The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 65
Critical Education Theory Series, Part 4
Perhaps no Marxist has had more influence on the Western world than the Brazilian crackpot educator Paulo Freire, who is most famous for his book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is the third most-cited work in the social sciences and humanities in the history of the world and a mainstay in all education programs today. Understanding Freire and his influence is therefore paramount to understanding how our education system has been poisoned by Marxist Theory over the last forty years. To put it simply, Freire must be understood as a significant prophet in the Marxist religion, and his faith has been integrated thoroughly into all North American education, to the detriment of all. Join James Lindsay in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, where he continues through the darker, deeper aspect of Freirean Critical Pedagogy, as he reads through the second half of Henry Giroux’s foreword to Freire’s 1985 The Politics of Education, which is an explicitly religious book. This is the fourth episode in Lindsay’s sprawling Critical Education Theory (Critical Pedagogy) series on the New Discourses Podcast.
Critical Education Theory Series:
Part 1: Education’s New Marxist Commitments
Part 2: How Education Turned Critical
Part 3: Paulo Freire’s Politics of Education and a New Hope
Part 5: Critical Education: What Is Culturally Relevant Pedagogy?
Part 6: Critical Education: Transformative Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)
Subscribe to the New Discourses Podcast on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, or by RSS.
Previous episodes of the New Discourses Podcast are available here.
7 comments
I have no lenghty comment to add other than WOW.
I gradutate High School in ’79 and I am so glad that we got an actual education at that time. I have also said for a long time that if I had children now I would not let them step foot inside a public school.
What these schools today are doing is absolutely criminal.
If we don’t find a way to eliminate the takeover of our children’s educations by flat out marxists, then we will pay an incomprehensible price.
Cultural production: Of course Freire is blowing lots of hot air here simply to support the conclusions he wishes to arrive at.
Culture in fact gets thought up and taught by many different people for many different reasons. One important context I have seen is childrens’ desire to play with each other.
But another important context is hidden from most of us because it is forgotten. This is the learned experiences from past lives.
“These people are fuckin’ nut jobs!” One reason these people have risen out of the slime running down our gutters is that we don’t realize what is really going on with them or with us. As our awareness of where our “revered” traditions actually came from becomes clearer, more and more of us become confused as our old stable datums fall and new ones, usually incorrect and not useful, are offered. The challenge is not simply to defend the saner aspects of what has already been built, but to add new aspects of culture that are correct and useful and thus will reduce confusion even as some of the old certainties fall.
Currently, this is certainly not being done by the new Left, but neither is it being done by the old Right. We must seek to re-educate ourselves before we are seized by our outraged children and sent to their “re-education” camps! It is time to stop being failed parents and begin to get it right. Most of the younger ones among us are simply too confused to take control and make good choices.
How interesting that your intro message says “…our education system has been poisoned by Marxist Theory over the last forty years.”
I have said for a very long time that I felt like I graduated from public school in the last generation that actually received an education. We had to take 2 foreign languages (Spanish was not offered). I remember English lessons where we had 4 new vocabulary words every day. We had Diction classes. In math classes you could not use calculators because they had not been invented yet. We had Geography and Social Studies and World History and American History and Grammar. There were Required Readings with Book Reports (one of them was 1984 which left me depressed for weeks).
I graduated High School in 1979. 1979 + 40 = 2019
Looks like I just squeaked through, thank God.
I have also said for years that if I had children, I would not let them step foot in a public school.
Paulo Freire!
Memory lane for me of the drugged out whacked out marxian urban poseur inanity of my 1980s and 90s younger days. Radio Farbundo Marti! Ole!
I did a Master’s thesis in Social Work in the 1980s on Freire’s Ped of the Opps. I applied his conscientization concept by using the technology of closed captioning for the deaf (a field I once accidentally and briefly worked in when my partner at the time said if I did not get a job within one month and help pay the rent he would throw my belongings out our 38th floor apartment window). My Paulo F. hommage thesis documented an adult literacy project I did at the non-profit where I worked (while MSWing on the side). My thesis project deconstructed television commercials with adult literacy students (male ex-cons) who were supposed to write their own words as captions to replace the words of the commercials to empower themselves by subverting the consumerist Moloch’s corrupt tv ads! Or something like this. (My feminist Marxist-Leninist thesis advisor professor adored it!) The illiterate ex-cons hated my project and wanted me to bring in porn for them to use to learn to read.
It was all very zany but it financed my other lives as an artist, a gay activist writer, and a part-time psychotherapist as well as providing steady cash for my decades long drug habit. The daze of Whine and Poses!
More Freiren nostalgia.
At a community literacy ESL program run by a Central American Shining Path Maoist refugee in Torontula (canada’s largest city of marxian woo-woo champagne socialist government grant poseurs living in million dollar homes), an old woman worked there who had actually been a disciple of Freire’s in the Brazilian jungle. She was treated like a communist saint and some anarchist lesbians even bowed in her presence. Liberation Theology informed Freire’s version of communism, indeed Lib Theo is one of the grandparents of today’s woke communist Christianity. This is a topic that I also have LSD flashback-esque memories of.
As a recent article on this site stated, Marxism is definitely a religion — and one that wears the Christianity it killed as a skin suit for the tax free “charity” money and all that free urban real estate they rent for huge tax-free bucks to govt funded non-profits. Like another non-profit I worked at (mentally ill welfare clients — I was E.D.) that was housed in an old downtown mainstream Christian church. The “minister” would constantly tell me and my rad lesbian colleagues not to worry about working in a church (he assumed being gay we all feared being struck by bolts of lightening) because all of the downtown Toronto Christian churches were now 100% Communist and Atheist (or were being converted into aboriginal sweat-lodges or mosques). He seemed very proud each time he repeated this story. Which was every week as he was also a major drunk.
Freire also worked in Africa (Guinea Bissau) so is the patron saint of the pre-BLM Franz Fanon decolonizing whiteness fanclub gang as well. Everyone I ever met during my 30 year non-profit “social work” career was a government-funded bourgeois-boho urban nutcase far-left hypocrite smug-ass exploiter of normal people’s gullibility and tax money. But the whole endeavour paid for my other non-working lives and habits and avocations. Now retired, hearing the name Freire is like being in a car crash and seeing a small, preposterous but lucrative part of my life flash before my eyes. Nightmarish actually.
ps Freire insider joke: I personally always loved phonics books with sentences like “Eva ate the grape.” But then I have anti-communism in my DNA.
Ditto
Halfway through , thanks James for reading all this stuff and breaking it down. I raised my son in Brazil , and had to talk with him of the truth and , as a mixed Brazilian American , he had great courage to stand up to teachers at a young age and call their bs . American kids cant speak up in America because the race card makes them afraid or guilty , Brazil has been plagued by Marxism since the mid thirties. Yet the lie of the cold war sais the USA supportrd a dictatorship that tortured and killed (under a thousand marxist revolutionaries died ) and you never hear the other side that these marxists were training in Marxist countries for armed revolution , including future impeached president Dilma . Brazil , one of the greatest countries in the world is set to reelect convicted ex pres , workers party Lula, who was at the center of the largest corruption rip off in Brszil history , the lies , manipulation , and corruption has brought Brazil to its knees , barely limping through Covid . The far left has done much to keep Brazil in chaos . Thanks for the ilumination on Freire who i had no idea rrpresented these horrid ideas Giroux can go to hell also
Thank you. I love hearing from others outside the US who have dealt with the leprosy of communism.
I have now met three men who have escaped communism, in Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and Venezuela.
All 3 have told me almost the exact same words: “never, ever give up your guns.”