Book Review: Pedagogy of the Oppressed

This is a revised version of a book review of Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed submitted for a course, Native Worldviews, in the Indigenous Learning Program at Lakehead University in the winter of 2015.

It is with a certain sense of nostalgia that, having been aware of Freire’s famous book for decades, I finally found an opportunity to read it. Upon entering the world of the work, I admit I was immediately transported back to the academic, social and political world of the 1960s, ‘70s and 80s (my earlier years in university), where debates about Hegel and Marx, Sartre and Lukács, Fromm and Marcuse, were alive with heat and vitality, and a sense of importance.

I mention this, in part, to wonder over the claim that the book is a ‘classic’ in the sense of having outlived its own time and that of its author. At the current point in time (2015), frankly, it ‘feels’ more like a specialty piece, dependent upon a specialist to mine its durable value for some contemporary concern from the surrounding ore of its original milieu.

Of course, the process of such an historical reflection is in keeping with the subject matter and concern of the book itself. However, the caveat is that it is difficult to see how the specialist in the narrow domain of her current speciality can presume the significance of cultural revolution on the scale of the social totality with which the book and the times in which it was written presumed to address themselves. For example, is it part of the revolutionary reading list of the Idle No More movement in the way it was for the counter-culture of its own era? It would be an interesting meditation to ponder how the cultural concept of a ‘classic’ might be critiqued using the critical categories of the book itself.

The concept of the ‘classic’ on quick perusal suggests two related but not mutually necessary criteria. A ‘classic’ may be the best exemplar of a particular type, genre or era. It may also have something of universal value. Of course, seeking the universal in the particular is a longstanding philosophical issue. It is also what Freire is addressing in historical terms with his reflections on the emergence of the historical human subject within the evolution of social reality.

So is Freire’s work a ‘classic’ in that it speaks to us living here in the northern half of Turtle Island reflecting on Native Worldviews from our contemporary vantage point, a mere temporal distance of three or four decades? Or has the social heat of its primary messages already lost their compelling conviction in our present moment?

First, the point of durability. Freire’s work would seem to be relevant to us, here and now, insofar as the general social relationship of oppression which his entire work revolves around, i.e., colonialism, is still with us, even if it took a somewhat different historical form and path in Canada than in South America.

Thomas Berger’s work, A Long and Terrible Shadow, articulates clearly the themes (“generative themes”?) and categories of European colonization which began to spread across North, South and Central America at the beginning of the sixteenth century. To the extent that Freire is addressing this broad phenomenon, an argument can be made that Freire’s work, while focused on Brazil, is relevant to the categories and tactics of the legacy of colonialism which we in Canada are still dealing with now. In that respect, it could be said to be a ‘classic’ in that it still speaks to us about our widely shared colonial situation.

Many of the categories and tactics in his discussion (conquest, divide and rule, manipulation, cultural invasion, dialogical cooperation, unity for liberation, organization and cultural synthesis) can be drawn into our discussion of colonialism in Canada and the need for a resurgence and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples.

For example, the inherently political and revolutionary nature of education, whether education is paternalistic or liberationist, whether the goal of education is to seek autonomy and responsibility, the need to surmount the internalized images of the oppressor via critical reflection and action, all seem just as relevant today. So are the potential dehumanizing effects of science, technology and money in our era where they have grown even more powerful in their capacity to be used to control and manipulate individuals.

However, there is another vantage point, that of the Native or Indigenous Worldwiew, from which I wonder if we can say that Freire’s work is a ‘classic’. It is this vantage point I wish to emphasize in this short essay. In other words, do we share Freire’s narrative voice or is he speaking from the vantage point of an Other with which we feel compelled to draw out our own significant difference? Is it a ‘classic’ only in the sense that it is an exemplar of its time and from a particular point of view?

The key point which I wish to focus upon then is not the broad colonial categories of similarity, but the, perhaps, more tightly focused point of difference which is important to us, attempting to imagine, to see and to be ourselves, from the standpoint of being Indigenous or living within a Native Worldview. Of course, some such critical reflection is precisely what Freire attempts to consider and articulate, however, are the categories of his reflection really ‘ours’?

The primary categories of tension and release, of oppression and liberation, in Freire’s work, are they not the conceptual categories of the colonial culture? Is the portrayal of the oppressor-oppressed relationship not presented entirely within the philosophical categories of the colonizers’ culture. Subject and object, and their dialectical evolution, are immersed in the categories of European philosophy, flowing from the longstanding debates, as noted above, from Hegel and Marx, to Sartre and Marcuse, and reaching back to the traditions of Ancient, Christian, Medieval and Renaissance philosophies.

Freire is primarily speaking to an audience who is at ‘home’ within this tradition about a culture and society (of South American peasants) that is not. So who are ‘we’ in this conversation that Freire is having? Do we, here, at the mouth of the Kaministiquia River, where the river of time and place flows into the great sea watched over by the serene reality of Nanabozho sleeping, dreaming, meditating, like a caring Grandfather reminding us of who we are, from where we have come, and what our future might be, do we feel entirely at ‘home’ in Freire’s story? Or is Freire’s story, the story of someone for whom ‘home’ is somewhere else, coming to terms with the legacy of his ancestors, trying to reconcile himself with the contradictions of his colonial inheritance?

The central theme in Freire’s story, and what provides it with its drive of tension and release, is that of humanism. Whether it’s the tension of the banking model of education, as depositing info into containers, versus the problem-posing, dialogical model of education, couched in the language of communication with or between equal subjects, rather than between subjects and their objects, or the conceptualization of liberation, as the freedom and equality of human beings, what it is to be human is the central category.

The tension with Indigenous forms of knowledge and being, and how Freire resolves that tension, makes it clear which audience of the two, Euro-American or Native American, Freire himself identifies with. In fact, Freire appears to be a modern-day, pedagogical version of Bartolomé de las Casas arguing, as a member of the colonizing society, for the humane treatment of Indigenous Peoples. The centrepiece of Freire’s argument, like that of las Casas, is where the threshold of the human is to be found. However, the threshold of the human is still the relevant categorical distinction which defines self and other, subject and object.

Like las Casas, Freire is appalled that his fellow colonizing culture is prepared to articulate in its legal, economic, and cultural policies, institutions and actions, a threshold for the human that leaves out Indigenous Peoples. The colonizing society invades Indigenous societies and declares them as non-human, as objects like plants and animals, thus, claiming the right to deprive them of their wealth, rights, and social integrity. And like las Casas, Freire argues that Indigenous Peoples are human and thus must share the standards of liberation as human equals. This is clearly the driving objective of his dialogical theory of pedagogy, of liberation versus domination, the dialogue of subjects versus the manipulation of objects.

It is an interesting speculation (not having the time or space to really demonstrate the point here) to consider if one replaced the word “humanism” with that of “Christianity” wherever the former appears in Freire’s work, whether there would be any great violence to the overall intent of the work. I will assume for the moment, that it would not, and if that be true, it again would demonstrate the convivial vantage point of a shared philosophical and spiritual tradition with las Casas. As such, is Freire’s work a ‘classic’ because it is an outstanding exemplar of the Christian humanist tradition or is it a ‘classic’ because it claims to be ‘universal’ by virtue of the claim to universality of that tradition? If the latter, is it not possible that it is just another permutation of colonial manipulation, a false cultural synthesis which transforms the Other into the cultural categories of the colonial society?

Here is but one of many possible examples: “The man or woman who emerges is a new person, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is superseded by the humanization of all people.”[1] It is not difficult to re-imagine this statement as espousing a Christian ethic of salvation based upon the dialectic of good and evil, Christian and pagan, heaven and hell and the middle kingdom, transubstantiation, etc. Let’s follow Freire when he confronts the otherness of the culture of the South American peasant.

Freire emphasizes the distinction between humans and animals, a key categorical threshold in the European colonial tradition. He notes, repeatedly, that reflection is unique to man and distinguishes him from the animals. Animals are, accordingly, fundamentally “being-in-themselves”.[2] He describes animals as living “submerged” in a world without meaning, without a sense of yesterday and today, they exist in “an overwhelming present”. Animals are ahistorical.[3]

Humans, by contrast, separate themselves from the world, by objectifying it, through symbols and transforming actions. Animals adapt, they do not transform. And to use the specific terminology of the tradition Freire follows, “Only human beings are praxis”[4], where praxis for Freire connotes the locus of transformation as the intersection of theory and practice, idea and action, reflection and material being, etc.

In laying out the “decoding” process where investigators interact with “the people” dialogically (the pedagogical teacher-student relationship), whereby the peasants emerge as Subjects of their own transformation, Freire makes the following observations:

The object of dialogical action is to make it possible for the oppressed…to opt to transform an unjust reality…[this] unquestionably requires class consciousness. However, the submersion in reality which characterizes the peasants of Latin American means that consciousness of being an oppressed class must be preceded…by achieving the consciousness of being oppressed individuals.[5]

He goes on:

Proposing as a problem, to a European peasant, the fact that he or she is a person might strike them as strange. This is not true of Latin-American peasants…whose gestures to some extent simulate those of the animals and the trees, and who often consider themselves equal to the latter.[6]

And he continues:

In order for the oppressed to unite, they must first cut the umbilical cord of magic and myth which binds them to the world of oppression; the unity which links them to each other must be of a different nature…[7]

Finally, regarding the goal of revolutionary leaders and the construction of this “different nature”, Freire argues:

The solution lies in synthesis: beyond palliative solutions to engage in authentic transformation of reality in order to humanize women and men.[8]

The point of this survey of remarks by Freire is to point out that when he confronts the otherness of the cultural worldview of the Latin-American peasant, submerged and immersed in the world of plants and animals, his response is to first ‘educate’ the peasant into seeing himself or herself as an individual person and part of a class of dialogical subjects that are being treated as objects by their colonial oppressors. Thus, when confronting the cultural otherness of these Indigenous Peoples, Freire first and foremost calls for the necessity of their transformation into individual subjects separated from the object world of plants and animals, and then re-organized into the dialogical class of human beings in preparation for conversion into universally free human subjects.

Again, this does not sound dramatically different from the call for conversion of the idolatry of pagans worshiping their particular idols in favour of the one, true and universal god of Christianity gathering them in the arms of mother church. In other words, the old colonial wine, served up in a new colonial bottle with a new colonial label: the pedagogy of the oppressed calling for a neo-Christian, humanist conversion of peasants to become and to be treated as European Christians.

This is not to argue that Freire’s critique is of no value. Quite the contrary, there is much here to digest about critiquing colonial models of education, colonial structures and colonial tactics. Rather, it is simply to argue that, like las Casas, it represents a critique from within the colonizing culture that never ceases to assume the value standards of the colonizing culture. He points out the internal contradictions of that culture from within that culture, arguing that Latin-American peasants should be treated as human (once converted), where the standard of human is that of a European colonial.

So, I will argue, Freire’s account does not represent a dialogue with Indigenous Peoples, it still is largely a dialogue about them. It deploys exclusively the conceptual categories of European culture, such as, human and non-human, pagan idolatry and universal Christian humanism, capital and labour, subject and object, etc. Where Freire is valuable then, is as an internal critique of the internal contradictions of Euro-American colonialism, science and technology, capital and labour, Christian humanism and monetized societies, and so on.

He is not so valuable when asking about the reconciliation of such Euro-American colonial societies and the Indigenous cultures and societies they colonized. Despite calling for a dialogue with Indigenous Peoples, Freire’s book is not an example of that dialogue, because when he encounters symptoms of Indigenous culture, his solution is to build a conceptual fence around them, brand them as near-animals in need of conversion into persons, and then develop a decoding technology which will convert and transform them into universal human subjects - like so many fish caught in the nets of salvation on the shores of Galilee.