Paulo Freire and the crisis of modernity

Abstract

Brazilian educator Paulo Freire played an influential role in the development of grass-roots religious movements throughout the Third World from the 1960s to 1980s. Partaking of the Enlightenment affirmation of critical thinking as the key emancipatory tool, Freire's pedagogical method has empowered hitherto marginalized subjects. Toward the end of the 1980s, however, postmodernist critiques of Enlightenment rationality as domination have raised some troublesome doubts about the viability of modernist emancipatory projects, including Freire's method. In this article, I reformulate Freire's method to respond to the challenges of postmodernist critiques. I argue that despite some serious shortcomings, the emancipatory impulse behind Freire's pedagogy is worth preserving. Further, I see a revised Freirean approach as a salutary counterpoint to postmodernism's excessive localism and elective affinity with neoliberal capitalism.