The Problem of Paulo Freire

While I was engaged in Ph.D. study at Georgia State University I was tasked with reading some bizarre topics. Most were politically motivated and liberal, but I could, if I looked hard enough and long enough, find a remote reason, educationally, why I was reading the topic. But, there was one author that I was forced to read more than most that I could not, no matter how hard and how long I looked, find a reason educationally why I was spending time reading his writings; that author was Paulo Friere.


The one book that I had to read in full was Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Brazilian educator Freire. No matter the professor nor the class, this book and author were referenced more than any other, and for the life of me I could not understand why?

The prompt for these feelings was an article by Sol Stern in City magazine. We seemed to have had similar experiences. Freire uses the term pedagogy yet he never ever writes about anything pedagogical. What he writes about is socialism... how the oppressed have to remove the chains of those oppressing them and overtake them. He advocates all kinds of things from political socialists like Marx and Lenin and never goes near the writings or the thoughts of educators. It is quite bizarre, if you ask me, and part of the problem found in our educational system, and yet another reason why Christians better quickly understand the power contained in education because the enemy does.


Freire's whole book is about changing culture through the youth. He labels his book educational for one reason... to penetrate the minds of our youth when they are most vulnerable. Anytime a mind is engaged in the educational process a mind is extremely vulnerable and easily influenced because of the very nature of education. This is why I believe we Christians ought to be starting new schools and colleges every year; our predecessors did. If you will investigate the colleges and universities of this country, you will find that over 95% of them were started by churches.


I will leave you with a story that proves that God has an sense of humor. During my second semester at Georgia State University in Atlanta, I took a class from a very liberal female professor. During one point in the class she passed a hat around to each student; we, in turn, had to pick a piece of paper out of the hat. On that piece of paper was a name, and that name was the name of the educational theorist on which we were to do an oral and written report. The only name I did not want was Freire, and guess which name I picked... Paulo Freire. I will not even go into how college is suppose to be a liberal arts experience with lots of choices and yet we were being forced to pick out of a hat like middle school students. Anyway, I had a major problem coming up with anything good to say as I disagreed with most of the man's theories. Needless to say... I did not do well on that portion of the class.


While I do not ascribe to all of Stern's views in this article, I do completely agree with his assessment that Freire's views are harmful to teachers and students. Education should not be used for political purposes as Freire advocates quite openly, but if used in that way, education, with its traits of indoctrination and enculturation, will be extremely effective and produce the desired results. Christians must understand this and begin to engage in the great conversations or sit back and watch another generation of our children be swept away by the growing tide of all the "isms" out there. Freire understood the power of education; the question is... do we?