Freirean

Woke Usage

Source: Giroux, Henry. Introduction to The Politics of Education, by Paulo Freire.

Within the discourse of theologies of liberation, Freire fashions a powerful theoretical antidote to the cynicism and despair of many left radical critics. The utopian character of his analysis is concrete in its nature and appeal, and takes as its starting point collective actors in their various historical settings and the particularity of their problems and forms of oppression. It is utopian only in the sense that it refuses to surrender to the risks and dangers that face all challenges to dominant power structures. It is prophetic in that it views the kingdom of God as something to be created on earth but only through a faith in both other human beings and the necessity of permanent struggle. The notion of faith that emerges in Freire’s work is informed by the memory of the oppressed, the suffering that must not be allowed to continue, and the need to never forget that the prophetic vision is an ongoing process, a vital aspect of the very nature of human life. In short, by combining the discourses of critique and possibility Freire joins history and theology in order to provide the theoretical basis for a radical pedagogy that combines hope, critical reflection, and collective struggle.

It is at this juncture that the work of Paulo Freire becomes crucial to the development of a radical pedagogy. For in Freire, we find the dialectician of contradictions and emancipation. In Freire’s work a discourse is developing that bridges the relationship between agency and structure, a discourse that situates human action in constraints forged in historical and contemporary practices, while also pointing to the spaces, contradictions, and forms of resistance that raise the possibility for social struggle.

New Discourses Commentary

“Freirean” refers to the work, ideas, and impact of the Marxist Brazilian Paulo Freire, who claimed to have devised an innovative model of education that, in practice, retools education into a form of (neo)-Marxist thought reform (a.k.a., brainwashing). The Freirean theory of education could also be called one of two things, which were the titles of two of his most important books: Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) or Pedagogy of Hope (1992). It is more accurate to call Freirean pedagogy a “pedagogy of the oppressed” than a “pedagogy of hope” because the hope referred to is specifically “critical hope,” which is hope that Marxism will work this time through sufficient consciousness and critique. As such, “Freirean” refers to the Marxist educational ideas that formed the backbone for Critical Pedagogy as it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, largely following the work of Paulo Freire’s greatest evangelist, Henry Giroux. Of note, Freirean ideas have had tremendous currency in educational circles, with Freire being the third most cited academic author of all time and his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed occupying pride of place in every college of education in North America.

Before continuing to describe the Freirean pedagogy and other among Freire’s ideas, it is important to note that Paulo Freire wasn’t merely a Marxist or an education theorist but was also a dedicated religionist. Freire was deeply steeped in Liberation Theology, which is Marxism posing as Catholicism. It is in this context—religious—that Freire’s is a “pedagogy of hope,” which would be more accurately described as a pedagogy of faith that relentless critique through perpetually deepening critical consciousness can deliver the liberated Marxist Utopia (cf. Hebrews 11:1 on the relationship between hope and faith).

Breaking down Freire’s ideas, or what is meant by “Freirean,” has to take place on two levels, broad and specific. Freire’s method is very specific and must be briefly detailed as such, but at the same time it is only properly comprehensible as an application of the broad strokes of his religious Marxism.

It is fitting, then, to begin with a discussion of Paulo Freire’s most famous and most influential book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which was published originally in English in 1970, though the manuscript was drafted in Portuguese and finished in 1968. Details of the pedagogy aside, a pedagogy of the oppressed should, in concept, use the fact of oppression to perform an educational function. For Freire, at the time blending his Marxism-inspired postcolonialist background with his intense mid-1960s study of Marxism proper, the education the fact of oppression has to offer is a structural education, i.e., a view into understanding the injustice of the world in terms of Marxist analysis of social and economic structures as determinant features of life in society. The point of the pedagogy of the oppressed is to learn to see the world from the standpoint of the oppressed and to understand that the standpoint of the oppressed is only duly informed and politically literate when it speaks from a position of Marxist structural analysis and neo-Marxist Critical Theory.

Freire actually goes quite a bit further with his notion of the pedagogy of the oppressed, which he refers to as gaining political literacy so that the illiterate can “learn to speak the word to proclaim the world” as conscious political subjects. He says that one must die and be reborn on the side of the oppressed, literally comparing it to a personal Easter of death and resurrection that must replace the Christian Easter celebration. He is completely explicit about this profoundly religious instruction in the tenth chapter of his 1985 book The Politics of Education. To quote him at full length on this point is necessary to fully believe it:

In committing themselves to the oppressed, they begin a new period of apprenticeship. This is not, however, to say that their commitment to the oppressed is thereby finally sealed. It will be severely tested during the course of this new apprenticeship when confronted, in a more serious and profound way than ever before, with the hazardous nature of existence. To pass such a test is not easy.

This new apprenticeship will violently break down the elitist concept of existence they had absorbed while being ideologized. The sine qua non the apprenticeship demands is that, first of all, they really experience their own Easter, that they die as elitists so as to be resurrected on the side of the oppressed, that they be born again with the beings who were not allowed to be. Such a process implies a renunciation of myths that are dear to them: the myth of their superiority, of their purity of soul, of their virtues, their wisdom, the myth that they save the poor, the myth of the neutrality of the church, of theology, education, science, technology, the myth of their own impartiality. From these grow the other myths: of the inferiority of other people, of their spiritual and physical impurity, and of the absolute ignorance of the oppressed.

This Easter, which results in the changing of consciousness, must be existentially experienced. The real Easter is not commemorative rhetoric. It is praxis; it is historical involvement. The old Easter of rhetoric is dead—with no hope of resurrection. It is only in the authenticity of historical praxis that Easter becomes the death that makes life possible. But the bourgeois world view, basically necrophiliac (death-loving) and therefore static, is unable to accept this supremely biophiliac (life-loving) experience of Easter. The bourgeois mentality—which is far more than just a convenient abstraction—kills the profound historical dynamism of Easter and turns it into no more than a date on the calendar.

The lust to possess, a sign of the necrophiliac world view, rejects the deeper meaning of resurrection. Why should I be interested in rebirth if I hold in my hands, as objects to be possessed, the torn body and soul of the oppressed? I can only experience rebirth at the side of the oppressed by being born again, with them, in the process of liberation. I cannot turn such a rebirth into a means of owning the world, since it is essentially a means of transforming the world.

Of course, when Freire here refers to this personal death and resurrection into the standpoint of the oppressed being a means of “transforming the world,” he is referring to the specific Marxist project, which is to transform the world into a “humanized” form. (The ninth chapter of this same book is about “humanistic education,” and focuses on precisely this idea in greater depth and unambiguously in the way Karl Marx meant it—he even distinguishes between humanistic and humanitarian approaches, with the latter being a mere means to reproduce systems of oppression and “domesticate” people into the kind of silent fatalism Marx condemned in religion as “the opiate of the people.”) That’s also what “historical involvement” in “praxis” refers to.

So, in broad strokes, the Freirean view, especially toward education, is that the fact of oppression in the world provides an opportunity to lead people to be “born again” in a way that lets them see the world differently: from a position not merely of being oppressed but also more importantly as capable of understanding oppression in the way Marxists do, i.e., as a structural phenomenon. Everything in his educational program, thus in the Critical Pedagogy that follows from it, hinges on this bedrock Freirean belief.

Rather than being despondent about the circumstances of oppression, Freire is hopeful and energized. This is because he sees it as an opportunity to raise critical consciousness under a (false) banner of education, and he is genuinely hopeful that by raising critical consciousness for the purposes of perpetual cultural revolution, eventually all “dehumanizing forms” can be denounced and cast down (dialectically and through praxis, i.e., by Marxism). This view is the basis for his autobiographical 1992 book, Pedagogy of Hope, where “critical hope” is meant to be the educational method and opportunity. In these things, Freire is unabashedly utopian in his disposition.

Freire’s utopianism is not the kind of utopianism that envisions a perfected world and works to make it. The Critical Marxism (or, Critical Theory; or, neo-Marxism) era through the middle of the twentieth century had rightly completely abandoned that hope and ambition. For Freire, to have a vision of the world you want to see is to eventually seize power and impose it upon people, which he identifies as being intrinsically “right-wing” and not liberating or genuinely utopian. Though he doesn’t say so explicitly, he seems to be laying this charge upon Lenin and Stalin and the failure of the USSR, and perhaps also on Fidel Castro in Cuba. In place of Lenin and Stalin, he points to the direction of the ongoing Cultural Revolution in China (under Mao Zedong and after), and as more effective than Castro, he points to the murderous guerrilla Che Guevara, whom he holds up as an ideal avatar of utopianism, hope, and love and thus also as a fitting model for educators and their students (though he says Guevara’s specific “witness” might not be appropriate in other contexts than his own).

Like the Critical Marxist Herbert Marcuse, to whom Freire was a contemporary and of whom he was a reader, Freire’s utopianism is negative utopianism, a somewhat unfamiliar point of view. In negative utopianism, the goal isn’t to articulate or envision some idealized society and work to make it; instead, it is to believe the ideal society is already “contained within” the existing society but needs to be liberated from the dehumanizing forms that prevent its emergence. Negative utopianism, therefore, is utopian in the sense that it believes the perfect world (or Kingdom of God on Earth) is already present but has to be freed up (or, recollected) from the repressive, oppressive, unjust world of structural power dynamics. It can only be freed up by ruthless criticism of all that exists, and this is precisely what Freire advocates. His process is little more than arriving at critical consciousness (conscientization) and then engaging in a process of denouncing all “dehumanizing” structures. If this denunciation (critique) is done from a conscientized position (i.e., as a Critical Marxist), the denunciation will automatically announce the possibility and direction of a more humanizing world. Freire’s (and Marcuse’s) utopianism is of this kind. (NB: This is to say that Freire’s and Marcuse’s utopianism is Hermetic in its underlying beliefs and structure—the Divine can be realized only by freeing it from the Mundane, in which it is trapped as a consequence of the Hermetic act of Creation. The process of freeing the Divine from the Mundane in the Hermetic mystery religion is called alchemy.)

Thus, for Freire, the key aspect of his program is conscientization (conscientização), which is the awakening of critical consciousness. Following the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács, who identified that above all (class) consciousness is educable, Freire devised a method of political education posing as real education that performs the necessary conscientization using whatever academic curriculum as “a mediator to knowledge [that is, conscientization].” For his part, Lukács, who most famously wrote History and Class Consciousness (1923), tried to bridge the gap between Marx’s insistence that the proletariat would rise up (which it did not do at the relevant time in the late 1910s and early 1920s) if it was sufficiently class conscious. Lukács, as a result, determined that there are different stages of consciousness preceding full class consciousness (and eventual true Communist consciousness) and was trying to sort out how to educate people into class consciousness. For his work in this endeavor, he was appointed Deputy Commissar of Education in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 under Béla Kun.

Though he wasn’t so specific about the stages and didn’t finely discretize them, Lukács’s model of establishing consciousness recognized that people first needed to be made aware of their class status, then they had to be taught what that class status means (oppression). The nature of oppression as structural within a greater whole then had to be communicated, and following that the essential dialectical view of the oppressed as a historical subject had to be raised. Only after these understandings had been taught could someone understand that the underclass can only effect true historical change through class solidarity (this power being reserved for the overclass otherwise), which is the final realization of class consciousness. He then finishes his discourse on the issue in History and Class Consciousness (specifically, the third chapter) by pointing out that class consciousness will ultimately reproduce class society unless the proletariat wins the final battle which is against itself. True Marxist consciousness will never arise, believed Lukács, unless the proletariat also destroyed itself and with it class society altogether. This concurred with Marx’s view that true Communism arrives only with the total transcendence of private property, thus human self-estrangement, and thus the dissolution of class society altogether.

In the years between 1923 and 1968, when Freire finished his first manuscript of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Lukács’s program had not generally succeeded in creating movements on behalf of Workers or others among the oppressed, and his focus on class consciousness specifically was seen by Critical Marxists like Freire as too limited. (Recall: Freire started his activism and educational model as a postcolonialist, not a classical Marxist.) Freire, like other Critical Marxists like Marcuse, saw class consciousness as incapable of producing the cultural revolution they sought (and lusted after, seeing the success of Mao Zedong in China). Societies tend to reproduce themselves, especially through education—a point the Critical Marxists, especially in education theory, referred to as the problem of reproduction. Freire was setting out to extend Lukács’s graduated, educable program of conscientization into and beyond the Critical Marxist limit.

Thus, the Freirean model picks up from class consciousness and extends it to critical consciousness, if it doesn’t bypass class consciousness altogether. Critical consciousness is the belief that the very terms upon which society is defined and communicated are set up to reproduce its existing forms and thus that a better or ideal society cannot even be expressed in the limited terms of the existing society. Stepping outside the existing paradigm, which Critical Marxists view as totalizing, is not possible, however, except in that it creates windows for discovering and critiquing “those aspects of the existing society that we do not like” (quoting Max Horkheimer).

Freire then extends the need for developing critical consciousness—that the very terms of the existing society and any dehumanizing form or structure that can be identified within it must be critiqued (in a neo-Marxist way)—and extends it into future societies as well. The problem of reproduction is subtle, and the issue Lukács identified, that class consciousness itself will tend to produce a new class society, is significant and perhaps insurmountable, at least in any single revolution. Freire therefore prescribes that as critical consciousness engenders a revolution, the need for critical consciousness increases. Cultural revolution isn’t a singular event for Freire but a perpetual state if one is to truly denounce dehumanizing forms of all sorts without letting them get established into a new mode of oppression. (This view he likely derived, given his writings, from seeing Latin American countries be liberated from oppressive rulers by outside forces or internal guerrillas only to install new and worse regimes in the vacuum.) This need for perpetually increasing criticality in one’s consciousness, I refer to as Freirean utopian consciousness, which Herbert Marcuse was just one step short of defining for himself.

The pedagogy of hope at the center of Freire’s project, then, is allowing faith that this intrinsically negative process will dialectically achieve a true Communist (and Socially Just) society if pursued with sufficient interest and commitment to denouncing every “dehumanizing” context. As a pedagogy, the pedagogy of hope would say to let that utopian hope be a teacher and a guide to relentless critique and perpetual struggle for ultimate liberation (a religious eschatological view in the religion of Marxism). Possessing something akin to this utopian consciousness is, in one sense, the meaning of being “Woke.” Turning education into a process to awaken “Woke” utopian consciousness is the heart of the Freirean project, and it follows from what I term a Freirean Marxification of Education.

Freire’s views of education follow almost entirely from the starting point of a fatalistic Critical Marxist view of the problem of reproduction and then chart a path out of that fatalism in this “pedagogy of hope” in utopian consciousness. The problem of reproduction, rightly viewed, however, erects a Marxian Theory of being educated, being literate, being a knower, and thus of knowledge itself, apart from the postmodernist project of deconstructing the legitimacy of claims to knowledge. It is this view that Freire adopted, which I refer to as his “Marxification of education,” and that led to his notion of utopian conscientization as a potential (alchemical faith–based) solution to that problem.

In short, it is possible to view being educated, being literate, and possessing knowledge as being in possession of a special kind of (private) property on terms that are set by the property holders. Marxists would view any such possession of special property and the terms of possession as being inherently rigged to the advantage of the existing property holders so as to exclude others from that overclass status while exploiting them, perhaps by having them do manual labor to produce food and infrastructure that they can enjoy as bourgeois white-collar types. Because the educated get to decide what counts as being educated, the literate get to decide what constitutes literacy, and the knowledgeable get to decide what counts as knowledge, there’s an inherent and unjust stratification of society along these lines that places people in conflict for status and resources in society. Those in the overclass not only set the terms but also promulgate a mythology—an ideology—explaining why the world of knowing or being learned is the way it is, which naturally justifies their own advantage both to them and to members in the underclass, who become fatalistic and accepting of the unjust world order.

Freire’s view is, in some sense, that culture and politics are actually downstream from education and who gets to be considered a “knower” in any given society. Utilizing a number of awkward puns on “literacy” and “reading,” he argues that even when the illiterate are taught to read, they are kept politically illiterate. In fact, by being educated in the existing system, they are taught to value the existing system, get a job in it, and thus prop it up while betraying those among their former peers who weren’t able to do so, worsening the underlying problem of oppression. A true education, he posits, then, is not about learning to read “disconnected syllables” and meaningless sentences but in learning to read the “concrete reality” of the unjust contexts of people’s lives. That is, true literacy is political literacy, and actual literacy is a kind of false literacy that actually ideologizes people and steals their revolutionary potential.

Following from this, Freire indicates that literacy lessons are best used as mediators to conscientization, which is the result of gaining true political literacy. That means under the pretext of teaching peasants and slum-dwellers to read, he is actually radicalizing them into a Marxist consciousness. His pedagogy of the oppressed is, in fact, this conscientization process. In practice today, the heavy reliance on Freirean pedagogy is why American schoolchildren are failing abysmally at academic competencies but are increasingly Leftist and radical. Their school lessons have been replaced with political literacy lessons that use the academic content as a mere mediator to radicalization. In other words, their education has been stolen from them by Marxists who want to use them to get their revolutions.

Now that we understand something of the Freirean mindset and project, we can examine his specific pedagogical method. As it turns out, it appears very complicated on the surface but is, in fact, extremely simple. It contains five key points: the dialogical model (versus the “banking model”) of education, the use of generative themes, a process of codification in lesson planning, a process of decodification and conscientization, and finally an invitation into praxis through “annunciation and denunciation,” as indicated above.

The first piece of his model is the so-called “dialogical model” of education, for which Freire is regrettably probably most famous (it is the least important of the pieces of his pedagogy). Freire, drawing off Socrates while saying he did it all wrong (in The Politics of Education), insists that for education to be true education and for it to be dialectical (read: Marxist), it must be based upon dialogue, not lecture and instruction. Moreover, to avoid reproducing the power dynamics of a class society, it must also feature dialogue between educators and learners as equals. Freire prefers they not be called teachers and students for this reason, but he’s rarely strict about it. Teachers are people “who know,” while students are people “who do not know,” which establishes the problem of reproduction. Educators and learners are equals in Freire’s “democratic” classrooms, though the educators have the role of “facilitators,” which isn’t to be mistaken for “programmers” or “groomers.”

Freire contrasts this democratic, dialogical approach to learning, where educators and learners learn (and conscientize) together against a strawman of education he calls the “banking model” of education. Education, or schooling, as we usually think of it, claims Freire, operates like a bank. The students are like deposit boxes, and the teachers have knowledge they “deposit” into the students. The students can then take that knowledge-capital and “capitalize” upon it (or not), which enables them to be successful in the existing society, which they’ll maintain, defend, and reproduce as a result.

In the dialogical method, educators and learners are supposed to learn, which is to say conscientize, which actually means radicalize, together. As it turns out, the dialogical approach therefore reproduces almost identically the educational approach applied under Mao Zedong in the early days of the CCP in China, specifically reproducing the “struggle” unit model. In those settings, both brainwashing (xinao) prisons and schools, a peer-learning model was used in which “learners” at varying levels worked together to encourage each other and “help” one another study more deeply into “the people’s standpoint,” which is in obvious parallel to the standpoint of the oppressed. The goal was mutual facilitation into greater conscientization of the “people’s standpoint,” which was the Marxist consciousness encouraged by Mao and the CCP. Surely it is only a coincidence that Freire and his chief evangelist, Henry Giroux, refer to the goal of conscientization as entering into “perpetual struggle” alongside the oppressed.

The dialogical model is used throughout all of the Freirean pedagogy, which proceeds in three definite steps: gathering generative themes, presenting and decodifying the codified themes, and then, allegedly, actual education. In experiments on implementing the Freirean approach, the third of these steps is rarely, if ever, reached. Students are so radicalized by the first two steps that they become “emotional wrecks” who not only don’t want to learn to read but also see no point in reading at all, often turning on the “facilitators” as part of the deep, existential problem in their lives. That is, in summary, the Freirean model works for conscientizing, which is radicalizing, but it does so at the expense of achieving its selling point, enhanced actual education through high engagement and interest. It’s good to remember that Freire considers the academic content a mere mediator to the radicalization before concluding that this outcome represents a failure of the Freirean method as opposed to it doing what it is actually designed to do (whatever intentions or claims about intentions are given alongside it).

To begin with this process, the dialogical model is used primarily for a 1960s- and 1970s-tech mode of information gathering (or data mining) the students about the “concrete realities” of the contexts of their lives. This enables the “generative themes” approach that Freire advocates absolutely. A generative theme is a theme in the learners’ lives to be discovered by a Freirean educator through dialogue (or, in the twenty-first century, direct device-enabled data mining). The goal is to find seventeen (for whatever reason) themes that have emotional, social, and political relevance to the structural injustices experienced by the learners in their everyday lives. These themes will be fed back to the “learners” by the “educators as facilitators” to increase their interest in learning.

The key in the Freirean approach is that the generative themes meet two primary criteria. They must match the actual contexts of the lives of the learners, and they must be emotionally engaging on politically relevant topics. Of course, “engaging” here is a euphemism. The themes are carefully selected entry points for radicalization. They are points of soreness or inflammation by which “learners” can be radicalized by their “facilitators” into a Marxist view of those very inflaming conditions that were drawn out of them through the dialogical approach in the first place. Proceeding with academic teaching from generative themes therefore constitutes the first big step in the Freirean theft of education.

Once the dialogical themes are extracted, the lesson plans around them are organized by the “educator as facilitator.” These lesson plans involve what Freire called “codifications” of the generative themes. A codification of a generative theme is an abstract depiction of that theme, usually pictorial in form if teaching literacy as the students cannot yet read. The goal of the codification is to present some radicalizing generative theme in a sufficiently abstract way that the learners will gain “critical distance” from what is being presented. For what it is worth, Drag Queen Story Hour presents itself academically as a “generative” approach to introduce “living queerly” to young children. The 1619 Project introduces generative themes to Critical Race Theory. Comprehensive Sexuality Education presents generative themes of sex, gender, and sexuality. “Decolonized” curricula exist to replace existing culturally anchoring curriculum elements with generative curricula for any of the above forms of Identity Marxism (note: recall Freire began his work as a postcolonialist, and the decolonization of the curriculum approach is based in his work thanks to a critical pedagogue named Joe L. Kincheloe, who also identified and described “critical constructivist epistemology,” which is the formal academic term that means “Woke”). “Culturally Relevant Teaching” is, in fact, the Freirean generative themes approach repackaged into “multicultural education,” “ethnic studies,” and/or Critical Race Theory.

After the codifications of the generative themes are prepared, a multistep process of “decodification” (decoding the political content) of those themes takes place. Actually, in fact, here’s where the second step in the Freirean theft of education really takes place, because there isn’t one decodification process happening; there are two at once. In practice, only one takes, and it is the path to conscientization and radicalization. One of these is linguistic; the other is political.

Freire describes the two processes of decodification in tandem, but it is helpful to separate them. The linguistic decodification proceeds as follows. The codified theme is portrayed by one means or another, pictorial in a strict Freirean approach. The image is then discussed (dialogical model), including its political relevance. This is the point at which the political decodification actually takes place, but we will bracket it for the moment to walk through the Freirean lie that steals education from our students. Once the learners understand the image of the codification, the generative word that gave rise to that theme and codification is shown with the image. Say it’s a slum, or racism. An image of that situation is shown and discussed, and then the word is added to the image. The reading lesson that linguistically decodifies the image and initiates the reading process is supposed to be enhanced by the political decodification that preceded it by increasing interest and engagement. Learners are supposed to focus on learning to read the word that they associate with the image, however, and then use what they learn by learning to read that word to begin to decodify the language by learning other words that are linguistically related to it (phonetically, syllabically, etc.).

The political decodification proceeds as a matter of dialogue around the codified image before presenting the word for the image and throughout the linguistic process (if it even occurs—political discussions tend to overwhelm the interest and consume learning time). It proceeds in three discrete stages: reading (an obvious cheap pun), problematizing (in case you wondered how that word became universal), and identifying or re-identification. This three-step process is supposed to facilitate conscientization about the political conditions in the image, and thus political literacy is to be achieved.

The reading phase of Freirean political decodification is a process of learning to read the “structural power” elements in and behind the codified image. That is, it’s learning to read the political content that generates the political relevance of the generative theme and that makes it emotionally important to the learners. This step is the introduction of the Marxist analysis of the “concrete conditions” learners find themselves in and the beginning of radicalization. Problematization follows, which is where those structural elements are made “problematic” in the sense of indicating a structurally relevant problem for the people they oppress. If the codification is of a slum or racism, the reading phase would have the learners read why slum life or racism is bad and might explore the feelings of people in those situations; the problematization phase would talk about how the slum or racism is structurally created and maintained by certain other people seeking to maintain their privilege and advantage in an exploitative, alienating relationship across a line of social, economic, or political stratification. The goal of the reading and problematization phases is to lead the learner through the first few stages of conscientization, up to understanding the holistic and structural nature of social conditions and inducing awareness of the individual as a historical subject within those conditions.

The identification or re-identification phase of the political decodification process is the true “decodification” of the codified generative theme. It’s the part where the educator as facilitator points out to the learner that the people in the codified image are the learner, or people who share class identification with the learner. That is, this phase of decodification is the part where the educator leads the learner to see himself on the side of the oppressed, in effect saying “the person in that horrible image we just discussed in terms of its rampant injustice is you and people like you.” In experiment, this often leads to emotional breakdowns of the learners and total radicalization. The linguistic decodification never proceeds when the political decodification succeeds. As a model of conscientization, the Freirean facilitator (posing as educator) will lead the radicalizing “learners” into one or both of class or critical consciousness (which may be social class consciousness, like racial consciousness). As this process proceeds through sixteen (for whatever reason) more codifications, the conscientization will be deepened, and the learner can be facilitated into full utopian consciousness and thus become an inconsolable and completely ignorant cultural revolutionary of the Freirean (that is, Woke) type.

As an aside, Freire has merely reproduced the original form of the Hegelian dialectic with this process. Hegel framed his dialectic as “abstract, negative, concrete,” in which the idea we have about something is its abstracted form, it meets its negative either through a countervailing idea or by finding contradiction in the real world, and that leads to a synthetic understanding of the original idea that is more “concrete” thanks to its encounter with contradiction, especially when practical contradiction. Codification is abstracting the generative theme. The first two steps in political decodification are presenting it with its negative. Re-identification makes it concrete.

Thus conscientized, the learner is induced into praxis, which means activism from a programmed “consciousness.” It can include conscientizing others as well as and through a process of critiquing every new “generative” theme they can find in their contexts. Because Freire frames his theory, ultimately, as a Marxist Theory of excluded knowing, literally everything can be attacked by this withering method of mindless critique merely by latching it on to any “dehumanizing structure,” such as finding the hidden racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or whatever in it and denouncing it as such because literally everything has a body of knowledge associated with it and thus knowers who are regarded as knowing that knowledge (and outsiders who are excluded from that status). This is the “denunciation” aspect of the Freirean method, and it has the capacity to tear apart any institution, nation, activity, or society if sufficiently many people are programmed into it.

In that regard, it’s a good thing (speaking very sarcastically) that the Freirean methodology didn’t completely take over our colleges of education just over thirty years ago and become the singularly dominant form of education throughout most of the Western world in the intervening time. That would be really bad for Western Civilization if that had happened. As a related aside, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is put in pride of place in every college of education in North America, and Paulo Freire is himself the third most-cited academic author across all of the humanities and social sciences (having several times more citations, say, than the vastly more famous Albert Einstein).

According to Freire, if the critical (or utopian) consciousness is achieved, denunciations will take a form that automatically announces the possibility of a more Socially Just world. Otherwise, this is not guaranteed and will eventually generate new forms of oppression. By changing the word “oppression” out for the more active term “repression,” we see that Freire has created an actionable program for installing the “liberating tolerance” that Herbert Marcuse offered in answer to what he called “repressive tolerance,” which is tolerance that tolerates “dehumanizing” conditions. We can also therefore very clearly see the world in which we inhabit and the modes in which we educate our children.

As for the Freirean method, virtually every fad in contemporary education theory is either rooted in the Freirean approach or makes use of it—as we saw, including Drag Queen Story Hour. Culturally Relevant Teaching (the other CRT) and decolonizing the curriculum are directly Freirean. Less obviously, so is Transformative Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). As Linda Darling-Hammond explains it in her foreword to the 2015 Handbook of Social and Emotional Learning: Research and Practice, written before Transformative SEL even existed yet,

As the contributors to this book show, there is a large body of scientific evidence demonstrating the positive outcomes of SEL and suggesting how these outcomes can be achieved. This scientific foundation challenges us to undertake a decidedly humanistic endeavor. In particular, this endeavor includes the humanization of school institutions that, as Max Weber described, were deliberately depersonalized in the early 20th century in order to function as more perfect bureaucracies—guided by rules and regulations that could avoid the need for individual considerations or feelings.

As Paulo Freire explained, humanization is “the process of becoming more fully human as social, historical, thinking, communicating, transformative, creative persons who participate in and with the world.” Educators, he argued, must “listen to their students and build on their knowledge and experiences in order to engage in … personalized educational approaches that further the goals of humanization and transformation” (Freire, cited in Salazar, 2013, p. 126). Indeed, this is what we see in schools that successfully undertake the journey of becoming socially and emotionally educative.

Because of the ubiquity of Critical Pedagogy and the Freirean approach, modified and adjusted as it may be, it can be said that virtually all of our kids go to Paulo Freire’s schools, with all that entails. The current trend into increasing applications of SEL, especially Transformative SEL, indicates that the Freirean method will increase dramatically in all facets of education in the coming years.

As an important additional point about the Freirean method, it isn’t merely limited to education. In particular, the tenth and eleventh chapters of The Politics of Education are extremely clear that every bit of the Freirean method applies in churches, seen as (values-imparting) educational outlets, just as much as it does in education. The tenth chapter of that book, in fact, is dedicated to outlining what Freire describes as “the prophetic church,” which is essentially a church that has been retooled around a theology of the oppressed, or Liberation Theology, regardless of if it is Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise. Precisely the same methods and mentality described above that conquered (secular) education can and will conquer faith education and thus pastorship itself—indeed, they already are.

To make a final point about the Freirean approach that’s relevant in many ways at once, including education, the church, and Social-Emotional Learning in particular, while Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum does not directly praise Paulo Freire (to my knowledge), the World Economic Forum itself has published essays on their website (now removed!) that claimed that the best way to teach is the Freirean method. Furthermore, a mentor of Freire, the so-called “Red Bishop” of Recife, Brazil, Dom Hélder Câmara, is recognized by Schwab as his “spiritual leader.” Schwab had Câmara speak at the fourth annual meeting (in 1974) of the European Management Forum, which was later renamed the World Economic Forum, despite it being against the law in Switzerland at the time to allow a Communist to speak. His message was about learning to see the world from the standpoint of the poor, oppressed in their favelas (slums).

Revision date: 9/27/22

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