Wednesday with Pascal: Critical Pedagogy--Threat or Menace?

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is currently in isolation after testing positive for COVID. In his absence—and rather than let Professor Arguendo continue his recent tirade—I offer the following.}

“There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education functions as an instrument to bring about either conformity or freedom.” (Paulo Freire)

“Is our children learning?” (George W. Bush)

Watch out, liberal elites: first, Christopher Rufo exposed your CRT and your grooming behaviors, and now Alexander Zubatov is spilling the beans on your “critical pedagogy”. “Left-wing elites,” he writes, “have every interest in concealing from the populace the content of many of the core texts constituting the kind of education they champion. Critical race theory is only a part of that picture. The far bigger fish that needs to be thrown back into the polluted stream from which it came is known as “critical pedagogy.”

Zubatov provides a quick primer on “critical theory” in general (hint: it’s “cultural Marxism” and it hates you) before tackling the pedagogical issue, which he does with evident gusto:

The explicitly educational branch of the “critical theory” movement, known as “critical pedagogy,” “views teaching,” in the words of Henry A. Giroux, one of its leading lights, “as an inherently political act,” that “reject[s] the neutrality of knowledge, and insist[s] that issues of social justice and democracy itself are not distinct from acts of teaching and learning.” As Wikipedia, echoing Giroux himself, tells us, critical pedagogy was “founded by the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire, who promoted it through his 1968 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” 

One is not surprised to learn that Freire was a Marxist whose seminal book was laced with citations from “Marx, Lenin, Mao, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro, as well as the radical intellectuals Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and Georg Lukács.” ¹

Zubatov is surely correct when he says that Freire occupies a “canonical place within the American academic canon.” Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a classic, and it has indeed been highly influential, as Zubatov disapprovingly confirms:

In 2016, a Google Scholar analysis found Freire’s book to be the third most-widely cited publication within the social sciences. Just last year, Columbia University, home to Teachers College, one of the nation’s top schools of education, celebrated Freire’s centenary on September 19, 2021 by creating the Paolo Freire Initiative at Columbia University, with an annual birthday event open to the public, a “Freire Scholars program” to fund research into his work, a year-long series of lectures, an announcement describing Freire's work as "foundational" and "closely aligned to the mission of Columbia University and Teachers College”.

Theories of pedagogy aside—should we think of students as empty vessels to be filled or should we encourage them to be active participants in the pursuit of, and creation of, knowledge—Zubatov insists that “Freire’s true goal is not education at all; it is, rather, revolution. The ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ is no mere monkish exercise in the pursuit of erudition and the contemplation of higher things. Liberation is ‘the objective to be achieved.’ The student learns through ‘participation in the revolutionary process,’ as ‘the revolutionary process is eminently educational in character.’ What starts as dialogue with the oppressed transforms, before long, into ‘cultural revolution’ as ‘a necessary continuation of the dialogical cultural action which must be carried out before the revolution reaches power.’  

It never ceases to amaze me how frightened conservatives are of texts written by revolutionaries (or would-be revolutionaries) during revolutionary (or faux-revolutionary) times, as if such texts might not contain useful observations or ideas apart from their revolutionary fervor; or as if mere exposure to them guaranteed that the ideas they contain would be unquestioningly assimilated by students, taken as gospel, and pursued to their logical conclusion(s).

Whatever his intentions, Paulo Freire did not start a revolution with Pedagogy of the Oppressed or in the course of his subsequent (and distinguished) career. ² He did, however, give people a lot to think about; and Zubatov surely understands the danger of that. Once people start thinking for themselves, who knows what they'll come up with?

As is the norm for today’s political/ideological Right, Zubatov waxes hyberbolic, declaring America’s education situation “an emergency”.  He is exceptionally candid in his recommended response:

Whether masquerading under names like “social justice teaching,” “antiracist teaching,” “culturally responsive education” or “promoting diversity, equity and inclusion,” critical pedagogy, wheeling along its Trojan horse of Marxist revolution, has infiltrated our schools and our minds. Purging it and its practitioners from our midst is not an option; it is an emergency. ³

I am not sure why critical theory and critical pedagogy, pernicious as they may be, constitute an emergency right now; if Zubatov is correct, those doctrines have been force-fed to Americans since 1968. We have had, that is, over fifty years of Marxist indoctrination in our schools, and yet we are still not living either in a gulag or in a workers’ paradise.

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Pedagogy of the Oppressors - The American Conservative

¹ I would not be surprised if Freire had also snuck in a reference or two to John Dewey and A.S. Neill.

² Paulo Freire - Wikipedia It is remarkable that Freire, a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist revolutionary and a clear and present danger to our way of life, received honors from such unlikely places as the University of Nebraska (Omaha), Claremont Graduate University, and the University of Illinois (Chicago); and that he and his wife were also formally recognized as “Outstanding Christian Educators”.

³ “Purging it and its practitioners from our midst”: this is cancel-culture on steroids.  

The most dangerous man in the world, next to Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse