INTRODUCTION:
PEDAGOGY OF THE HEART
Antonia Darder
I am … a being in the world, with the world, and with others; I am a being who makes things, knows and ignores, speaks, fears and takes risks, dreams and loves, becomes angry and is enchanted. I am a being who rejects the condition of being a mere object.
—Paulo Freire
In Pedagogy of the Heart, we encounter a translation of Freire in a very contemplative and reflective state of mind, as he revisits philosophical ideas that for decades were central to his work. I choose to raise the question of translation, first, in that it is an essential political question about how we make meaning seldom acknowledged or considered by readers when reading Freire. Yet, this cultural and epistemological issue is palpable in even the translation of this book’s Portuguese title, Under the Shade of the Mango Tree. Lost is the living manifestation of the mango tree as both organic and cultural metaphor, under which Freire ponders and unveils his reflections on a variety of themes. For those of us whose cultural and epistemological sensibilities are more deeply anchored in the South, something powerful can get lost or erased in translation; a diverse cultural essence, a bodily sensibility, a way of knowing the world, a cadence that echoes the suffering of colonized generations.
Yet, despite the inelegance so often encountered in translated texts, Freire’s formidable intellectual capacity to engage lovingly, yet soberly, with his world remains evident here. In this instance, we find him in a hopeful state of mind, as he contemplates a maturing of democracy in his beloved Brazil, despite the pressures of encroaching neoliberal forces in the country and around the world. No doubt he would experience a deep sadness and frustration should he have lived to see Brazil today, where conservative forces and neoliberalism have aligned against the genuine needs of the people. Under the right-wing leadership of Jair Messias Bolsonaro, the nation’s poverty has intensified, while his gross mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic besieged the nation, which is now only second to the United States in total cases and deaths from COVID-19.1
Internationally renowned as one of the most cited progressive scholars of his time, Freire ought to be remembered as Brazil’s most respected educational philosopher. However, in the current neoliberal climate, Bolsonaro’s authoritarian government has proclaimed Freire an enemy of the people. More disheartening, Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed has been maligned on the streets by the reactionary Chega Freire2 (Enough with Freire) movement, bolstered by right- wing proponents who seek to eliminate his legacy from schools and curriculum, advance a staunchly instrumental and prescribed form of education across the country, and move to outlaw teachers and educators who teach his works.3 In response, Freirean opponents challenge the repression of Brazil’s banking educational approach, which censors open dialogue and critical reflection within education, by way of a pedagogy that disembodies students from their own learning. Yet, we can surmise from Freire’s reflections here that, despite whatever disappointment he would have felt if still alive today, he would be reflecting, writing, and speaking to what is to be done—actively engaging with the global conditions of poverty, participating in the struggle of the landless movement in Brazil, reflecting on the issues raised by the Black Lives Matters movement around the world, and speaking out against the environmental violence of global capitalism.
Freire gave serious attention to the relationship of human beings to history, making this concept central to his philosophy of education and to his critical reading of the world. In this volume, he wisely draws from his historical experiences as an educator, his fifteen years in exile, his tenure as Sao Paulo’s secretary of education, and his participation in democratizing campaigns to expand the breadth of educational opportunities for students. It is, therefore, not surprising that shortly before the end of his life, he critically engages here with the contentiousness of political campaigns in his country, from the standpoint of popular movements and electoral politics. Freire advocates for a language of historic possibility, a concept that remains vastly salient to the larger struggles we face today against the destructive forces of advanced capitalism threatening the well-being of the planet. Freire also points to a critical notion of utopia, which does not relate so much to a concrete place of eventual arrival, but rather to an ethical vision against perversity to guide our politics. Armed with a socialist vision, Freire urges us to do all in our power to organize and mobilize in the name of a democratic citizenship that prepares to critique, challenge, and resist, as we struggle to denounce oppression and announce justice. And all this, he argues, must be enacted politically with a deep spirit of humility, generosity, acceptance, and an ease with the uncertainty that defines our existence as human beings.
In writing about his period of exile, Freire astutely notes, “In one’s fight for justice, one neglects seeking a more rigorous knowledge of human beings” and, as such, we can underestimate the impact of domination upon our lives. He speaks of this through suffering exile—enduring the suffering of exile by embracing the pain of his experience and what it represented in his life. Despite this anguish, he was forced to accept the tragedy of his rupture, the loss of his homeland, existence in a borrowed context, and reconciliation with contradictions between his past life and his present, as he simultaneously longed for his return to Brazil. Freire recalls suffering exile with his conscious body, that is to say with both reason and feeling, where his body was deeply affected by the grief, bitterness, lament, and yearning for return. In the midst of this, he was forced to deal with the tensions of his new conditions, while remaining loyal to his political dreams. He openly confesses that, in the experience of his exile, his virtues and flaws became highlighted, as his ability to love, contend with anger, and find tolerance were frequently tested. Through such heartfelt reflections, we gain a glimpse into the inner personal struggles of this very thoughtful, loving, and soulful man to live coherently both his pedagogy and politics.
Freire also expresses thoughtful concern for his own grappling with the question of human nature, within the realities that shape our historical experiences. This he considers an indispensable political question often overlooked by those who struggle on the left. He reminds us that we are unable to truly know ourselves independent of history or outside our relationship to the world. And as such, if we do not possess a clear understanding of the historical forces and systemic conditions that enhance or thwart our participation as democratic citizens, we are left impotent to transform the oppressive conditions of society. Here again, Freire underscores human nature as never absolute, a priori, or ahistorical, in that our lives are always constructed within history, as are our struggles for liberation. Similarly, he returns to the idea that fighting against all forms of oppression constitutes an ethical imperative, in that our liberatory struggles must fundamentally work against the negation of our humanity.
The Fate of Humanity Hangs in Balance
We are … at a moment of confluence of crises of extraordinary severity, with the fate of the human experiment quite literally at stake.
—Noam Chomsky4
At this precise moment, the question of history hangs heavy on the minds and hearts of many radical educators and activists. Around the world, we have endured ruthless neoliberal assaults on democracy, as the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, Brazil, Turkey, and other nations have taken a sharp turn to the right, betraying liberal ideals that formerly beckoned global social change. Instead, populist conservative discourses prevail unabated across these nations, as is well illustrated by the rancorous presidential rhetoric of Donald Trump in the United States. Neoliberal excesses, beginning with the overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973,5 set forth the political stage for the current historical milieu, by systematically eroding social, educational, and labor gains of the twentieth century—hard-won gains achieved by people’s movements and trade union struggles. Further, the destructive seeds of the neoliberal era were sown when the industrialized west “decided its mission was to conquer and subdue the natural world, when it embraced an ideology that fetishized money and turned people into objects to be exploited.”6
The outcome is, as Chomsky argues, that the fate of humanity now hangs in balance. The crises we are facing today are inextricably tied to neoliberal policies of globalization that have produced staggering poverty and deplorable environmental abuses around the world. In fact, Harvard scientists suggest that many of the root causes of climate change have also increased the risk of global pandemics.7 Capital-led deforestation associated with climate warming, linked to a loss of habitat, is forcing wild animals to migrate and potentially spread pathogens to other animals and humans. High carbon producing livestock farms are also sources for spillover of life-threatening infections. The lethal nature of the coronavirus (or COVID-19), for example, has left to over 35 million cases worldwide, with over a million deaths in less than a year.8 This viral outbreak has been rightly linked to the destabilization of our complex global ecosystem, and gross deficits in public health and environmental sanitation is the result of neoliberal disregard for life.9
The pandemic has, therefore, not only set off a global health crisis, along with distressing impacts on both education and worker conditions, but has also highlighted enormous cleavages in political, economic, and racialized inequalities across societies, which are expected to increase in the post-pandemic world. Black, Latino, Indigenous, and other racialized populations, in particular, are experiencing the distressing impact of the virus, where statistics show significant disparities in death rates among people of color from COVID- 19 compared to white counterparts.10 In education, where over a billion children have been affected worldwide by the move to virtual learning, racialized inequalities in digital access has widened the divide.11 Similarly, subaltern workers typified as low skilled and with few benefits have also shouldered disproportionately the burdens of neoliberal disregard.12
In the current political climate, emancipatory struggles against such uninhibited social Darwinism are belittled, while the accumulation of wealth and power among the few is openly normalized and defended as a sign of business acumen or personal fortitude. In the midst of fifty years of neoliberal economic plunder, all notions of shared social responsibility have been tossed out the window, leaving the majority of the world’s population defenseless in the face of its wide-scale consequences. Nowhere has this dehumanizing spectacle been more apparent than in the confusing and inept handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which led to elderly, impoverished, and racialized populations suffering disproportionately, while politicians pondered theories of herd immunity and argued about personal protection equipment to safeguard against the spread of the virus. There is no question the proponents of global capitalism have sought to undermine political efforts to build a more humanizing and just social order, generating the conditions for the fiercest global-class struggle in the history of humankind.
Amid harsh political economic measures that have betrayed the heart of liberal democracy, people around the world are contending with what critical theorist Henry Giroux13 terms neoliberal fascism, where the ironclad rule of the marketplace has replaced any formerly held social consensus of government responsibility for the people. In its place, the welfare state has been systematically dismantled, as the unbridled privatization of public institutions prevails, with education, health care, and even prisons converted into money-making enterprises. Concurrently, a neoliberal ideology of unimpeded authoritarianism wages war on democratic values, bolstered by an economic logic of political hyper-individualism, competition, and financial gluttony. The consequence is we are living in a world where not only has the gap between the rich and the poor continued to deepen, but the racial wealth gap is higher today than in the 1960s.14 Moreover, if current economic disparities remain unchecked, economist predict that by the year 2030, the top 1 percent will own 64 percent of the world’s wealth.15
It is worth repeating that these massive economic injustices are the direct result of five decades of neoliberal excesses made possible by the political consensus and social neglect of powerful governments around the world. In an effort to extract labor and exploit the financial opportunities of the globalized economy, national leaders followed the speculative initiatives of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, while looking the other way as workers’ real wages diminished, educational resources dwindled, and key public welfare services were slashed by austerity measures that relentlessly persevered the interests of the global capitalism.
Critique of Global Capitalism
We truly face a crisis of humanity. Our very survival depends on us at the very least curbing the excesses of the out-of-control system of global capitalism, if not its outright overthrow.
—William I. Robinson16
It was precisely Freire’s persistent concern for the dehumanizing impact of global capitalism on the lives of the majority of the world’s population that fortified his enduring vision of education as a humanizing political project in the interest of freedom and equality. Freire wrote Pedagogy of the Heart during the mid-1990s, after witnessing the neoliberal project of global capital beginning to take hold like a vengeance. During the era of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States, right-wing agendas included repeated assaults on the welfare state, by way of draconian social policies and cuts in public spending, along with taxation laws and deregulation of the financial industry, prioritizing economic interests. As the two major world leaders in support of rising neoliberalism, Thatcher professed, “There’s no such thing as society,”17 promoting the supreme value of the individual, while Reagan defended the omnipotence of free-market competition, peddling the logic of his trickle-down economics. More to the point, both leaders used their executive powers to propagate the notion that schools should function as economic engines for the nation, while also utilizing national resources to drastically weaken the power of trade unions.
It is not surprising then to find that at the core of Freire’s argument against neoliberalism is a direct and unapologetic critique of global capitalism. Freire openly chastises neoliberal disregard for the most vulnerable and argues against the corrupt nature of global financial initiatives. He condemns the politics of privatization that, openly or by stealth, have seized public resources worldwide to expand capital accumulation among the wealthy and powerful. Freire speaks adamantly to how neoliberalism undermines public access and limits the democratic participation of the masses in crucial decisions that impact their labor and daily existence. He argues that no just political economic vision can be actualized without the active participation of men and women, advocating for systems genuinely in sync with human needs. Similarly, his reflections point to a global capitalism that operates across terrains of class, race, and gender, invisibly and pervasively embedded in all of society’s institutions. Freire’s view echoes what Anibal Quijano18 calls the coloniality of power—hegemonic societal structures of power inherent to the global reach of imperial capitalism that endure to the present.
Speaking out resolutely against the oppressive power of the ruling class, Freire reminds us about the power of ideology in the consolidation of material power and control. He calls upon us to demystify determinist discourses of neoliberalism that engender fatalism and obstruct open participation. Freire insists that such dystopian discourses impoverish democratic efforts, in both the north and the south, given how global neoliberalism functions to expand and consolidate power and wealth among the few. Here, he stalwartly contends, capitalism is not the radiant future, to make the point that it is impossible for us to overcome the abuses of capital without entering in a forthright negation of its oppressive ideology of extraction and accumulation. This points to a colonizing ideology anchored to a Western epistemology of conquest that reproduces what Boaventura de Sousa Santos19 calls an abyssal divide—where all knowledge or meaning that does not serve the interests of capital is systematically invisibilized, rendering it nonexistent or irrelevant to our reading of the world.
Freire also unwaveringly asserts that the curricular injustices of capitalist educational systems function to obscure global class struggle. Class antagonisms within the classroom, veiled by instrumentalized curricula, intensify the labor of critical educators who struggle to enact practices of democratic learning. This lack of clarity about social class can also generate confusion and contradictions among many working-class teachers, students, and communities, disrupting their capacity for coherent participation in class struggle. As such, if we are to unveil the concrete conditions of oppression and fight to dismantle the structures of global capitalism, we must resist and challenge the oppressive ideologies of domination that betray our humanity. Freire further notes that a clear conceptual understanding of the complexities of global capitalism engenders social movements and civic organizations to enact and endorse more coherent political interventions and to reimagine a lucid, hopeful, and critically ethical leadership.20 Indisputably, Freire points to ethical coherence between what we do and say as key to building social movement organizations that can inspire the confidence and solidarity necessary for global political mobilization in these times. At the core of Freire’s message is the need for educators and activists to confront the deadly impact of global capitalism on our lives and to enter into political struggles within the actual circumstances we face within schools and communities. This mandate, however, is often very challenging for teachers, particularly within the rising global inequalities of today’s virtual learning culture.
Virtual Learning and Technology
Human beings make their own history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing.
—Karl Marx21
The difficult circumstances of the coronavirus pandemic are certainly not of our own choosing. Given Freire’s commitment to the humanizing purpose of education, he would undoubtedly experience much unease with the current proliferation of online teaching and widespread marketization of piecemeal curricula to accommodate the intensification of virtual learning. At the heart of his disquiet would be the lasting threat of continuing and expanding digital education, once the conditions of the pandemic recede. For Freire, classroom conditions of democratic education provide opportunities for students to critically grapple together across differences and likenesses, in an effort to learn, communicate, and transform their world within the complexity of our diverse humanity. Vital to the critical intellectual formation of students is the creative tension that unfolds in the context of lively human encounters and relationships, best enacted through their embodied presence within the everyday. Within the disembodiment of virtual education, students are expected to function in ways that, more than ever, alienate them from the processes of their learning and from their dynamic participation in their lived history.
Instead of rigorous classroom dialogues, key to Freirean inspired question-posing pedagogies, students are expected to learn within lonely, detached, online spaces with minimal teacher attention. Nevertheless, they must readily respond to prescribed, standardized forms of curricula developed and designed for them by experts, often without teacher or student participation or input. Such virtual spaces reinforce neoliberal learning values that privilege individualization, memorization, and quantification, in ways that promote a stilted one-dimensionality in the production of knowledge. Instead of students being immersed in active learning processes that stimulate critical engagement, the development of voice, and the construction of participatory knowledge, they are now conditioned to learn sequestered and unaided, away from embodied human contact and the communal dialogical environments that best foster and cultivate empathy, openness, and acceptance across differences.
In contrast, virtual education, more single-mindedly than ever, reinscribes banking educational methods by way of standardized curricula and teaching-to-the-test, often resulting in undemocratic practices that inhibit students’ understanding of themselves as empowered subjects of their own learning. In this sense, digital mainstream approaches transfigure students into objects to be manipulated and silenced, narrowing the scope and expectations of their contribution. Without student opportunities for critical reflection and dialogue with others, they are prevented from developing the social skills required for democratic interaction and collective participation. The outcomes are educational circumstances where students fail to garner a rich sense of their own social agency as loving, thinking, feeling, and conscious human beings, a vital quality in the political formation of democratic citizens. Moreover, when students’ embodied experiences with others are severely curtailed or altogether absent in the e-learning experience of many students worldwide today, the impact of its alienating conditions cannot go unheeded. In the prevailing virtual educational context, Freire would likely argue that the epistemological curiosity of students is severely curtailed by a pedagogy and curriculum fixated on keeping the national economic engine revving, rather than creating conditions where students learn to critically challenge the injustices of their world.
Similarly, Freire would have expressed serious concern for the manner in which teaching in these new circumstances disfigures the labor of teachers. In the virtual classroom, the difficult labor of teachers has become even more routinized and tediously disembodied than previously, as they are expected to function as technological mediators, dispensers, and automatons of a growing virtualized pedagogical culture. Similarly, many young student teachers, who should be receiving adequate pedagogical support and room to develop their practice are instead being overwhelmed by exploitative teaching loads. The consequence is a situation where students are often taught by teachers inadequately prepared and who must now also labor longer hours to demonstrate their students are fulfilling neoliberal standards of accountability put in place for digital learning.
No doubt, Freire would have objected to the dangers of this deeply technocratic educational culture, which further initiates and conditions teachers, student teachers, and students into a commonsensical acceptance of technological institutional practices, which provide “the grounds for a degree of surveillance never before experienced within the classroom.”22 Social media platforms for e-learning are not employed solely for teacher-student communication, but are widely used for monitoring student assessment, test results, attendance, class participation, chat-box, and many other virtual instructional activities. The extensive data collection and processing capabilities makes these platforms privacy-invasive and insecure. Consequently, educational platforms can readily become “fodder for the government and private players to build a society of control and exploitation.”23 With this in mind, critical educators and activists cannot overlook how the more extensive use of social media platforms across society can function as a vehicle for state repression, threatening violation of human rights and civil liberties.24
Freire rightly asserts technology is a bastion of capitalism, given its instrumentalizing demands, its dizzying acceleration and movement of uncritical communication, and its shift to promoting a largely disembodied existence. He reasons that, despite the wonders attributed to technology, the domination and exploitation of the majority of the world’s population by the few persists—globalized oppression more formidably intensified by algorithmic capitalism,25 where algorithms, changing and opaque, are embedded within a mode of production that bolsters and fortifies structures of surveillance, social control, and domination. According to The Social Dilemma,26 nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than the arena of social media, whose pervasive proliferation remains in the hands of a small group of designers, eagerly attending to the profit motives of transnational corporations. As the wealthiest and most unregulated global industry under neoliberal rule, massive online corporations such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest ruthlessly extract data and sell users to the highest bidder. Accordingly, social media platforms have profoundly normalized the exchange of embodied public space for a virtual social existence, where messiness, contradictions, and complexities of human life give way to a cacophony of distorted and unsubstantiated truths, pontificated by disreputable “experts” whose aims are, at best, questionable and, at worst, politically authoritarian, violent, xenophobic, and misogynist.
It can be argued that social media represents not only the most sophisticated and effective operant and conditioning tool in the history of humankind, but also, in the Gramscian sense, the most complex hegemonic devise for securing a variety of streams of cultural consensus among the masses. Accordingly, “our minds are being aggressively rewired to hold their attention and then make them pliable for corporations to sell things.”27 Similarly, identities are being constructed by way of virtual images and disembodied artefacts that deceptively condition users to desire the uncomplicated perfection of a limited range of identities, which for all intents and purposes can only exist in the virtual zone. Within this dehumanizing or what some now call posthuman zone,28 the commodification and exploitation of prefabricated archetypes that dictate personal behaviors (i.e., how we talk, walk, dress, live) and emotions (i.e., fears, insecurities, desires, and yearnings) become addictive drivers of personhood, replacing in-the-flesh relationships of human contact, community values, and shared experiences. In the process, the competitive financial and political agendas of capitalist zealots not only enjoy free reign over the marketplace, but also gain access to our hearts and minds. Through overwhelming sensory bombardment of virtual images, behind-the-scene algorithmic wizards narrowly manipulate human consciousness in ways that can potentially disrupt democratic dialogue across political and cultural differences.
It goes without saying, there is a dire need for civil rights and social movement organizations to forge new tactics and strategies to contend with this technological assault on our humanity. However, these must go beyond simply urging users to get off these platforms or urging parents to restrict their children’s screen usage. Needed are tougher global campaigns to defend public space, redistribute the wealth, and dismantle the overwhelming control of transnational corporations over life on the planet. In education, rather than surrender to neoliberal discourses that fatally portend the inevitable virtualization of education, we must work collectively to move schools, universities, and the public toward an unwavering democratic commitment to education for the well-being of humanity. Freire would also urge us to establish global networks and social movement campaigns that unveil, challenge, and fight against the oppressive structures of global capital responsible for the preponderance of profiteering technology and its increasing reification of human consciousness.
A foremost concern for Freire is that students evolve democratically into critically conscious adults, prepared to face the challenges and contradictions of a complex world. True to his philosophy, he also insisted on a critical reading of technology that retains a dialectical perspective. In this volume, he espouses a view of technology as a powerful tool utilized for oppressive as well as liberatory undertakings. This signals Freire’s refusal to fall victim to an essentialist analysis of technology, one that fails to engage critically with its deeply contradictory nature. Here, we must consider how the oppressed have utilized technology for democratizing knowledge, the dissemination of unfairly censored information, and support of democratic dissent around the world. No doubt, if writing today, he might remind us about the significant emancipatory political role of technology to the anti-austerity campaigns in Europe, the global Occupy movement, prodemocracy movements of the Arab Spring, and worldwide protests of Black Lives Matter following the police killing of George Floyd. He might also note the risks taken by Chelsea Manning in exposing military war crimes or Edward Snowden in exposing government technological surveillance or Julian Assange in setting up WikiLeaks to expose the excesses and impunity of world leaders.
In the spirit of Freire, there are progressive educators who seek to bring criticality to the center of e-learning.29 Toward this aim, Freirean educators engage with questions of power and decision-making by assessing with students their goals, prior to deciding how a virtual classroom or course is structured.30 They work to keep the transformative aim of education at the forefront by creating e-learning opportunities that enhance dialogical interactions and activities by situating student learning in their lived experiences. These educators also focus on the development of voice; support students’ strengths, abilities, and interests as they strive to engage new material; and emphasize horizontal relationships with students to create space for (re) negotiating together course strategies and materials. Most fundamentally, a Freirean approach to online teaching begins with building community where dialogue can ensue and students can engage ideas openly, as well as experience opportunities for meaningful collaboration.31 As noted earlier, practicing these strategies within the instrumentalized and fractured environment of virtual education is highly challenging. Larger structural changes are also needed to facilitate critical pedagogical efforts, including smaller class sizes; reduced virtual screen time, with adequate breaks; help for parents to assist their children; and a decrease in standardized material covered to ensure ample time for interactive virtual activities with and among students.
Freire would certainly have supported progressive educators who, in the midst of the pandemic, are laboring to bring criticality to virtual instruction. Amid this great challenge, he would have urged critical optimism, to not be left silenced, disempowered, or to become uncritical opponents of technology. He would have encouraged educators and activists to remain present and be involved in a critical relationship with the world of technology and virtual learning, as it exists, in the hopes of discovering the cracks by which a genuine liberatory position of struggle could be forged. And, more importantly, he would have considered this dedication to criticality, in the face of dehumanizing circumstances, to be the ethical and political responsibility of educators and activists committed to our fight against the common enemy.
Fighting the Common Enemy
Therefore, we tend to divide forces fighting among and against ourselves, instead of fighting the common enemy.
—Paulo Freire32
In Freire’s reflections on his “first world” as a child, he argues that before we can become citizens of the world, we must be citizens of our place of origin. This is to say that we must embody an awareness of our existence, the place of our doing, the space of our dreaming, the geography of our identity. The profound political relevance of knowing ourselves fully across the many identities that shape our consciousness and our world is essential to our pedagogical and political work. In Freire’s discussion of difference, there is an appreciation for the construction of political identity as a dynamic human factor that links each of us to our cultural, racial, linguistic, religious, political, and economic histories. Yet, simultaneously, he notes the limits of a politics founded solely on identity markers, which can obscure the commonalities in the suffering of oppressed peoples.
Freire argues, for example, that the perversity of racism is not inborn to human nature but arises from the color of ideology. This to say, racism arises from a dehumanizing ideology of race, historically linked to systems of exploitation or the colonial matrix of power responsible for the persistent brutality of colonization, slavery, and genocide. Freire’s critical insights on this matter remain salient today, as we continue to grapple with an overwhelming tendency to divide our forces, fighting identity battles among and against ourselves. Troubled by struggles of disunity on the left that ultimately serve the hegemony of the ruling class, Freire urges us to embrace unity within diversity, a collective political vision for liberation, which aims for unity across diverse progressive political groups.
Cognizant of the growing need for political action on the left against the atrocities of neoliberal exploitation, Freire also voices his abhorrence of sectarianism and dogmatism, which impoverishes democratic participation by way of vanguard solutions derived by the few for the many, rather than solutions generated with and by the people. Instead, he upholds the democratic capacity of workers, women, racialized communities, and other oppressed populations to name their own realities, to collectively labor for change and to assert their self-determination in the interest of a destiny where justice prevails. For Freire, it is an open, unfinished, and historically undetermined vision of the future that counters the historical stasis and fixity of modernity, by embracing movement, change, and the unpredictability inherent to liberatory struggles. Antonio Machado’s words, which Freire often quoted to accentuate this point, come to mind: se hace camino al andar,33 or “we make the road by walking.”
Freire also expresses concern for leftists who enter into questionable alliances with conservative forces, which ultimately render them politically incoherent. He laments those on the left who take centrist or pragmatic positions, often justifying their decision by asserting that the significance of class has disappeared. Similarly, he warns against political infighting and debilitating ruptures among the left, as if those with whom we disagree are our enemies rather than simply comrades in struggle with whom we differ. Again, he makes a case here for unity within diversity as an irreplaceable value in the larger struggle for liberation, calling for political and pedagogical organizations to collectively address common struggles of our time, by way of democratic participation and interventions rooted in the needs of the oppressed. To enter political struggles across our differences requires great tolerance and patience, which Freire advocates in our speech, relationships, and actions, if we are to enter into the intimacy of democracy. This infers an active political process by which we cultivate relationships of struggle within social movements that transcend closed organizational borders. This entails a willingness to labor openly across diverse political fields of being, as we keep questions of culture, politics, economics, gender, skin color, sexuality, religion, and physical abilities at the center of our struggles for a better world.
Freire, of course, acknowledges the many challenges at work for leftist organizations and progressive political parties who aspire to gain political power for the emancipatory purpose of transforming society. Pedagogical qualities important to this crucial political task include curiosity, coherence, patience, faith, a sense of hope, dialogue that begins where people are at, communal goodwill, critical optimism, and ethical rigor. Freire affirms that through these qualities we can better remain open to the evolution of social consciousness, as we learn new language, strategies, and skills for critiquing capitalism and challenging conditions of suffering across communities. Freire underscores the importance of collective organizing that democratically supports oppressed communities to define strategies of resistance against forces that trample upon our humanity. A glimpse of this type of organizing in the United States was visible in the powerful efforts of CORE (Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators)34 of the CTU (Chicago Teacher’s Union), who fought on behalf of the city’s entire working class, uniting issues of education to racism, immigration, and the school-to-prison pipeline. More importantly, by embracing organizing strategies that brought teachers, students, parents, and community members together, their successful campaigns for educational justice helped to shift schools toward a more democratic balance of power.35
In instances, however, where organizing for change is not as successful, Freire reminds us of the grueling political conditions faced by those who endure daily conditions of oppression, where despair and hopelessness can ensue even for those committed to a socialist future. At such moments, educators and activists fighting across differences may be tempted to focus solely on issues associated with what they perceive as their own oppression, forgetting that all forms of human oppressions are inextricably linked. And although Freire empathizes with the temptation to struggle separately in the name of urgency, he also rightly compels us to reach across our own suffering and join in the suffering of others, so that we might struggle together against the common enemy. Rather than to wax cynical or surrender to despair, Freire maintains that it is precisely through the power of our solidarity, unity, and labor with those perceived as different that we generate the power of hope and commitment to persist in the arduous fight for liberation.
Nevertheless, Freire adamantly objects to imposed transformation in the name the oppressed, which he argues reinforces blind obedience, immobilization, passivity, fear, and erosion of people’s participation in making decisions vital to their lives. He also warns of the pressures, tensions, and confusion generated by the advance of political conservatism, where a sterile and necrophilic sectarianism can arise among the left, when what is most needed are open, creative and life-affirming political stances that support critical democratic dialogue among people. This reflects his concern with growing authoritarianism and overbearing arrogance that is too often justified, in the name of political urgency. And, while Freire might be the first to assert the power of resistance and people on the streets, he also decries a politics predicated primarily on rally cries, slogans, prescriptions, indoctrination, and undemocratic forms of vanguard leadership. So, despite the everyday tensions generated by our differences, Freire provokes us to persevere in building political open-mindedness and solidarity across our differences by integrating values indispensable to democracy and to the making of a more loving world.
Values Indispensable to Democracy
I hope at least the following will endure—my trust in the people and my faith in human beings and in the creation of a world in which it is easier to love.
—Paulo Freire36
Freire’s great concern for the fate of our humanity under the domination and exploitation of capitalism seems evermore relevant and salient today, given the unrelenting neoliberal war against democracy. In this volume, Freire asserts the liberatory intent of critical pedagogical and political projects as the fulfillment of our vocation: to be human. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed,37 he distinctly connects this vocation to our capacity to love the people and the world. This humanizing intent, however, does not end with the classroom, but rather is meant to extend to the pedagogy and politics of social movements, trade unions, and other political organizations. Similarly, Freire advances love as an essential political force in our fight for liberation.38 His meaning is well-articulated by bell hooks39 when she writes, “The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.” And although few references to love are included in Pedagogy of the Heart (whose title implies the significance of love in his philosophy), Freire offers pedagogical and political reflections on curiosity, faith, and hope—all akin to love—as values indispensable to democracy.
Epistemological Curiosity
For Freire, living a reflective life as that of teachers entails a willingness to ask questions by entering with an open sense of curiosity into the reality of students’ lives and the conditions of the world around us. Epistemological curiosity, as he conceives of it, pertains to an openness to knowing and exploring our nature as human beings, as well as a willingness to discover the differences that exist across our lives. Such a pedagogical process supports a liberatory acceptance of the differences ever-present between schools, students, and communities. Curiosity also generates a greater realization of the many human possibilities that exist for knowing the world. As students evolve in their capacity to be open to differences, they can also better seek democratic ways to enter into conscious and humble communion with others across our diverse humanity. Freire demonstrates this even with his readers, by way of a cultural style of passionate engagement and use of language that brings body, mind, and emotions into conversation, enlivening his many personal and political reminiscences born of his own curiosity to know his world more fully.
Correspondingly, Freire opposes a closed pedagogical system or a pedagogy of answers, where abstracted, neutral, and decontextualized answers float in the air, devoid of the critical inquiry that opens doors to transformative knowledge—knowledge with the power to disrupt the authoritarian values deceptively embedded in the elite, patriarchal, and racializing culture of hegemonic schooling. Severely blunting students’ curiosity, a pedagogy of answers (or banking education) erodes students’ creativity, imagination, and social agency, reinforcing a frozen, ahistorical, and timeless view of knowledge. Freire posits that decontextualized knowledge of standardized or marketized curricula, wittingly or unwittingly, denies the democratic investigation and dialogical participation of students in their critical formation. In turn, authoritarian values and vertical approaches to teaching and learning are persevered, where students are perceived as objects to be filled.
Freire does not view epistemological curiosity as solely a cognitive exercise, but rather a dynamic process of knowing that relies on the entire body. The body is crucial to our knowing in that “once we start talking in the classroom about the body and about how we live in our bodies, we’re automatically challenging the way power has orchestrated itself”40 in our lives. It is no wonder that Freire poetically argues, both pedagogically and politically, for our increasing solidarity between the mind and the hands, in that social and material change are realized to the degree that our bodies are actively implicated in the remaking of our world. It is also through our physical participation that we renounce an existence as mere objects of an oppressive system that appropriates our human agency for the extraction of our labor. Similarly, a disembodied pedagogy of answers inhibits the development of voice, robbing students of opportunities to embody their thoughts and actions in the interest of their freedom to be.
In discussing epistemological curiosity, Freire also speaks to the pedagogical and political significance of wrestling with uncertainty (as opposed to settling for absolute ways of knowing). Uncertainty, he contends, is essential to the development of critical thought, in that historical conditions and therefore our lives are ever changing. This continuity of history shapes our production of knowledge, in that we are continuously developing knowledge, while simultaneously immersed in the historical movement of our lives. It is this view of history and knowledge that guides Freire’s problem-posing philosophy of education, where epistemological curiosity drives the evolution of critical consciousness and, therefore, our political process as subjects of history. Moreover, it is curiosity, according to Freire, that stimulates teachers and students toward a critical process of making meaning, grounded in our embodied relationships with others. In this way, transformative forms of democratic knowledge can assist us to engender those material conditions and relations of power that support our liberation.
As is the hallmark of Freire’s liberatory philosophy, he decisively reiterates faith as central to the transformative capacity of human beings. Freire reflects on the manner in which faith has served as an impetus for his ongoing participation in the fight for liberation—a fight that reaffirms a just vision of society, commits to stand for freedom, respects the self-determination of others, and strives to enact humility, coherence, and tolerance in our pedagogy and politics. In particular, faith in the people is underscored as a significant ethical and political commitment of those who fight for a more just world. Faith in the people respects the ability of others to evaluate, investigate, name, and transform their conditions. Faith in others allows us to support critical pedagogical and political practices that make feasible concrete opportunities for oppressed communities to critically engage collectively with their lived circumstances.
Freire also argues that it is this faith in people that cultivates and nurtures democratic relationships of solidarity where, through our collective labor with others, critical social consciousness evolves and transformative relationships develop. A formidable example is the miners’ strike of 1984–5,41 where 187,000 miners took to the streets in the largest class war in the history of Britain—with workers on one side and every conceivable ruling class weapon on the other. The size and year-long duration of the strike would have been impossible, if not for the participation of allies across communities. Many miners’ wives participated, bravely venturing outside their immediate communities to speak publicly for the first time in their lives. Crucial to the campaign were Miners support groups formed in every town and city across the country, where Black students, lesbian and gay activists, and religious organizations supported the strike. Despite valiant efforts, the miners’ strike was ruthlessly smashed by the Thatcher government’s neoliberal onslaught against the power of organized class struggle.42 Nevertheless, the labor and evolving political consciousness of the miners, their families, and supporters, who fought with faith in people’s self-determination, transformed their lives forever.43
As the miners’ strike above and Freire’s own reflections attest, genuine political transformation is a process rooted in the decisions, relationships, and actions we undertake collectively and those we enact daily. For revolutionaries, revolution must be comprehended as an active, present, and living pedagogy of love and an ethical way of life. Our future is, therefore, undeniably tied to the allegiances and commitments that shape our consciousness, which in turn shape our political decisions and interventions in the world. Additionally, faith in others and political consciousness evolve in community, through the radical collective actions we take to change the inequalities and social exclusions at work in our everyday. The political transformation of society and its democratic commitment to people is an ongoing matter that relies on our consistent reflection, dialogue, and democratic participation as critical citizens of our world. Hence, as Freire argues, education is an indispensable institution for the liberatory reinvention of society, in that emancipatory schooling, founded on our faith in students, critically prepares them for democratic life.
Hope as Ontological Requirement
In his personal reflections on exile, Freire affirms the importance of educators and activists being reflective about our human nature, in that many oppressed people exist in the half-free condition of internal exile, forced to exist in a borrowed context not of our own making. This echoes the experience of many working-class and racialized educators and activists who live as second-class citizens. In these difficult times, Freire’s grief, bitterness, lament, and yearning for a more just world resonate deeply with the powerful longing of oppressed communities around the globe, where their conditions of exploitation, marginalization, and violence fuel bitterness, rage, and despair, that in turn engenders hopelessness. Here, Freire posits hope as the antidote to fatalism, inviting us to embrace an empowering understanding of our human nature.
As with curiosity and faith, our struggle to sustain hope must be permanent. It requires our ongoing critical engagement with the circumstances of schools and society, in that we find the strength to keep hope alive, only through our constant communion with others. Through hope forged collectively, Freire contends, we discover the courage, strength, and emancipatory possibilities to challenge social injustices taken for granted in the past. In this way, hope also inspires our collective vision and participation in changing the direction of our future, by opening us to new definitions of what it means to be human. With this in mind, Freire affirms, hope is the ontological requirement of human beings. A powerful example of abiding hope is the fight waged against anti-Black racism and police brutality by the Black Lives Matter movement, one of the largest movements in US history. The refusal of Black Lives Matter activists to be deterred in their struggle has led to dramatic shifts in how people today understand historical and contemporary expressions of anti-Black racism, across the nation and around the world.44
Freire rightly stresses that an education of answers functions in the service of domination, striping hope away with pragmatic educational policies and practices that limit students’ critical engagement. In the process, students are steered toward jobs that may fulfill the vocational needs of the neoliberal workplace, but leave workers empty and despairing. In opposition, a pedagogy of question, grounded in the lived histories and experiences of those populations most afflicted, aims to name, challenge, and resist root causes of oppression, in an effort to develop collective solutions for the future. An emancipatory vision of hope mobilizes students, educators, and activists past oppressive conditions of inequality and exclusion. Freire embraces the significance and necessity of rebelliousness, if another world is to be truly possible. Here, critical questions of power remain ever on the table, in that social and material conditions of domination cannot be altered outside of our critical interrogation and collective participation in the daily life of schools and communities. Furthermore, no genuine or lasting political change is possible outside a larger ethical struggle to end global poverty, the appalling abuses of the labor market, the unnecessary world health crisis, the unprecedented incarceration of subaltern populations, and the dreadful inequalities that persist in education.
Finally, Freire insightfully warns us that without hope, we would be fatally trapped in a predetermined world, where the oppressed would have little choice but to accept our fate within an oppressive order. Instead, Freire argues convincingly that it is free and empowered human beings in collective struggle who transform history. Without hope, our human suffering would remain unabated and the inhumanities of the wealthy and powerful unchecked. Hope illuminates our persistent and coherent opposition of oppressive ideologies, policies, and practices and fuels our revolutionary dreams. And, it is through the power of collective hope that we garner the strength and wherewithal to unite across our differences, in the creation of a world in which it is easier to love.
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1Malta et al. (2020).
2Darder (2015a).
3Accioly (2020).
4Chomsky (2020).
5Lagos-Rojas and Gomez-Baeza (2019).
6Cook (2020).
7C-Change (2020).
8European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (2020).
9Wallace et al. (2020).
10Yaya et al. (2020).
11International Task Force on Teachers for Education (2020).
12Furceri et al. (2020).
13Giroux (2019).
14Pathe (2015).
15Sheen (2018).
16Robinson (2019).
17Moncrieff (2013).
18Quijano (2000).
19Santos (2007).
20Darder (2018).
21Marx (1852).
22Luck (2012).
23Bajpai (2020).
24Timotijevic (2020).
25Bilić (2018).
26Orloeski (2020).
27Cook (2020).
28Rutsky (2018).
29Kahn and Kellner (2007).
30Carr-Chellman (2016).
31Informedia (2020).
32Freire (2020), p.44.
33See: https://www.espoesia.com/poesia/antonio-machado/caminante-no-hay-camino-antonio-machado/.
34Uetricht (2019).
35Jaffe (2019).
36Freire (1970).
37Ibid.
38Darder (2015).
39hook (2006, p.298).
40hooks (1994, p.137).
41Mitchinson (2005).
42Green (1990).
43Bannock (2015).
44Buchanan et al. (2020).