The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 72
Critical Education Theory Series, Part 8
This episode of the New Discourses Podcast continues into a second part a long miniseries exploring Paulo Freire’s landmark 1985 book The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation, and it is embedded in the broader Critical Education Theory series here. In the previous part, James Lindsay presented the ideas of the first two chapters, revealing both how religious Freire is and how Marxist. Part 1, covering the first two chapters of the book can be found here.
In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James tackles the next two chapters of this book, chapters three and four, wherein it becomes abundantly clear that “Culturally Relevant Teaching” is an Identity Marxist repackaging of Freirean education. His discussion highlights how messianic Freire is and pointing out that, in some sense, Freire’s Critical Pedagogy stands in analogous relationship to the Gospel of John for the Marxist Theology. Freire’s idea is that literacy means political literacy as understood in the Marxist way: formal education is bourgeois and Critical Education is a revolutionary praxis that can transform the oppressive state of the world. Freire’s point, though, is positively religious, in the Johnnine sense in that his goal is to teach the word so the conscious can learn to speak the world. Join James Lindsay to unpack even more of what it means that all of our children now go to Paulo Freire’s Marxist Sunday Schools.
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6 comments
Other than autocrats and people who love classism, why anyone would find the “The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation” threatening is beyond me.
Really?
Always great insights , James , the world owes you a debt of gratitude .
They keep saying they dont teach CRT in grade school .
Would somebody please scream back , we arnt dummies we know they arnt passing out books of crenshaw , delgado etc to kindergarden. We are saying these are the origins to the identity politics based methedology they are trying to impliment in our grade schools , corporate trainings , military , universities with people in congress defending it .and backed by MSM and big tech.
You’re right, this is religious education and they aren’t teachers they’re chaplains. Thank you for your yeoman’s work on making this clear and accessible.
Here is Herbert Marcuse on feminism (he notes the Cathars as proto-feminists):
https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/archive/rgroups/2006-chicago/marcuse_marxismfeminism.pdf
Thanks for the link. The document is fascinating as a historical-cultural artifact. Yet, the content is fraught with absurd claims and opinions outside of his area of qualified expertise.