Pedagogy of the OppressorsPaulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is corrupting our teachers.
Alexander Zubatov
Jul 25, 2022
In waging its ever-escalating campaign to unravel our culture and cherished traditions, one of the left elite’s go-to maneuvers has been to dissimulate the actual content and use of the texts and ideas that animate its movement. This has been painfully obvious in the pushback against the exposure of critical race theory by Christopher Rufo and others on the center-right. Seeking to take advantage of the general population’s ignorance about what critical race theory really is and how its teachings have seeped out into K-12 and college education, academics have sought to portray CRT as an abstruse doctrine taught primarily in law schools. Mainstream journalists, most of whom don’t know any better, have uncritically parroted such disinformation, while absurdly contending conservatives are just trying to silence the teaching of truths about slavery and racism. The fact of the matter, however, is that left-wing elites have every interest in concealing from the populace the content of many of the core texts constituting the kind of education they champion. Critical race theory is only a part of that picture. The far bigger fish that needs to be thrown back into the polluted stream from which it came is known as “critical pedagogy.”
What is “critical pedagogy”? When you hear the “critical” modifier, as in “critical race theory,” “critical legal studies,” or “critical gender studies,” you can be fairly sure its ultimate roots are in “critical theory.” Critical theory refers to the mid-20th century movement to study why a workers’ revolution along the lines Marx predicted had not yet materialized throughout the industrialized societies of the capitalist West, which had been expected to fall like dominoes after the 1917 Russian Revolution and the civilizational cataclysm of World War I. Also known as “Cultural Marxism,” this movement, which I have described at greater length here—composed of such thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and the notorious 60s radical and father of the American New Left, Herbert Marcuse—built upon the work of the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács and the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci to propose that because, contra Marx, much of the proletariat had been successfully entranced by capitalism and the creature comforts and cheap-thrill entertainments (rather than Marxian “immiseration”) it enabled, radicals had to bide their time and plant seeds by taking over elite institutions, using them as platforms to “raise” the consciousness of the working class. Later, in 1967, Marcuse argued expressly that because the white working class was a lost cause for the socialist left, the groundwork for the revolution had to be laid by co-opting “outsiders within the established order,” namely, the “underprivileged” “in the ghettoes” and those “at the opposite pole of society,” among our socio-cultural elites. That blueprint has been followed to the letter, and the institutional and cultural takeover these Frankfurt School fanatics envisioned has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
The explicitly educational branch of the “critical theory” movement, known as “critical pedagogy,” “views teaching,” in the words of Henry A. Giroux, one of its leading lights, “as an inherently political act,” that “reject[s ] the neutrality of knowledge, and insist[s ] that issues of social justice and democracy itself are not distinct from acts of teaching and learning.” As Wikipedia, echoing Giroux himself, tells us, critical pedagogy was “founded by the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire, who promoted it through his 1968 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.”
Though you may be hearing of it for the first time here, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is no obscure tract. It is, rather, a central text in many American graduate schools of education, the institutions—however academically non-rigorous and anti-intellectual they may generally be — where most teachers get credentialed. I first heard about the book and Freire—a Brazilian Marxist and municipal Secretary of Education in São Paulo during the late 1980s and early ’90s —from a 2009 City Journal article by ex-radical Sol Stern. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Stern explained, “was one of the most frequently assigned texts” in philosophy of education courses, having achieved “near-iconic status,” and was required reading for many first-year teaching fellows.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/pedagogy-of-the-oppressors/
