The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 75
Critical Education Theory Series, Part 11
This episode of the New Discourses Podcast continues into a fourth 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 fifth chapter, wherein the seeds of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) are laid as Freire describes how education and social work are closely related. The previous parts of this series, covering the earlier chapters of the book can be found here, here, and here.
In this episode, James dives into the first half of the sixth chapter, which goes deeply into Freire’s model for education. In fact, what we see in this episode makes sense of the ones before it while setting the stage for all the ones that follow. Paulo Freire Marxified education itself. That is, Freire redefined literacy, education, and even knowledge according to the usual bourgeois/proletarian dichotomy and thus was able to redefine literacy to mean gaining critical consciousness. Join James to hear about the Marxification of education itself, bearing in mind yet again that almost all of our kids now go to Paulo Freire’s schools.
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7 comments
I doubt most teachers who have been influenced to some extent by Critical Pedagogy even fully understand what it is. I would hazard they see these ideas as giving teaching a higher purpose than the miserable, over-managed, over-worked and low-status job that teaching in high schools has become. Consequently, it’s no surprise that many teachers are drawn to these ideas in consolation.
James , thanks again for enlightening us . Its not easy for me , but , im getting it . My instincts were always on point about it , but , you are truly pulling the covers off , and , reading their words doing it .
A warning from 1989:
https://fee.org/articles/the-new-york-times-reported-the-mainstreaming-of-marxism-in-us-colleges-30-years-ago-today-we-see-the-results/
Herbert Marcuse’s own widow may have been the original Robin DiAngelo!
https://nonsite.org/the-first-privilege-walk/
…sort of similar to Mao’s psycho wife Jiang Qing!
Some have called Paulo Freire the Rousseau of the 20th Century.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Paulo_Freire_Rousseau_of_the_Twentieth_C.html?id=HBAcRBkTuaEC&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y
Isaiah Berlin made an excellent lecture on the problems with the Romanticists and their proto-Woke idea that we must surrender our liberties to entities that claim to liberate us from subconscious forces .
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EC_eC32RAyc
Romanticism is the ultimate ancestor of Wokeism.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VnXcQLj-acs
In 1919, JL Talmon identified Romanticism as a critical antecedent to the rise of Totalitarian Democracy where an elite claim the right to rule on behalf of the romanticized “masses” by demonizing and destroying all opposition. Talmon dissects the Jacobins and the French Revolution as the first incarnation of all subsequent Marxist, socialist, and liberal totalitarian fake “democracies” where people “vote” for “parties” that are comprised solely of the elite class. Jacobin ideas formed the blueprint for modern Dictatorships of the Elites (Schwab, Soros, Gates, etc.) who impose their authoritarian version of Utopia for lesser humans.
Elites use soft totalitarian tools of population control (Huxley’s velvet revolution) such as Soma (population self-enslaved by pleasure) and manipulation of innate mob desire for Identarian-based historical or class-envy revenge (BLM, Antifa, Trans). An ideologically trained nomenklatura of high status lackeys (WEF’s Young Global Leaders) run the elite’s “democracies” where middle class “citizens” (white college educated women, urban beta males, high status POCs) vote for magical thinking mumbo jumbos that tell them they are moral and free.
JL Talmon ‘The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy’ 1919