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]