’s most widely quoted metaphors
dismisses teacher-directed instruction as a misguided “banking
concept,” in which “the scope of action allowed to the students extends
only as far as receiving, filing and storing the deposits.” Freire
proposes instead that teachers partner with their coequals, the
students, in a “dialogic” and “problem-solving” process until the roles
of teacher and student merge into “teacher-students” and
“student-teachers.”
After the 1970 publication of the book’s English edition, Freire
received an invitation to be a guest lecturer at the Harvard Graduate
School of Education, and over the next decade he found enthusiastic
audiences in American universities. Pedagogy of the Oppressed
resonated with progressive educators, already committed to a
“child-centered” rather than a “teacher-directed” approach to classroom
instruction. Freire’s rejection of teaching content knowledge seemed to
buttress what was already the ed schools’ most popular theory of
learning, which argued that students should work collaboratively in
constructing their own knowledge and that the teacher should be a
“guide on the side,” not a “sage on the stage.”
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire had listed ten key
characteristics of the “banking” method of education that purported to
show how it opposed disadvantaged students’ interests. For instance,
“the teacher talks and the students listen—meekly”; “the teacher
chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply”; “the teacher
disciplines and the students are disciplined”; and “the teacher chooses
the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to
it.” Freire’s strictures reinforced another cherished myth of American
progressive ed—that traditional teacher-directed lessons left students
passive and disengaged, leading to higher drop-out rates for minorities
and the poor. That description was more than a caricature; it was a
complete fabrication. Over the last two decades, E. D. Hirsch’s Core
Knowledge schools have proved over and over again not only that
content-rich teaching raises the academic achievement of poor children
on standardized tests but that those students remain curious,
intellectually stimulated, and engaged—though the education schools
continue to ignore these documented successes.
Of course, the popularity of Pedagogy of the Oppressed
wasn’t due to its educational theory alone. During the seventies,
veterans of the student-protest and antiwar movements put down their
placards and began their “long march through the institutions,” earning
Ph.D.s and joining humanities departments. Once in the academy, the
leftists couldn’t resist incorporating their radical politics (whether
Marxist, feminist, or racialist) into their teaching. Celebrating
Freire as a major thinker gave them a powerful way to do so. His
declaration in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that there was “no
such thing as a neutral education” became a mantra for leftist
professors, who could use it to justify proselytizing for
America-hating causes in the college classroom.
Here and there, some leftist professors recognized the dangers to
academic discourse in this obliteration of the ideal of neutrality. In Radical
Teacher, the noted literary critic Gerald Graff—a former president
of the ultra–politically correct Modern Language Association—took on
his fellow profs, arguing that “however much Freire insists on
‘problem-posing’ rather than ‘banking’ education, the goal of teaching
for Freire is to move the student toward what Freire calls ‘a critical
perception of the world,’ and there seems little question that for
Freire only Marxism or some version of Leftist radicalism counts as a
genuine ‘critical perception.’ ” Elsewhere, Graff went even further in
rejecting the Freirian model of teaching:
What right do we have to be the self-appointed political
conscience of our students? Given the inequality in power and
experience between students and teachers (even teachers from
disempowered groups) students are often justifiably afraid to challenge
our political views even if we beg them to do so. . . . Making it the
main object of teaching to open “students’ minds to left, feminist,
anti-racist, and queer ideas” and “stimulate” them (nice euphemism
that) “to work for egalitarian change” has been the fatal mistake of
the liberatory pedagogy movement from Freire in the 1960s to today.
But Graff’s cautionary advice fell on deaf ears in the academy.
And not only did indoctrination in the name of liberation infest
American colleges, where students could at least choose the courses
they wanted to take; through a cadre of radical ed-school professors,
the Freirian agenda came to K–12 classrooms as well, in the form of an
expanding movement for “teaching for social justice.”
As a case in point, consider the career
of Robert Peterson. Peterson started out in the 1980s as a young
elementary school teacher in inner-city Milwaukee. He has described how
he plumbed Pedagogy of the Oppressed, looking for some way to
apply the great radical educator’s lessons to his own fourth- and
fifth-grade bilingual classrooms. Peterson came to realize that he had
to break away from the “banking method” of education, in which “the
teacher and the curricular texts have the ‘right answers’ and which the
students are expected to regurgitate periodically.” Instead, he applied
the Freirian approach, which “relies on the experience of the student.
. . . It means challenging the students to reflect on the social nature
of knowledge and the curriculum.” Peterson would have you believe that
his fourth- and fifth-graders became critical theorists, interrogating
the “nature of knowledge” like junior scholars of the Frankfurt School.
What actually happened was that Peterson used the Freirian
rationale to become his students’ “self-appointed political
conscience.” After one unit on U.S. intervention in Latin America,
Peterson decided to take the children to a rally protesting U.S. aid to
the Contras opposing the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The children
stayed after school to make placards:
let them run their land!
help central america don’t kill them
give the nicaraguans their freedom
Peterson was particularly proud of a fourth-grader who described
the rally in the class magazine. “On a rainy Tuesday in April some of
the students from our class went to protest against the contras,” the
student wrote. “The people in Central America are poor and bombed on
their heads. When we went protesting it was raining and it seemed like
the contras were bombing us.”
These days, Peterson is the editor of Rethinking Schools,
the nation’s leading publication for social-justice educators. He is
also the editor of a book called Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching
Social Justice by the Numbers, which provides math lessons for
indoctrinating young children in the evils of racist, imperialist
America. Partly thanks to Peterson’s efforts, the social-justice
movement in math, as in other academic subjects, has fully arrived (see
“The Ed Schools’
Latest—and Worst—Humbug,” Summer 2006). It has a foothold in just
about every major ed school in the country and enjoys the support of
some of the biggest names in math education, including several recent
presidents of the 25,000-member American Education Research
Association, the umbrella organization of the education professoriate.
Its dozens of pseudo-scholarly books, journals, and conferences extol
the supposed benefits to disadvantaged kids of the kind of teaching
that Peterson once inflicted on his Milwaukee fourth-graders.
To counter the criticism that the movement’s objective is
political indoctrination, social-justice educators have developed a
scholarly apparatus designed to portray social-justice teaching as just
another reasonable education approach backed by “research.” Thus a
recent issue of Columbia University’s Teachers College Record
(which bills itself as “the voice of research in education”) carried a
lead article by University of Illinois math education professor Eric
Guttstein reporting the results of “a two-year qualitative,
practitioner-research study of teaching and learning for social
justice.” The “practitioner research” consisted entirely of Guttstein’s
observing his own Freirian math instruction in a Chicago public school
for two years and then concluding that it was a great success. Part of
the evidence was a statement by one of his students: “I thought math
was just a subject they implanted on us just because they felt like it,
but now I realize that you could use math to defend your rights and
realize the injustices around you.” Guttstein concludes that “youth in
K–12 classrooms are more than just students—they are, in fact, actors
in the struggle for social justice.”
![Illustration by Arnold Roth.]()
There’s no evidence that Freirian
pedagogy has had much success anywhere in the Third World. Nor have
Freire’s favorite revolutionary regimes, like China and Cuba, reformed
their own “banking” approaches to education, in which the brightest
students are controlled, disciplined, and stuffed with content
knowledge for the sake of national goals—and the production of more
industrial managers, engineers, and scientists. How perverse is it,
then, that only in America’s inner cities have Freirian educators been
empowered to “liberate” poor children from an entirely imagined
“oppression” and recruit them for a revolution that will never come?
Freire’s ideas are harmful not just to students but to the
teachers entrusted with their education. A broad consensus is emerging
among education reformers that the best chance of lifting the academic
achievement of children in the nation’s inner-city schools is to raise
dramatically the effectiveness of the teachers assigned to those
schools. Improving teacher quality as a means of narrowing racial
achievement gaps is a major focus of President Obama’s education
agenda. But if the quality of teachers is now the name of the game, it
defies rationality that Pedagogy of the Oppressed still
occupies an exalted place in training courses for those teachers, who
will surely learn nothing about becoming better instructors from its
discredited Marxist platitudes.
In the age of Obama, finally, it seems all the more unacceptable
to encourage inner-city teachers to take the Freirian political agenda
seriously. If there is any political message that those teachers ought
to be bringing to their students, it’s one best articulated by our
greatest African-American writer, Ralph Ellison, who affirmed that he
sought in his writing “to see America with an awareness of its rich
diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom. . . .
confronting the inequalities and brutalities of our society
forthrightly, yet thrusting forth its images of hope, human fraternity,
and individual self-realization.”
Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal, a
senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Breaking
Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.
