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

Paulo Freire is one of the most important critical educators of the twentieth 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 colleges 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 interest, one consequence is that the educational concern with excellence has been removed from matters of equity while higher education, once conceptualized as a public good, has been reduced to a private good.Universities are now largely defined through the corporate demand that they provide the skills, knowledge, and credentials to build a workforce that will enable the United States to compete and maintain its role as the major global economic and military power.Consequently, there is little interest in understanding the pedagogical foundation of higher education 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, removed from having any control over their classrooms or school governance structures.Teaching to the test and the corporatization of education become 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, the exploitation of faculty labor, 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 migrates to sites outside of the school only to be mediated and corrupted by a corporate-driven media

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