Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy Henry A. Giroux | Truthout | 2010

 Friends:

Published in 2010, I offer blog reader's Dr. Henry Giroux’s reflection on Paulo Freire that makes clear why the Brazilian educator remains one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed offered not just a literacy method, but a vision of education as a deeply political, moral, and liberatory practice. Especially in fields like education, sociology, and the humanities, I don't think one should graduate without having read this text.

Unlike today’s market-driven models of schooling that reduce learning to test scores, job preparation, and corporate accountability metrics, Freire viewed pedagogy as a project of freedom—an invitation for students to reflect critically, imagine otherwise, and act to transform their world. Giroux laments how contemporary education has largely abandoned this vision, reducing teachers to technicians and classrooms to “dead zones” where critical thought is stifled in favor of test prep and control.

At the heart of Freire’s philosophy is the conviction that education is never neutral. It either domesticates students into existing systems of power or equips them to challenge injustice and reclaim their agency. For Freire, literacy was not merely functional but existential: it was about “reading the world” as much as reading the word, developing self-knowledge, and creating conditions for democratic life. Such an approach is threatening to elites precisely because it cultivates critical citizens rather than compliant workers. Giroux stresses that this remains as urgent today as in Freire’s lifetime, as neoliberal policies and corporate culture continue to erode education’s democratic purpose.

Beyond theory, Giroux also recalls Freire as a person—humble, generous, and full of hope. His politics were inseparable from his humanity: he modeled compassion, joy, and a refusal to surrender to cynicism. For Freire, hope was not naïve optimism but a disciplined practice rooted in history and collective struggle. His legacy challenges educators and citizens alike to see education as a site of possibility, to insist on its role in sustaining democracy, and to nurture the unfinished project of freedom. In Giroux’s words, Freire’s work remains not only relevant but indispensable in the fight against conformity, authoritarianism, and the foreclosure of human potential.

Giroux's article in Truthout originates from Policy Futures in Education, a scholarly journal, where it was published in 2010, as well. I should add that Henry Giroux is also one of the most influential educators in the last and current century, as well. I once heard Giroux lecture while at Stanford and found him every bit as passionate and dynamic in person as he is in his writing.

-Angela Valenzuela

References

Giroux, H. A. (2010). Rethinking education as the practice of freedom: Paulo Freire and the promise of critical pedagogy. Policy futures in education, 8(6), 715-721. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.715

Giroux, H. A. (2010, January 1). Rethinking education as the practice of freedom: Paulo Freire and the promise of critical pedagogy, Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/rethinking-education-as-the-practice-of-freedom-paulo-freire-and-the-promise-of-critical-pedagogy/

Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy

Henry A. Giroux | Truthout | 2010

Paulo Freire is one of the most important critical educators of the 20th century.[1] Not only is he considered one of the founders of critical pedagogy, but he also played a crucial role in developing a highly successful literacy campaign in Brazil before the onslaught of the junta in 1964. Once the military took over the government, Freire was imprisoned for a short time for his efforts. He eventually was released and went into exile, primarily in Chile and later in Geneva, Switzerland, for a number of years. Once a semblance of democracy returned to Brazil, he went back to his country in 1980 and played a significant role in shaping its educational policies until his untimely death in 1997. His book, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," is considered one of the classic texts of critical pedagogy, and has sold over a million copies, influencing generations of teachers and intellectuals both in the United States and abroad. Since the 1980s, there has been no intellectual on the North American educational scene who has matched either his theoretical rigor or his moral courage. Most schools and colleges of education are now dominated by conservative ideologies, hooked on methods, slavishly wedded to instrumentalized accountability measures and run by administrators who lack either a broader vision or critical understanding of education as a force for strengthening the imagination and expanding democratic public life.

As the market-driven logic of neoliberal capitalism continues to devalue all aspects of the public good, one consequence has been that the educational concern with excellence has been removed from matters of equity, while the notion of schooling as a public good has largely been reduced to a private good. Both public and higher education are largely defined through the corporate demand that they provide the skills, knowledge and credentials that will provide the workforce necessary for the United States to compete and maintain its role as the major global economic and military power. Consequently, there is little interest in both public and higher education, and most importantly in many schools of education, for understanding pedagogy as a deeply civic, political and moral practice - that is, pedagogy as a practice for freedom. As schooling is increasingly subordinated to a corporate order, any vestige of critical education is replaced by training and the promise of economic security. Similarly, pedagogy is now subordinated to the narrow regime of teaching to the test coupled with an often harsh system of disciplinary control, both of which mutually reinforce each other. In addition, teachers are increasingly reduced to the status of technicians and deskilled as they are removed from having any control over their classrooms or school governance structures. Teaching to the test and the corporatization of education becomes a way of "taming" students and invoking modes of corporate governance in which public school teachers become deskilled and an increasing number of higher education faculty are reduced to part-time positions, constituting the new subaltern class of academic labor.

But there is more at stake here than a crisis of authority and the repression of critical thought. Too many classrooms at all levels of schooling now resemble a "dead zone," where any vestige of critical thinking, self-reflection and imagination quickly migrate to sites outside of the school only to be mediated and corrupted by a corporate-driven media culture. The major issue now driving public schooling is how to teach for the test, while disciplining those students who because of their class and race undermine a school district's ranking in the ethically sterile and bloodless world of high stakes testing and empirical score cards.[2] Higher education mimics this logic by reducing its public vision to the interests of capital and redefining itself largely as a credentializing factory for students and a Petri dish for downsizing academic labor. Under such circumstances, rarely do educators ask questions about how schools can prepare students to be informed citizens, nurture a civic imagination or teach them to be self-reflective about public issues and the world in which they live. As Stanley Aronowitz puts it:

"Few of even the so-called educators ask the question: What matters beyond the reading, writing, and numeracy that are presumably taught in the elementary and secondary grades? The old question of what a kid needs to become an informed 'citizen' capable of participating in making the large and small public decisions that affect the larger world as well as everyday life receives honorable mention but not serious consideration. These unasked questions are symptoms of a new regime of educational expectations that privileges job readiness above any other educational values."[3]

“Eugenics in Brazil," an online data and teaching tool by Dr. Anadelia Romo

Very interesting and important history that I'm just learning about conducted by Texas State University History Department professor, Dr. Anadelia Romo, titled “Eugenics in Brazil.”   (completed 2015).  I'm understanding that this is part of a larger initiative titled, The Eugenics Archives Project. For those wanting to teach about the history of eugenics, this online database and teaching tool developed by scholars, including Dr. Romo should prove helpful.

Do check out Dr. Romo's vita and publications.

-Angela Valenzuela

The origins of this diversity came from significant disagreement about the nature of race and the many different sources of inspiration for the movement. Thinkers were shaped by far-ranging influences including international scientific currents, as well as the dilemmas of modernization and nation building common to Latin America at the time. Perhaps most importantly, eugenics in Brazil was marked by national concerns, most notably anxieties about Brazil’s long history of racial inter-mixing. Eugenic thought in Brazil therefore filtered and sifted through a variety of competing, often conflicting, ideologies to create a wide-ranging set of ideas that all used the language of eugenics. What linked these ideologies, and what marked Brazil’s eugenic movement as distinctive, were early connections with public health reformers, the failure of “negative” eugenic policies such as sterilization to achieve mainstream dominance, and the overall focus on social, rather than genetic, reforms as the solution to Brazil’s problems.

Brazil’s eugenics movement stands apart as the earliest within Latin America. Like other movements in the region, however, it gained much of its character from its close association with a dynamic public health movement. In fact, the timing of the two movements within Brazil largely coincided, both emerging with energy in the decades of the 1910s and 1920s. Brazil had recently abolished slavery (1888) and established its first republic (1889). Given this recent political and social upheaval, the early decades of the century were dominated by elite concerns about how to create a strong, modern nation despite a population that they regarded as racially problematic, with large contingents of mestiço (mixed) inhabitants alongside indigenous and black populations. Despite the pessimistic views of racial mixing held by political elites, turn-of-the-century intellectuals such as Sílvio Romero and Euclides da Cunha took a largely redemptive view of the issue. Moreover, many medical authorities in the public health movement expanded on this more optimistic interpretation. Brazilian doctors returning from expeditions to the poverty-stricken interior of the country in the early 1910s became convinced that the nation’s problems were rooted in disease and poverty rather than genetic defect or race. These medical reformers endorsed views of neo-Lamarckian genetics, which saw a formative role for the environment and believed in the inheritability of acquired traits. This perspective, along with the general optimism of the public health movement about the potential of Brazil’s population, may have helped to moderate the early years of Brazilian eugenics. While Brazil held the distinction of the establishing the first eugenics organization in Latin America in early 1918 (the São Paulo Eugenics Society, formed by Renato Kehl), its goals at this early juncture focused primarily on propaganda and influencing contemporary marriage laws; adherents remained largely uninterested in negative forms of eugenics that sought to restrict fertility.

While this first organization disbanded in 1919, eugenic ideas and eugenic language continued to be influential amongst those concerned with the fields of education, sanitation, and hygiene, particularly in the discipline of mental hygiene, or preventative psychiatry. By the late 1920s, however, this broad and disparate movement shifted its focus, and some sectors more frequently turned to discussion of negative eugenic measures, such as immigration restrictions and sterilization. Members of this sector, most notably the famous eugenicist and doctor Renato Kehl, moved away from their earlier positions and instead embraced more hardline approaches. Proposals for race-based immigration restrictions gained traction, and though they never passed into law, by 1934 a softer policy of national quotas was passed. In addition, a biological and mental pre-nuptial exam was introduced in the early 1930s. In contrast, proposals for sterilization came under intense criticism, both from Catholics and from those who believed social reform and support for mothers to be a more appropriate route for change. Though this sector of hardliners never came to dominate the eugenics movement as a whole (as the debates of the eugenics congress of 1929 revealed), it nonetheless revealed a significant presence that cannot be reduced to the voice of Kehl alone.

Brazil’s 1929 National Eugenics Congress, its first and last, was remarkable for the range of disagreement about basic premises of eugenics. Some of this rift can be attributed to the rising popularity of Mendelian genetics, which envisioned a much stricter role for heredity than neo-Lamarckians allowed for, but there was nuance even within these approaches. By the time of the 1929 Congress there was no one central orthodoxy to be found, and many of the participating eugenicists spoke prominently in defense of the mestiço. Though the mestiço had been seen in positive terms by early thinkers such as Sílvio Romero, this assessment depended on a view of racial mixing that anticipated a gradual whitening of the population—a premise that still revealed whiteness as an ideal and the end goal. Many at the Congress now questioned ideals of whitening, notably the anthropologist Edgar Roquette-Pinto; he and others instead saw the path for Brazil’s advancement in educational and social reforms. Though these thinkers were far from free from racialism, they nonetheless advocated a route for structural reforms that ventured beyond the biological and proved ultimately dominant in the national climate of the 1930s.

Eugenic thought lingered on in the 1930s, and influenced discussions of immigration reform, as well as provided new impetus for physical education. It lost much of its influence, however, as the decade wore on. The rise of Getúlio Vargas (1930-45) to power through a coup in 1930 created a more centralized state, new social legislation and added repression under the semi-fascist state of the Estado Novo (New State, 1937-45). For eugenicists there was much to appreciate, particularly the regime’s policies of fostering nationalism, identifying potential criminals by physical type, and perfecting bodies through physical education. Yet the regime also embraced rhetoric that privileged racial mixing, and celebrated popular culture with Afro-Brazilian roots. Sociologist Gilberto Freyre encapsulated this new racial thinking in his book Casa-grande e senzala (The Masters and the Slaves) in 1933. His vision of a uniquely harmonious Brazil built on mestiçagem, or racial mixing, became the new dominant understanding of the nation’s past as well as its future. Though this vision ignored stark racial inequalities, and continued to frame race as central to the nation’s path, the myths that he helped to create proved sufficiently useful and seductive to persist (though not without serious challenge) into the present day.

-Anadelia Romo

12 Libros de Paulo Freire para Educar para la Libertad | 12 Books by Paulo Freire on Education for Liberation

Disfrute estos libros en español escritos por el autor ya fallecido Paulo Freire que muchos de nosotros usamos en el aula universitaria. Gracias a la Dra. Aida Hurtado por compartir este tesoro tan maravilloso de cortesía de La Campaña Latinoamericana por el Derecho a la Educación (CLADE).

Enjoy these books in Spanish written by the late author Paulo Freire that many of us use in the university classroom. Thanks to Dr. Aida Hurtado for sharing this wonderful treasure courtesy of The Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education (CLADE).


-Angela Valenzuela

@redclade

Para garantizar una educación emancipadora, Paulo Freire afirmaba que “se debe construir el conocimiento desde las diferentes realidades que afectan a los dos sujetos políticos en acción, aprendiz y maestro” 

Paulo Freire es uno de los representantes de la pedagogía crítica, que ha sido considerada un nuevo camino por el cual las dos partes involucradas en el proceso educativo puedan reflexionar y crear conciencia de los problemas sociales que se viven a diario y que afectan de manera directa e indirecta a las salas de aula.

Así, para que más personas conozcan y apliquen las ideas del pedagogo con miras a una educación para la libertad, compartimos a continuación 12 de sus libros para descargar:

1. Pedagogía del Oprimido
2. Pedagogía de la Esperanza
3. Pedagogía de la Indignación
4. Pedagogía de la Autonomía
5. Cartas a quien pretende enseñar
6. La Educación como Práctica de la Libertad
7. La importancia del acto de leer
8. Hacia una pedagogía de la pregunta
9. ¿Extensión o comunicación? La concientización en el medio rural
10. Pedagogía Erótica
11. Educación y Cambio
12. Educación popular, cultura e identidad desde la perspectiva de Paulo Freire

Agradecemos a la Revista de Educación y Cultura AZ por crear y poner a disposición esta lista de libros.