The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 102
Education has been stolen from our society and from our kids. This should be intolerable. Doing something about it, as we’re learning, requires understanding how this robbery has occurred and how it keeps running. Fortunately, that’s comprehensible and can be summarized in a single short sentence: our kids go to Paulo Freire’s schools. You may not know who Paulo Freire was, but his theory of education (critical pedagogy, as it came to be called) explains a great deal of what has gone wrong in our schools. To make this subject comprehensible and pull back the veil on Marxist praxis in education over the last fifty years, James Lindsay, host of the New Discourses Podcast, has written a new book called The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education, which is available now. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James introduces the book and goes through some selected portions of the text to give you a sense of just how significant this problem is. Join him and grab a copy of the book to learn about how things went so wrong in education!
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9 comments
comment part 4 of 5:
Freire’s own words from ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ were used as “proof” of this systemic oppression of HIV-positive by HIV-negative gay men. The oppression was even given an appropriately histrionic name, “the sero-chasm of viral apartheid”. I am not making this up! Empowering PHA gay men to fight their fellow gay men as their “oppressors” became AIDS work! HIV-negative gay men were called “sex negative” because they feared catching AIDS not simply because they didn’t want to die (oh! the white privilege of not wanting to die!) but because HIV would destroy their oppressor’s power. HIV-positive gay men were called “sex positive” because they already had the virus so they could now continue to have any kind of sex they wanted 24-7 just like before “the plague”. HIV-prositive gay men were proclaimed the authentic incarnation of sexual Gay Liberation while HIV-negative gay men were derided as anti-sex prudish reactionary far-right white conservative oppressors! This was 1997! There was no Woke then.
The oppressor/oppressed PHA model became so deranged that gay men were deliberately getting HIV so not to be part of the white power and privilege of the HIV-negative gay male oppressing class. This phenomenon also had a name: Bug Chasers and Gift Givers. See: “Generationing, Stealthing, and Gift Giving: The Intentional Transmission of HIV by HIV-Positive Men to their HIV-Negative Sex Partners” 2014 study at NIH Govt web site. If you ever donated to a gay AIDS charity back then, this study may make you feel you were duped.
For years, AIDS “treatment” has involved a person-centred non-oppressive therapy called pre-exposure prophylaxis where gay men take HIV drugs BEFORE they get the disease to mitigate symptoms and “viral load” when they do get it. And they expect to get it because being HIV-positive means being an oppressed minority therefore high status and only their oppressors, HIV-negative gay men, would shame and disempower anyone who says they don’t care if they get infected with HIV, an empowering oppressed identity.
When HIV-negative gay men like myself and friends and colleagues publicly supported a burgeoning gay community discourse developed by some American HIV-negative gay writers about this bizarre reconceptualizing of AIDS as Freirean empowerment against HIV-negative gay men as “oppressors”, we were all cancelled, censored, ridiculed and silenced exactly as people are today by the Woke. Where do you think this technique came from. Queer quangos went on an Inquisitional witch-hunt and I was one of its targets in the late 1990s. That was 25 years ago! Long before Woke yet the identical scenario of unpersoning.
comment part 5 of 5:
This oppression paradigm and self-definition of people as oppressed based solely on self-declaration became a social template that morphed beyond the gay men’s world of AIDS into all of these emerging new “Queer communities” and beyond (see New Discourses’ research on Butler, Foucault, etc.) who smelled the intoxicating aroma of the power of being labelled “oppressed” and went hog wild with Social Vengeance Warrior campaigns of terror against their newly invented “oppressors”. Bi-curious trendy females and heterosexual hipster male transvestites were writing Freirian manifestos claiming that white gay men oppressed them with their power and money by owning bathhouses restricted only to gay men: “Share your privilege with the oppressed in our communities, gay men. Stop hoarding the resources for yourself, oppressors.” I continued writing against these developments in the gay press and eventually online (early blogs) until the early 2000s when I was driven out as a heretic and gave up caring.
This entire process of creating invented classes of Freirian-styled oppressed peoples for power and status escalated for decades across all intersectional identities and each has a history similar to the one I’ve just described using the identity group of gay PHAs in the 1990s. Queer oppression olympics reached its pinnacle ten years ago with the madness of Drag Queen Story Hour. Drag Queens used Freirean theory to name and claim their “oppression” and to further proclaim their “right” to “educate” their oppressors’ own children to stop the “fascism” of far-right capitalist white power and privilege by making their oppressors’ children into the Drag Queens’ co-oppressed thus subverting their oppressors’ successors. Drag Queen Story Hour is a Freirean Frankenstein that manufactures oppressed Queers out of non-Queer oppressors’ very children! This is terrifying because it is so successful.
All of this has been like living for 40 years in Soviet Russia in a microcosmic Gulag unnoticed by the oblivious majority living all around me. It all felt unreal as it unfolded over decades because no one in the normal world even knew it was happening other than as funny occasional headlines about some “crazy PC stuff”. This crazy PC stuff has now become our lives.
Mine is just one small personal story of how a single individual’s professional authentic interest in the intellectual works of Freire in the 1980s led to being there for decades and bearing witness as it metamorphosed into Gulag-level Cultural Revolutionary Woke Authoritarianism in the 2020s. There is a such a need for more of these personal witness stories from others who were there as it unfolded. Perhaps if normal people can fully understand how we ended up in this mess, they might be able find ways to stop it once and for all. I may no longer care, but I still hope.
After listening to this podcast, I went back to Freire whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed has languished on my shelves for a long time. When I initially looked at it, I couldn’t read much because I simply dismissed it as a Marxist screed. I am personally rather sensitive to anything with marxist ideas in it and so I recoiled. However, on looking into again, I am surprised to find that it seems a very big jump from what Freire writes to what I hear is being practiced in US schools; in fact, my impression is that Freire would be horrified. His concern is with people who could genuinely be considered oppressed, which is to say, impoverished Brazilian peasants living under a crushing load with little idea of their personal worth and dignity. Freire’s stated concern is with what he terms ‘humanization’ and also in the Portuguese ‘conscientização’. While one can readily see that the way he writes could be an open door to the woke nonsense, my impression is that it need not go in that direction at all and could lead to wholesome outcomes. Freire quotes Marx, but superficially at least does not espouse Marxism. He uses the language of revolution but without it necessarily being a left wing revolution. (I am a follower of the best revolutionary of them all, the best humanizer of them all, who says “Blessed are the poor.” I don’t immediately see Freire’s outlook as opposed to this.) When, then, modern US education with its, frankly, brainwashing techniques that divide people into identity groups and reduce people to membership of these groups, this actually seems to be the opposite of what Freire was seeking to achieve in Brazil. I may be misreading Freire; at all events, it does seem a huge leap from Freire to wokeism and drag queens in schools. If this link is as strong as JL suggests, I would be interested to know how it has been made – how Freire has been used to justify brainwashing rather than educating. As a closing note, I asked a fairly conservative sort of Brazilian student if she is familiar with Freire. Her response was “Yes of course, he’s a legend in Brazil, a great educator.” I think JL’s take on Freire probably needs some further investigation. (And I wish he wouldn’t swear.)
Wokness is bad and a cancer upon society but it has nothing to do with Marxism it is radical liberalism that is based on identity politics rather than class. There is no Marxifcation of education because woke ideology it is inherently anti-Marxist and pro-imperialist and pro-capitalist. If wokeists are Marxists then why do they oppose the DPRK, Syria, Russia and China? Why do they support the Nazi regime in Ukraine? Why do they take pro-imperialist positions constantly? Because Wokness was created by wall street bankers and neo liberals to defend the America Empire against actual leftists in favour of synthetic ‘leftists’ who care more about men in skirts than actual leftist views. You’re blog is full of the same politically illiterate nonsense about ‘marxism’ without understating the real cause.
This comment is astoundingly incorrect. Read Lindsay
No it is completely correct and everyone here is clearly clueless of political theory. Marxism is about class struggle and anti-imperialism only, everything else is liberal idpol created to protect Wall Street and the capitalist class. Also answer my question why don’t wokeists support the DPRK? IF they were good Marxists then surely they would have solidarity with comrade Kim Jong-un and Korean socialism but they do not. IF they were Marxist they would have stood with President Assad and Syria but instead they called anyone who supported him far right or Nazis. IF they were Maxists they would support Russia who has ensured the survival of many anti-imperialist movements and are fighting Nazism in the Ukraine, yet instead they are standing with the Nazis and the American Empire. So in what world or by what twisted logic would they even by an inch ‘Marxist’? You would have to be retarded to think that any think about wokeness is Marxist.
I think you’re mistaken. Marxism in its classical form of economic theory concerning class struggle has simply been shown not to work, causing economic collapse wherever the theories have been implemented. The main goal of Marxism is revolution, continual bloody revolution and because the class-struggle theme doesn’t work in the ‘West,’ the cause of destructive revolution has had to find new vehicles; in the USA the most useful vehicle to foment trouble has evidently been race, but sexual identity seems to be the other favourite. Thus Marxism has taken on new ‘neo-marxist’ forms as found in wokeism, which well combines politics with all the basest forms of human behaviour. Marxism and now post-modernist neo-marxism has only ever been about power, which is why people who are involved in it with any form of intellectual consistency in the end are without moral principle and so can back any movement (such as the nasties in the Ukraine) they please.
commenter wrote: “I may be misreading Freire… it does seem a huge leap from Freire to wokeism and drag queens in schools. If this link is as strong as JL suggests, I would be interested to know how it has been made – how Freire has been used to justify brainwashing rather than educating.”
Excellent question. The answer is the missing piece of the Woke puzzle. But the answer is extremely complex and really needs a full article or book. But I’ll synthesize an attempt at an answer in a very long comment and try to be as succinct as possible. I’ll also break the answer into five back to back comments.
comment part 1 of 5:
The commenter’s question sums up what most normal people wonder. They read the brilliant and critical research and analysis like James Lindsay’s of the ideological origins and intellectual antecedents of Woke and like the commenter (and me) they often knew of or experienced some aspects of these origins (by reading or college) in their past as benign or positive or simply far-out trends disconnected from subsequent normal day-to-day historical reality over the past 40 years. This disconnect is THE PROBLEM. A huge missing chunk of 40 years worth of personalized history and experiential reality has not yet (because of censoring) been fleshed out for others to read so they can understand how current Wokeness evolved from theories into social tyranny.
The fact that Woke seemingly transmogrified out of thin air is not merely perplexing to those who didn’t witness up close the processes leading to Woke hegemony, but the complete absence of any recorded documentation of these processes ends up diminishing or devaluing contemporary analysis of current Wokeness in many readers’ minds because this intellectual analysis of what is happening today, although correct and clear, does not explain HOW 40 years of real life/real people processes and events slowly operationalized the original ideological origins of Woke into its present state.
People don’t understand what specifically happened over that time period to bring about such a drastic and society-wide transmogrification because they never heard or saw anything related to the topic until it seemingly emerged fully formed five years ago. This missing information causes a reaction of: “There must be MORE to all this than just the theories of Freire and Marx to make such authoritarian insanity happen across an entire society. And if no one can describe the “MORE”, then maybe it’s all just far-right conspiracy theory like the Woke say it is”. This reaction is the intended purpose of the censorship of the MORE.
comment part 2 of 5:
Merely saying it was “the long march through the institutions” is too abstract an answer despite the truth that this is what actually happened. What’s missing are the personal stories of people who lived that Long March presented in the media, in books, novels, movies, documentaries, in the culture at large. What’s missing are the details of the “in between” period that occurred from the time people encountered Freire, Marx or other radicals’ theories in the 1960s/70s/80s and the resultant authoritarian Woke madness of the 2020s. What’s missing are the autobiographical stories of how all of this happened to real people in real situations incrementally over time as a series of complex confluences, asynchronous accretions and slow motion perfect storms that when concatenated globally via social media circa 2010 resulted in the current Woke societal crisis.
What’s missing are all the Tom Wolfe-style “Radical Chic” articles and books by enough people who lived through the transition to Woke and watched it happen and participated in it. These people need to tell their story of the transition to Woke for those who see Woke only in terms of a distant past theory that somehow popped up out of nowhere to became a present day insanity but who are missing the critical linkage information on HOW it actually happened and unfolded step by step over time so they can make proper sense of it all.
People who were “along for the ride” to Woke from Day 1 need to speak up. I am one of those people. I am also someone who knew Freire’s writing well. I did a Master’s thesis on Freire (specifically ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’) in the late 1980s and then worked in Adult Literacy for 20 years. I just found and re-read some of the many adult education train-the-trainer materials I wrote in the 1990s when I worked training people who prepared volunteers to teach “marginalized” people to read in community-based Adult Literacy programs. Most of my books refer to Freire’s ideas in the same way as the commenter experienced them: as a relatively “positive and useful” model of adult education for highly specific populations of “marginalized” adults in very particular contexts. None of it seemed a call to Woke Madness in 1989.
Despite the seeming blamelessness of Freire’s ideas in my own quoting of him over 30 years ago, I did witness and experience personally and professional the way in which Freirean ideas were distorted and maladapted for a variety of reasons by other people working in adult education and NGO/community-based organizations of that time (see New Discourses posts analysing UNESCO for context). But I will use another personal/professional example of how I witnessed the mutation of Freire into Woke by a different sector that I worked in and was involved with 30 years ago and which better answers the commenter’s question: How did Freire’s ideas lead to Drag Queen Story Hour’s child indoctrination?
comment part 3 of 5:
I was also a gay “activist” (writer actually) who also worked at some major AIDS organizations in the 1990s where I encountered Freire’s ideas being deformed beyond belief. AIDS organizations in the 1990s began maladapting Freire’s idea of Oppressor and Oppressed until it became the sole ideological paradigm of all AIDS work at the time and to this day. AIDS was conceptualized not as a disease to be stopped by prevention, behaviour modification, etc., but as a form of oppression. People with HIV/AIDS (PHAs) were literally self-named and self-declared as a “marginalized” and “oppressed” group. I worked with the HIV-positive gay man who wrote the seminal book on “PHA Empowerment” and was shocked to discover that he took Freire’s ideas and literally transposed them onto AIDS and HIV-positive gay men (and a few other secondary groups with AIDS) as if they were the jungle peasants of Brazil being terrorized by American imperialism.
Who exactly was oppressing these “PHAs”? Not the medical establishment or politicians who switched from ignoring to championing gays with AIDS after the media beating they took in the late 1980s from gay AIDS activists. The main “oppressors” of HIV-positive gay men in the 1990s were identified as HIV-negative gay men! The theory claimed HIV-negative gay men talked about HIV-positive gay men as “not normal, diseased, infected, unclean pariahs to be avoided” while thinking of themselves in their “clean” privilege as normal, not diseased, uninfected. This was almost as bad as slavery! Or so the hype went. Thus a completely new and invented oppressor/oppressed template was forced onto all gay men solely based on their HIV status, a totally new identity that did not even exist a few years earlier and could not have existed without the theories of Paulo Freire.
HIV-positive PHAs proclaimed themselves an oppressed underclass similar to blacks oppressed by white racism or women oppressed by patriarchy or Jews by Nazis. This was pre-intersectionality with HIV-positive gay men as top victim class at the time. And the HIV-negative gay men who they had just marched arm in arm with as comrades in the struggle for Gay Liberation during the previous 20 years turned overnight in their minds into their worst oppressors. No longer was homosexuality a unifying category of identity with all members of the group purportedly being equally oppressed by heterosexuals, but the group was artificially split with some being labelled oppressors and others oppressed based solely on an invented category of oppression. All of this derived from the theories of Paulo Freire, though wildly distorted and deformed, and is the first instance I know of where pre-Woke victim hierarchy identity politics were used successfully to gain social control and political power in real life via the oppressor/oppressed paradigm. This paradigm became the model for all subsequent Woke identity politics.