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queenluaFirst off: the foreward to the 25th century anniversary edition of this book is worth the price of admission all on its own. Normally you'd expect a foreward to be a somewhat-dry account of the context & dialogue around the work, right? Instead, this foreward is just this translator guy getting SO MAD on behalf of his bro Freire. It's just a solid 35 pages of this dude being like, "here's some dude who claims to be doing critical pedagogy, but actually this dude sucks shit, I hate him" and "here's some high school in Arizona that banned Friere's book, how dare, what shitlords." (Not that I approve of high schools banning books, but like, one principal being a jackass in some random US town happens every other Tuesday, lol; feels like a bit of a non-event compared to some of the other stuff...!)
Said foreward is even funnier when you get to the main text, because Friere himself is so mild and calm compared to foreward guy. Like, may we all have a friend willing to fight literally everyone on our behalf, this dude rules.
Anyway. This book has been on my list since aaaall the way back in early 2020, when I read The Charisma Machine.
That book described an ambitious-but-ultimately-shortsighted education venture, One Laptop Per Child, which targeted kiddos in the global south. In passing, that book's author noticed that the OLPC administrators (both the ur-admins in Cambridge, MA, and the boots-on-the-ground very-enthusiastic urban-cosmopolitan guys in Paraguay) were huge fans of revolutionary-education-y books such as Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
I'd never heard of the book before, so I noted it down, and the name kept coming up in various contexts over the coming months, so I kept nudging it up the to-read list, and now here we are.
Going in, what I knew was:
* Paulo Friere has a pretty incredible story: in Brazil, he developed a program for increasing literacy among the poor, said program had staggeringly effective results (like, "we can get these illiterate farmworkers literate in ~45 days" effective), which naturally led to them wanting to do cool things like vote, unionize, generally advocate for themselves, etc. This is good for the planet and humanity but bad if your country gets right-wing-coup'd, which, uh, is exactly what happened, and Friere had to go do the living-in-exile thing, but he wrote this book about his educational theories while he was at it.
* This book is apparently very widely taught in various graduate programs, particularly in education programs, particularly in elite-ish schools, from ~1980s onward.
* L I B E R A T I O N T H E O L O G Y B A B E Y
* ...which is to say, Paulo Friere can be read as a forerunner of / adjacent to the liberation theology movement, a group of mostly-South-American mostly-Catholic peeps who advocate using the church to actively aid/liberate the poor (like, in fundamental/structural/political ways), and it's a group I've found fascinating ever since that one time I wound up chatting with a liberation theology guy at a bar for like four hours^. Like, "form a union for Jesus" is about the coolest implementation of Christian theology i can think of, these dudes rule
^ god sometimes i miss living in a city that was absolutely swarming with academics, the bars were so good
In general, what I hoped for was nitty-gritty deets on what made Friere's literacy program so effective. That... is not the point of this book, actually. There are glimpses of it, here and there, but Freire's much more interested in his pedagogical theory.
Basically, the breakdown of the book is like:
-> 20% cool insights from practical experience: When Friere does go into specifics and case studies, he describes some honestly-pretty-neat techniques for doing anthropological fieldwork, education, etc, some of which are commonplace nowadays but probably weren't in his time. For instance, he describes how starting a project with the goal of "reducing alcoholism in this population" would be totally wrong, because you haven't bothered spending time talking to people in the community and asking their own thoughts on their situation (in as neutral a way as possible, so as to not irresponsible push the responses some particular direction; he has some tips for that). By doing this sort of field work in one case, they got the surprising insight that "dudes who drank too much" were admired by the community—because, people saw the drinkers as people with hard jobs and heavy responsibilities, and thus were driven to drink because they were the hardest workers. Ergo, you don't just barge in and put up posters about DRINKING IS BAD; that kind of shaming campaign would be exactly wrongheaded. Helping ease those heavy workloads may be a good start instead. This is cool stuff and I wish the book were more of this! Instead we get...
-> 60% theory blah blah blah: A lot of this reads like classical Marxist analysis applied to education. Well, actually, it's that but with a pretty charming emphasis on how everything begins & ends in love. As someone with hippie-dippy-Girl-Scout tendencies, it's kinda heartwarming how much this dude believes the heart of the revolution is love for the people, how much he emphasizes that authentic love & trust between people is the only way to break down harmful oppressor/oppressed dynamics for good... his stated end-goal is "the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love." D'awww.
Anyway, the basic overview of this bit is:
A lot of these ideas are "in the water supply" now, albeit in often simplified or bastardized variants. (It's funny to see Friere using "critical thinking" here in a very specific and technical way, and then log back onto Tumblr, where "critical thinking" instead means "if you read anything with Problematic Content TM you are a bad person," lmao.) In college, a lot of my more innovative professors had started experimenting with "flipped classroom" teaching, which incorporated some of these ideas (and, e.g., had really stunningly good results for some of the "intro to proof-based math" stuff), and I know high schools that have made more of an effort to meet their communities where they are instead of just ramming their preconceived notions down the students' throats.
But taken as a whole, as a theory/mental model for revolutionary change, what's outlined here seems... just okay? In the sense of, I think it has explanatory power for some situations but not others, and since Friere doesn't get into specifics, I can never tell exactly how universal or how caveated he expects these ideas to be. For example:
-> Freire seems to argue that it's specifically this type of method, and this kind of ideological awakening, that led to his great success in Brazil... but one wonders if any sufficiently charismatic doctrine would've sufficed just as well. Like, is "becoming more human + recognizing one's oppressors" absolutely integral to his methodology? or would any sufficiently appealing idea have sufficed? Like, idk, people have gotten really jazzed and done remarkable things motivated by revolution, but they've also done it purely in the context of religious faith, or out of a desire for status, or out of some community feeling...
-> Freire emphasizes that, while revolutionary leaders may come from a bougie/empowered class (and indeed, they often do, for various reasons), it's important that they fully identify with the oppressed / the people they're trying to help, because otherwise they're just gonna replicate the same relationship with a slightly more humanitarian veneer. (It's the “if you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together” thing.) But he doesn't seem to offer much guidance on what this fully-identifying process look like, how to make sure you're not just being condescending or manipulative or wasting time. Like, I don't think the OLPC people were charlatans or acting in bad faith, particularly the Paraguayans helping run the program, but the disconnect was still there, and if the OLPC staff were to look at this book for an answer on "what should we have done differently," I think the answers they get would be a little too vague/abstract to be helpful.
And—more fundamentally—I'm not sure how to reconcile Friere's "oh look, I'm not teaching them in an authoritarian way, I'm just posing problems so the people will naturally realize their oppressed state" thing, versus "okay sure but you do have an end-goal here, right, like, no one is Socratic method-ing totally in a vacuum, you as a facilitator are definitely putting a finger on the scale to lead them to some set of conclusions"... Like, I dunno, I've witnessed the "highly-educated highly-confident academic enters a poor/struggling community and tells them that they're being oppressed" thing before, and way too often it ends up being... kinda condescending? Maybe they are the No True Scotsmen, but if so, I'd like more details on what a true scotsman looks like versus doesn't, I guess.
These underdeveloped aspects are frustrating because Freire seems like a pretty smart and nuanced guy; he knows how to hedge his claims without being timid; I actually get the feeling that he probably thought about these problems! (e.g., he makes passing asides several times to the effect of, "of course you have to have some kind of bureaucracy/organizational structure for core functions of revolutionary governance, I'm not saying there should be chaos," and I'm like, yeah bro, tell me more!!! but then he does not tell me more!!!^) But since I can't corner him and ask, all I've got is what's on the page.
^ That aspect did remind me of the Eritrean freedom fighters as described in Michela Wrong's history of the region, which examined this tension in a satisfactory way. The nature of the work, e.g. expelling the shitlords who took over your country, did require a hierarchy and command structure that wouldn't be unfamiliar to any right-wing army. But the ways in which they strove to legitimately structure their army as a league of equals, their commitment to gender equality, commitment to various methods of moderating or making decisions, were really interesting and legitimately different and gave me a ton to think about... I think I'm just the kind of person who thinks better in terms of histories and case studies than theory, haha.
-> 20% "oof that aged poorly": It's, uh, hard not to raise your hackles a bit when Freire breezily goes on about the necessity of a "cultural revolution," and how of course a cultural revolution is not oppressive because you're only righting wrongs, see, and uh... big yikes! But, in fairness, China's own rather ill-advised implementation of this idea hadn't yet happened when Friere first wrote the book, so. Okay, dude couldn't predict the future and was kinda naive; I'll give him a pass. (People in the year of our lord 2021 who act like this is a simple and solved problem, however, do not get a pass.)
Anyway. Skimming all this over now, I probably sound more negative than I actually am. It wasn't the book I expected, and in general I find it easier to grapple with this sort of thing when it's in the realm of concrete histories and case studies. But! it was quite readable overall; and it was really nice to see the origins of a lot of concepts that get kicked around casually in their original context, and it'd probably make for great class discussion. Looking over my highlights now, the translator's foreward actually had a ton of really interesting insights in between the GETTIN SO MAD FOR FRIERE bits, especially wrt the structure of relief efforts abroad vs what we're willing to do at home; and the afterword, where they just interview a bunch of educators and ask stuff like "hey so what would a Frierean school look like," was fun stuff.
So, yeah, that's the book!
Said foreward is even funnier when you get to the main text, because Friere himself is so mild and calm compared to foreward guy. Like, may we all have a friend willing to fight literally everyone on our behalf, this dude rules.
Anyway. This book has been on my list since aaaall the way back in early 2020, when I read The Charisma Machine.
That book described an ambitious-but-ultimately-shortsighted education venture, One Laptop Per Child, which targeted kiddos in the global south. In passing, that book's author noticed that the OLPC administrators (both the ur-admins in Cambridge, MA, and the boots-on-the-ground very-enthusiastic urban-cosmopolitan guys in Paraguay) were huge fans of revolutionary-education-y books such as Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
I'd never heard of the book before, so I noted it down, and the name kept coming up in various contexts over the coming months, so I kept nudging it up the to-read list, and now here we are.
Going in, what I knew was:
* Paulo Friere has a pretty incredible story: in Brazil, he developed a program for increasing literacy among the poor, said program had staggeringly effective results (like, "we can get these illiterate farmworkers literate in ~45 days" effective), which naturally led to them wanting to do cool things like vote, unionize, generally advocate for themselves, etc. This is good for the planet and humanity but bad if your country gets right-wing-coup'd, which, uh, is exactly what happened, and Friere had to go do the living-in-exile thing, but he wrote this book about his educational theories while he was at it.
* This book is apparently very widely taught in various graduate programs, particularly in education programs, particularly in elite-ish schools, from ~1980s onward.
* L I B E R A T I O N T H E O L O G Y B A B E Y
* ...which is to say, Paulo Friere can be read as a forerunner of / adjacent to the liberation theology movement, a group of mostly-South-American mostly-Catholic peeps who advocate using the church to actively aid/liberate the poor (like, in fundamental/structural/political ways), and it's a group I've found fascinating ever since that one time I wound up chatting with a liberation theology guy at a bar for like four hours^. Like, "form a union for Jesus" is about the coolest implementation of Christian theology i can think of, these dudes rule
^ god sometimes i miss living in a city that was absolutely swarming with academics, the bars were so good
In general, what I hoped for was nitty-gritty deets on what made Friere's literacy program so effective. That... is not the point of this book, actually. There are glimpses of it, here and there, but Freire's much more interested in his pedagogical theory.
Basically, the breakdown of the book is like:
-> 20% cool insights from practical experience: When Friere does go into specifics and case studies, he describes some honestly-pretty-neat techniques for doing anthropological fieldwork, education, etc, some of which are commonplace nowadays but probably weren't in his time. For instance, he describes how starting a project with the goal of "reducing alcoholism in this population" would be totally wrong, because you haven't bothered spending time talking to people in the community and asking their own thoughts on their situation (in as neutral a way as possible, so as to not irresponsible push the responses some particular direction; he has some tips for that). By doing this sort of field work in one case, they got the surprising insight that "dudes who drank too much" were admired by the community—because, people saw the drinkers as people with hard jobs and heavy responsibilities, and thus were driven to drink because they were the hardest workers. Ergo, you don't just barge in and put up posters about DRINKING IS BAD; that kind of shaming campaign would be exactly wrongheaded. Helping ease those heavy workloads may be a good start instead. This is cool stuff and I wish the book were more of this! Instead we get...
-> 60% theory blah blah blah: A lot of this reads like classical Marxist analysis applied to education. Well, actually, it's that but with a pretty charming emphasis on how everything begins & ends in love. As someone with hippie-dippy-Girl-Scout tendencies, it's kinda heartwarming how much this dude believes the heart of the revolution is love for the people, how much he emphasizes that authentic love & trust between people is the only way to break down harmful oppressor/oppressed dynamics for good... his stated end-goal is "the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love." D'awww.
Anyway, the basic overview of this bit is:
* people become dehumanized when they're oppressed (also, the oppressors themselves get fucked up by this process, since they have to pull off the mental trick of valuing ownership/objects/materialism more than the humanity of their fellow humans)
* dehumanized people struggle to meaningfully engage with the world, because they're trained/taught/coerced by everything around them into accepting their misery as Just The Way Things Are TM
* if they realize they're being oppressed, and recognize who, specifically, their oppressors are, they can become human again and work to change this state of affairs
* (note that it's important that this is not just a power grab; if you become "fully human" you should not want to become the oppressor and just repeat the cycle; you should instead want to end oppression altogether)
* education can help with this process, but only the right kind of education
* in particular, Friere rails on the "banking" model of education where the teacher talks and students listen, because it encourages passivity and discourages meaningful engagement with the material, parallels oppressor/oppressed dynamics elsewhere, etc
* he advocates more Socratic-method-ish teaching, where the teacher is more of a facilitator, presenting problems to the students, asking questions, and learning with them and presenting stuff relevant to their situation/feelings/etc instead of just filling their heads with rote knowledge that they may not want or need
* and the bulk of the remaining material is various caveats and things to watch out for—e.g. a variation on that "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality seems like oppression" thing; warnings that private charity and goodwill are insufficient for truly radical change because it's the power relationship that needs to change, not just the amount of money sloshing around; it's important for the oppressed to not collapse into petty infighting because that generally just means the people in power win, etc etc
A lot of these ideas are "in the water supply" now, albeit in often simplified or bastardized variants. (It's funny to see Friere using "critical thinking" here in a very specific and technical way, and then log back onto Tumblr, where "critical thinking" instead means "if you read anything with Problematic Content TM you are a bad person," lmao.) In college, a lot of my more innovative professors had started experimenting with "flipped classroom" teaching, which incorporated some of these ideas (and, e.g., had really stunningly good results for some of the "intro to proof-based math" stuff), and I know high schools that have made more of an effort to meet their communities where they are instead of just ramming their preconceived notions down the students' throats.
But taken as a whole, as a theory/mental model for revolutionary change, what's outlined here seems... just okay? In the sense of, I think it has explanatory power for some situations but not others, and since Friere doesn't get into specifics, I can never tell exactly how universal or how caveated he expects these ideas to be. For example:
-> Freire seems to argue that it's specifically this type of method, and this kind of ideological awakening, that led to his great success in Brazil... but one wonders if any sufficiently charismatic doctrine would've sufficed just as well. Like, is "becoming more human + recognizing one's oppressors" absolutely integral to his methodology? or would any sufficiently appealing idea have sufficed? Like, idk, people have gotten really jazzed and done remarkable things motivated by revolution, but they've also done it purely in the context of religious faith, or out of a desire for status, or out of some community feeling...
-> Freire emphasizes that, while revolutionary leaders may come from a bougie/empowered class (and indeed, they often do, for various reasons), it's important that they fully identify with the oppressed / the people they're trying to help, because otherwise they're just gonna replicate the same relationship with a slightly more humanitarian veneer. (It's the “if you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together” thing.) But he doesn't seem to offer much guidance on what this fully-identifying process look like, how to make sure you're not just being condescending or manipulative or wasting time. Like, I don't think the OLPC people were charlatans or acting in bad faith, particularly the Paraguayans helping run the program, but the disconnect was still there, and if the OLPC staff were to look at this book for an answer on "what should we have done differently," I think the answers they get would be a little too vague/abstract to be helpful.
And—more fundamentally—I'm not sure how to reconcile Friere's "oh look, I'm not teaching them in an authoritarian way, I'm just posing problems so the people will naturally realize their oppressed state" thing, versus "okay sure but you do have an end-goal here, right, like, no one is Socratic method-ing totally in a vacuum, you as a facilitator are definitely putting a finger on the scale to lead them to some set of conclusions"... Like, I dunno, I've witnessed the "highly-educated highly-confident academic enters a poor/struggling community and tells them that they're being oppressed" thing before, and way too often it ends up being... kinda condescending? Maybe they are the No True Scotsmen, but if so, I'd like more details on what a true scotsman looks like versus doesn't, I guess.
These underdeveloped aspects are frustrating because Freire seems like a pretty smart and nuanced guy; he knows how to hedge his claims without being timid; I actually get the feeling that he probably thought about these problems! (e.g., he makes passing asides several times to the effect of, "of course you have to have some kind of bureaucracy/organizational structure for core functions of revolutionary governance, I'm not saying there should be chaos," and I'm like, yeah bro, tell me more!!! but then he does not tell me more!!!^) But since I can't corner him and ask, all I've got is what's on the page.
^ That aspect did remind me of the Eritrean freedom fighters as described in Michela Wrong's history of the region, which examined this tension in a satisfactory way. The nature of the work, e.g. expelling the shitlords who took over your country, did require a hierarchy and command structure that wouldn't be unfamiliar to any right-wing army. But the ways in which they strove to legitimately structure their army as a league of equals, their commitment to gender equality, commitment to various methods of moderating or making decisions, were really interesting and legitimately different and gave me a ton to think about... I think I'm just the kind of person who thinks better in terms of histories and case studies than theory, haha.
-> 20% "oof that aged poorly": It's, uh, hard not to raise your hackles a bit when Freire breezily goes on about the necessity of a "cultural revolution," and how of course a cultural revolution is not oppressive because you're only righting wrongs, see, and uh... big yikes! But, in fairness, China's own rather ill-advised implementation of this idea hadn't yet happened when Friere first wrote the book, so. Okay, dude couldn't predict the future and was kinda naive; I'll give him a pass. (People in the year of our lord 2021 who act like this is a simple and solved problem, however, do not get a pass.)
Anyway. Skimming all this over now, I probably sound more negative than I actually am. It wasn't the book I expected, and in general I find it easier to grapple with this sort of thing when it's in the realm of concrete histories and case studies. But! it was quite readable overall; and it was really nice to see the origins of a lot of concepts that get kicked around casually in their original context, and it'd probably make for great class discussion. Looking over my highlights now, the translator's foreward actually had a ton of really interesting insights in between the GETTIN SO MAD FOR FRIERE bits, especially wrt the structure of relief efforts abroad vs what we're willing to do at home; and the afterword, where they just interview a bunch of educators and ask stuff like "hey so what would a Frierean school look like," was fun stuff.
So, yeah, that's the book!
