Marxism Conquers the American Classroom
For Paulo Freire, America was the ultimate oppressor—and for that reason, he accepted a position at Harvard University, in order to study the enemy from within. “I thought that it was very important for me as a Brazilian intellectual in exile to pass through, albeit rapidly, the center of capitalist power,” he said. “I needed to see the animal close on its home territory.”1
Between 1969 and 1970, Freire spent six months as a research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, hosting seminars, writing articles, and haunting left-wing bookstores with other teachers and activists. His work, despite being anti-capitalist, was funded by two of the great titans of American industry: the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation. The months in Cambridge were extremely productive. He worked with a colleague to translate Pedagogy of the Oppressed into English and wrote two essays for the Harvard Education Review, which, as the historian Isaac Gottesman has documented, helped introduce “critical Marxism” into the field of American education.2
More importantly, Freire established two crucial relationships—first, with the education reformer Jonathan Kozol, then, in subsequent trips, with the professor Henry Giroux—that would, over time, embed his ideas throughout the American public education system. Kozol became one of Freire’s first American champions, publishing a letter in the New York Review of Books promoting the Brazilian’s theories and making the argument that his ideas were “directly relevant to the struggles we face in the United States at the present time, and in areas far less mechanical and far more universal than basic literacy alone.”3
Giroux proved to be an even more important ally. Freire had exchanged correspondence with Giroux for a number of years and, after his work with the Marxist-Leninist regimes in Africa and Latin America, finally met the American academic in the early 1980s.4 Giroux was immediately seduced by Freire’s ideas. Giroux had immersed himself in the intellectual milieu of “critical Marxism,” drawing inspiration from the critical theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and the critical pedagogists led by Paulo Freire.5
After establishing a relationship, Giroux and Freire initiated a long collaboration, co-editing an influential series called Critical Studies in Education, which began the process of popularizing their radical pedagogical theories. Giroux dedicated the first book of the series to his master, calling Freire the “living embodiment of the principle that underlies this work: that pedagogy should become more political and that the political should become more pedagogical.”6
Although Freire’s work had failed in the Third World, he sought to revive it in the First World.
Freire believed that the United States was a key source of the world’s problems, projecting war, racism, imperialism, domination, and oppression across the globe. He also believed that the country projected these forces within. Although Freire initially refrained from explicit political activism during his time at Harvard—he was, after all, a political exile—he quietly developed his own theories about the United States in collaboration with his American counterparts.7 As Giroux explained in an article for Curriculum Inquiry, Freire’s analysis needed to take into account the nature of domination in North America, which was more subtle than in the postcolonial societies: “The fact of domination in Third World nations, as well as the substantive nature of that domination, is relatively clear. . . . The conditions of domination are not only different in the advanced industrial countries of the West, but they are also much less obvious, and in some cases, one could say more pervasive and powerful.”8
Freire’s basic theory of oppression in the First World was that capitalism “uproots” the poor and working classes, then “domesticates” them through a series of “myths” that seek to legitimize and manufacture support for the system of private property, individual rights, and human initiative.9 This liberal-democratic order creates the superficial appearance of freedom and prosperity, but upon deeper analysis serves the interests of economic elites and subjugates the masses to a form of psychological slavery. “Perhaps the greatest tragedy of modern man is his domination by the force of these myths,” Freire explained in his book Education for Critical Consciousness. “Gradually, without even realizing the loss, he relinquishes his capacity for choice; he is expelled from the orbit of decisions. . . . And when men try to save themselves by following the prescriptions [of the elites], they drown in leveling anonymity, without hope and without faith, domesticated and adjusted.”10
During his travels to the United States throughout the 1970s, Freire spent much of his time helping organize poor and minority communities,11 believing that the revolution must begin with what he called “the Third World in the First World.”12 The FBI closely tracked Freire’s movements and affiliations. The Bureau’s declassified files describe Freire as an “intellectual radical revolutionary” who, according to confidential informants, was working to organize a leftist school in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and giving lectures to young militants, including members of the Black Panther Party.13
But the Brazilian educator encountered a double frustration in the American slums. After working with radical groups composed of “negroes, indians, chicanos, puerto ricans and whites,” Freire privately concluded in a letter to a friend that the American revolutionaries suffered from the “lack of ideological and political clarity, the paroquial vision of reality [and] the lack of dialectical thought.”14 Additionally, Freire began to see the limitations of working with elites, who funded his work at Harvard and, subsequently, at the Geneva, Switzerland–based World Council of Churches, but were ultimately shaped by the interests of capitalist society. “We cannot expect the ruling classes to commit suicide,” he confided. “They cannot really permit us to put into practice a kind of education that will lay them waste, once the raison d’être of the oppressive reality is revealed.”15
This insight, originally applied to the Third World, held even stronger for the First World. If the small and fragile elite of Guinea-Bissau could not be persuaded to commit “class suicide,” how could one persuade the enormous middle and upper classes in the United States to do the same?
The answer to this question, Freire hoped, was through the education system. Since Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire had argued that traditional schools were designed for “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”;16 or, in modern terms, that the focus of education was individualistic rather than systemic. Freire proposed turning this model upside down: “The solution is not to ‘integrate’ [students] into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become ‘beings for themselves.’”17
This political strategy, Freire believed, was universal. “In metaphysical terms, politics is the soul of education, its very being, whether in the First World or in the Third World,” Freire said.18 “Education must be an instrument of transforming action, a political praxis at the service of permanent human liberation. This, let us repeat, does not happen only in the consciousness of people, but presupposes a radical change of structures, in which process consciousness will itself be transformed.”19
In the 1980s, Freire’s American disciples, led by Henry Giroux, began translating Freire’s visions into reality. The first step, a book series in direct collaboration with Freire, would lay out their “critical theory of education” and establish a base of support in academia. This effort was explicitly neo-Marxist. As Giroux explained: “The neo-Marxist position, it seems to us, provides the most insightful and comprehensive model for a more progressive approach for understanding the nature of schooling and developing an emancipatory program for social education.” Giroux believed that public schools served as “agents of ideological control” on behalf of the oppressor class—which, he hoped, the circle of intellectuals around Paulo Freire could demystify and subvert from within.20
The next step, according to Giroux, was to launch a “political intervention” within the university and work to secure tenure for one hundred radical intellectuals. He believed that, if they could reshape the concepts in academia, they would eventually trickle down to the classroom.21 Thus, with Freire as the guru and Giroux as the tactician, the project was born: the critical theorists of education began methodically deconstructing the existing curricula, pedagogies, and practices, and replacing them, brick by brick, with the ideology of revolution.
What followed is nothing short of a coup. Over the course of forty years, Giroux’s initial cadre of one hundred bespectacled and shabbily dressed academics expanded their influence, recruited followers, and achieved dominance in the field of education. They pumped out papers, secured tenure, marginalized rivals, and transformed scholarship into activism. Pedagogy of the Oppressed became the bible of teachers colleges throughout the United States22 and created a cottage industry in academic publishing.23
In total, Freire’s oeuvre has generated nearly 500,000 academic citations and his disciple, Henry Giroux, has generated another 125,000.24 Freire’s concepts—“Mythologization,” “cultural invasion,” “codification-decodification,” “critical consciousness”—have reshaped the language of pedagogical theory and dominated the discourse in the academic journals. Over time, these ideas have become part of the official architecture of higher education: UCLA sponsors an official Paulo Freire Institute; Chapman University hosts an annual Paulo Freire Democratic Project Awards; McGill University runs a Paulo and Nita Freire Project for Critical Pedagogy; and similar initiatives have been established in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Germany, Finland, Austria, England, and Brazil.25
As the historian of education Isaac Gottesman has documented, the field of education went through a “critical turn” that radicalized the discipline, from the university to the primary school. “The turn to critical Marxist thought is a defining moment in the past 40 years of educational scholarship, especially for educational scholars who identify as part of the political left,” Gottesman explains. “It introduced the ideas and vocabulary that continue to frame most conversations in the field about social justice, such as hegemony, ideology, consciousness, praxis, and most importantly, the word ‘critical’ itself, which has become ubiquitous as a descriptor for left educational scholarship.”26 The Brazilian educator stands at the center of this change: “Freire is the touchstone voice—scholarship espousing social justice is almost always in conversation with his critical educational approach.”27
Over time, the scholarship that began in the universities trickled down to the primary and secondary education systems. The result is that thousands of public schools are now training American schoolchildren, explicitly or implicitly, to see the world through the lens of critical pedagogy.
In California, America’s vanguard state, Freire’s ideas have reshaped the curriculum entirely. In 2021, the state Board of Education approved a sweeping Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, with the goal of transforming education in ten thousand public schools, serving a total of 6 million students. The curriculum, which is based in large part on Freire’s framework of critical consciousness, decolonization, and revolt, begins with the assumption that students must learn how to “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs” and critique “white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression.” Teachers are then encouraged to drive their pupils to participate in “social movements that struggle for social justice” and “build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism society.”28
R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, the original cochair of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, developed much of the material regarding early American history. In his book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, cited in the state’s official reference guide, Cuauhtin argues that the United States was founded on a “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” Cuauhtin claims that whites began “grabbing the land,” “hatching hierarchies,” and “developing for Europe/whiteness,” which created “excess wealth” that “became the basis for the capitalist economy.” The result was a system of white “hegemony” that continues to the present day, in which minorities are subjected to “socialization, domestication, and ‘zombification.’”
The solution, according to Cuauhtin, is to “name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition” in a posture of “transformational resistance.” The ultimate goal is to “decolonize” American society and establish a new regime of “countergenocide” and “counterhegemony,” which will challenge the dominance of white Christian culture and lead to the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.”29
In pursuit of this goal, the state curriculum encouraged teachers to lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which appealed directly to the Aztec gods. Students clapped and chanted to the deity Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to become “warriors” for “social justice.” As the chant came to a climax, students performed a supplication for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which they asked the gods for the power of “critical consciousness.”30
This is pure Paulo Freire. According to the “vision statement” prepared by the Board of Education, the purpose of the curriculum is not to assist students in achieving literacy or competency, but to provide a “tool for transformation, social, economic, and political change, and liberation.”31 The curriculum writers have deliberately recast the United States as an oppressor nation that must be “decolonized” through politics. They unabashedly elevate the Aztecs—who brutally sacrificed thousands of innocent men, women, and children—into religious symbols of California’s state-approved ideology.
As Cuauhtin tells it, white Christians committed “theocide” against indigenous spirituality.32 Those deities must be resurrected and restored to their rightful place in the social justice cosmology. It is, in a philosophical sense, a revenge of the gods.
This curriculum is already transforming local districts into centers for left-wing political activism.
In 2020, the Santa Clara County Office of Education held a series of teacher-training sessions on how to deploy ethnic studies in the classroom. As state ethnic studies advisor Jorge Pacheco explained, the model curriculum is based on the “pedagogy of the oppressed,” and although the Marxist underpinnings of the theory might “scare people away,” he insisted that teachers must be “grounded in the correct politics to educate students.”
During the training sessions, Pacheco told the teachers that the United States is a political regime based on “settler colonialism,” which he described as a “system of oppression” that “occupies and usurps land/labor/resources from one group of people for the benefit of another.” The settler colonialist regime, Pacheco continued, is “not just a vicious thing of the past, but [one that] exists as long as settlers are living on appropriated land.”
What is the solution? Pacheco told the teachers they must “awaken [students] to the oppression” and lead them to “decodify” and eventually “destroy” the dominant political regime. The first step in this process is to help students “get into the mind of a white man” such as Christopher Columbus and analyze “what ideology led these white male settlers to be power and land hungry and justify stealing indigenous land through genocide.” Pacheco described this process as transforming students as young as six years old into “activist intellectuals” who “decodify systems of oppression” into their component parts, including “white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, genocide, private property, and God.”
It’s “never too young” to begin the process of conversion, Pacheco said, telling educators they should be “cashing in on kids’ inherent empathy” in order to reshape their ideological foundations.33
The method of critical pedagogy is now mandatory statewide. After releasing the model curriculum, the California state legislature quickly passed a bill making ethnic studies a graduation requirement for all high school students, which will make the “pedagogy of the oppressed” the official ideology in every school district in the state.34
The ethnic studies activists grasp the destabilizing nature of their project—but they believe it provides them leverage for their broader political ends. During the Santa Clara presentation, the instructors provided the audience a handout with a quote from Paulo Freire: “Critical consciousness, they say, is anarchic. Others add that critical consciousness may lead to disorder. Some, however, confess: Why deny it? I was afraid of freedom. I am no longer afraid!”35 They seek, at a minimum, a moral revolution—and, out of such tumult, the political revolution that might follow.
The critical pedagogists foreground ideology, but there is another, deeper force at play: the cold and calculated expansion of the public school bureaucracy. Implicit in every step in the process of “decolonization” is a transfer of power from parents, families, and citizens to the bureaucratic class: administrators, counselors, consultants, specialists, advisors, and paper-pushers.
Following the model of the universities, the largest school districts have all begun to entrench the critical pedagogies into the bureaucracy under a variety of names, such as “Diversity and Inclusion,” “Racial Equity,” and “Culturally Responsive Programs.” These departments fulfill a dual purpose. First, they serve as a mechanism for ideological enforcement. Second, they serve as a jobs program for college graduates with degrees in the critical theories. Contrary to many skeptics who have argued that students in the fields of race, gender, and identity would have difficulty finding employment, these ideologically trained graduates have found rapidly expanding opportunities in the educational bureaucracy.
The statistics reveal the extent of this shift in power. Between 1970 and 2010, the number of students in American public schools increased by 9 percent, while the number of administrators increased by 130 percent. In total, half of all public school employees are now nonteaching administrators, bureaucrats, and support workers.36 According to the US Department of Labor, there are now hundreds of thousands of public school managers making an average wage of $100,000 per year, which is significantly more than classroom teachers and the median American household.37
This fifty-year experiment has yielded virtually no improvement in academic outcomes—the test scores for American high school students have flatlined since the federal government began collecting data in 197138—yet the expansion of the bureaucracy continues, with recent growth driven by “diversity and inclusion” divisions in the largest school districts. As the Heritage Foundation discovered, 79 percent of school districts with more than 100,000 students have hired a “chief diversity officer” and implemented university-style “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programming.39
Seattle Public Schools provides a model for how deeply the bureaucracy can entrench itself. The district, which has a $1 billion annual budget for 52,000 students, has created a Department of Racial Equity Advancement; a Division of Equity, Partnerships, and Engagement; a Department of Ethnic Studies; Office of African American Male Achievement; and an Equity and Race Advisory Committee. The district’s race and identity programs receive at least $5 million in dedicated annual funding and involve hundreds of school employees, who design the policies at the central offices and implement them as part of school-level “Racial Equity Teams.”40
These positions are purely ideological: as part of the Department of Racial Equity Advancement, for example, the district employs a full-time director for building “Black liberation movements,” a full-time program manager for “actively dismantling the systems of oppression,” and a full-time “critical race theorist” for “building leadership racial capacity.”41
The narrative of these programs is a familiar one: in its teacher training materials, Seattle Public Schools explains that the United States is a “race-based white-supremist society,” that public schools are guilty of “spirit murder” against minorities, and that white teachers must confront their “thieved inheritance”; in order to rectify these injustices, school employees must embrace “anti-racist pedagogy,” support the “current social justice movements taking place,” and work toward the “abolition” of whiteness.42 The lesson planners in the central office are busy designing a “liberatory curriculum for grades K–5 that embeds Black Studies across all subjects [and] a district-wide Black Studies course for middle and high school students that will be required for graduation.”43
Even math and science have been captured. According to the district’s Math Ethnic Studies Framework, students must learn to reject “‘Western’ mathematics,” which has been used to “oppress and marginalize people and communities of color,” and adopt the superior theory of “ethnomathematics,” developed by the Brazilian postmodernist and student of Paulo Freire, Ubiratan D’Ambrosio.44 The district spins the postcolonial myth that mathematical theory “is rooted in the ancient histories of people and empires of color,” whose accomplishments were then stolen, subverted, and obscured by white Europeans. Students, therefore, must decolonize mathematics and, following Freire, learn how to “decode mathematical knowledge,” “advocate against oppressive mathematical practices,” and “change mathematics from individualistic to collectivist thinking.”45
The real innovation in Seattle, however, is beyond content and curriculum. The district’s planners have begun an unprecedented campaign to encrust every subdivision of the school system with a layer of racial bureaucracy. It begins, as in the universities, with an endless rotation of lectures and training programs, but concludes with the deployment of ideologically driven “Racial Equity Teams” to every campus in the district.46 The program, which currently operates in forty-nine schools, seeks to create “racialized educators,” implement critical pedagogy “in every classroom,” deconstruct “whiteness [and] privilege,” and engage in “anti-racism advocacy in schools.”47 These teams are composed of one administrator and four teachers at each school, who meet regularly, undergo extensive critical pedagogy training, and enforce the ideology across the campus.48
They are the eyes and ears of the bureaucracy, in the same way that political officers in the postcolonial regimes monitored and regulated the practices of local schools. The ideology is the weapon, the bureaucracy is the authority, and the revolution is the goal.
The grounds have already shifted within Seattle Public Schools. In meetings, teachers identify themselves by race and gender identifiers—“Brandon, He/Him, White,” “Nichole, She/Her, Black”—and engage in elaborate rituals and repetitions of the faith. They confess their status as colonizers, promise to “bankrupt their privilege,” and orient their classrooms toward “abolition.”49 They also accumulate power. The bureaucracy subsidizes and rewards individuals who enforce the orthodoxy and, in turn, reinforce the bureaucracy. From ethnomathematics to mandatory “racial equity audits,” education is passed through the filter of politics—and there is no limiting principle.
During his lifetime, Freire had a certain ambivalence about pure identity politics, which had been gaining ground in academic circles. Toward the end of his life, in his book of correspondence to his niece, Letters to Cristina, he bowed to the identity categories of “class, gender, race, and culture,” but warned that “the fight for liberation” could never be “reduced to the fight of women against men, of blacks against whites.” In his rhetoric, Freire strove to provide a basis for unity, prioritizing human universals over fragmented identity categories. “The fight is one of all human beings toward being more,” he wrote. “It is a fight to overcome obstacles to the humanization of all. It is a fight for the creation of structural conditions that make a more democratic society possible.”50
But, at the same time, he could not resist the temptations of sweeping explanations and racial reductionism. When asked why “students of color” had failed to achieve strong educational outcomes even in “so-called progressive societies,” he responded: “The failure of students of color represents the success of a dominant racist power. . . . The failure of black students is not their responsibility, but that of the policies discriminating against them.” That is, the complex reasons for educational disparities—including formative influences such as family, culture, and study habits—could be reduced a priori to a single variable: racism. The problem was that the progressive societies might have adopted a regime of legal equality but had “not yet died to their racist selves or experienced their rebirth as democratic selves.”
Freire’s answer, as always, was more revolution. He believed that left-wing activists must not only seize the “infrastructure” of state institutions but also must continuously work to change the “superstructure” of culture, which inevitably lags behind.51
In practice, however, this process always ends in disappointment: from Guinea-Bissau to the California ghetto, Freire’s theories have never resulted in the meaningful improvement of practical skills, such as reading and writing. They provide a relentless critical function, but not a substantive alternative. But rather than confront these failures on their own terms, the critical pedagogists use them as justification for a permanent revolution against the “cultural invasion” of the dominant class.52 As the ideology exhausts itself logically and empirically, the humanism falls away and vengeance reveals its hideous face.
In the final stretch of his life, Freire recounted in his letters that his vision was still influenced by the ghost stories he had heard as a child, in which God would send the spirits of the oppressors wailing into the darkness of the sugarcane fields. But, as a man, he believed that this retribution must be made real in the world of the flesh. “The ideal is to punish them in history, not in the imagination,” he wrote. “The ideal is in overcoming our weakness and impotence by no longer concerning ourselves with punishing the souls of the unjust, by ‘making them’ wander with cries of remorse. Precisely because it is the live, conscious body of the cruel person that needs to weep, we must punish them in society.”53
This—idealism that has devolved into revenge—is where his revolution would turn.
* * *
Paulo Freire died in 1997 at the Albert Einstein Hospital in São Paulo, Brazil.54 He died a hero of the global Left. In the last stretch of his life, he had traveled the world collecting the accolades of the liberal intelligentsia: the UNESCO Prize for Education for Peace, the King Balduin African Development Prize, and twenty-seven honorary doctorates from institutions scattered across the earth.55
Freire’s legacy is, in some ways, a surprise. History should have reduced Pedagogy of the Oppressed into an ideological curiosity. The revolutionary figures he idealized—Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Guevara—turned out to be monsters. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao laid waste to their own societies in the name of the revolution. Castro and Guevara’s Cuba still clings to state-run communism, but it is a poor, isolated, authoritarian nation. And all of the regimes that Freire advised—Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and El Salvador—abandoned Marxism-Leninism and have sought, sometimes furtively, to make the transition to a market economy and democratic system of government.
And yet, Freire remained unrepentant until the end. The old man, having watched his revolutions fail across the globe, having seen the mass deaths unleashed in the name of utopia, wanted to try once more. In his final works, there is no sign of guilt or introspection, no trace of regret about the regimes he had guided and rationalized.
Long after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Freire still railed against “the intrinsic evil of capitalism” and “bourgeois democracy.” He insisted, just before his death, that “the proclaimed triumph of capitalism and death of socialism actually just underlines the perversity of capitalism on the one hand and the enduring socialist dream on the other, if it is purified, with sacrifice and pain, from authoritarian distortion.”56 He downplayed the atrocities under Stalinism as “historical, philosophical, and epistemological errors,” not intrinsic flaws of state communism. He insisted that his “dream,” his “utopia,” was still possible—it just needed to be purified, purged, reimagined.57
But while Freire failed to institutionalize his ideas in the Marxist-Leninist nations, his work has had a profound influence in the United States—the beating heart of global capitalism.
For the men and women of the Third World, where poverty, hunger, disease, and corruption reigned, Freire’s abstractions offered little sustenance; his call for “committing suicide as a class” was madness.58 But in the First World, insulated from the concrete miseries of the postcolonial societies, Freire’s abstract appeals to liberation, revolution, and socialism have found a receptive audience. American intellectuals took Freire’s concepts as a metaphor, believing that the slums of the “Third World in the First World” provided a justification for, at minimum, a cultural revolution. These writers and activists, maintained by the university system and celebrated in the public schools, imagined themselves as a new vanguard that could finally correct the unfinished business of the twentieth century.
The grave diggers of São Paulo might have buried Paulo Freire’s body,59 but nothing, it seems, could adequately shake the world of his ideas. America might have vanquished the revolution abroad, only to find itself in the midst of a revolution at home.