Paulo Freire’s first wife, Elza, died in 1986. He was 65. His best-known work had been published nearly 20 years before and had established his reputation worldwide. But now he fell into a state of near despair, and was rescued only through the loving support of his second wife, Ana Maria Araujo (Nita), who worked steadily to encourage him and keep him going, and who since his death has devoted much energy to promoting his ideas. Pedagogy of Commitment is the most recent in a succession of works she has prepared for publication, collecting papers, speeches and symposia given by Freire in the nine years before his death in 1997.
Freire’s ideas about education were set out in his major works in the 1970s – most notably in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which established his reputation as a revolutionary thinker. The book was dedicated ‘To the oppressed, and to those who suffer with them and fight at their side’. He wrote:
No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption. (Freire, 2012: 54)
Freire argued that teachers were no longer to be seen as messengers or evangelists, imparting knowledge to the ignorant (the notorious ‘banking model’ of education). Instead, they were to work alongside the learners, sharing and learning with them, enabling them to recognize their own cultural values and articulate them. Freire scornfully rejected the banking model, which constructed the learners as empty-headed, sullenly waiting to have knowledge drilled into them through the rote learning of the values, skills and information of the oppressive group, and teachers as the ambassadors of the dominant culture, the knowledge they imparted being merely instrumental in securing the learners’ cultural and political subordination. But Freire made one exception in his condemnation of the banking model: literacy was, unashamedly, a gift. Through literacy the oppressed were given a tool. They could then do with it whatever they chose, including the dangerously liberating political task of making their values and their programmes known to their oppressors. And they could take control of their own education:
apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other. (Freire, 2012: 71–72)
These ideas were revolutionary. They formed the basis for what quickly became known as ‘critical pedagogy’, with its thunderous announcement that
[i]t is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice. For this to happen, a total denouncement of fatalism is necessary. We are transformative beings and not beings for accommodation. (Freire, 2012: 56)
Amongst others, Peter McLaren, Mike Apple and Patti Lather (all, interestingly, early keynote speakers at the Discourse, Power, Resistance conferences) developed these ideas into a formidable critique of the prevailing educational theory and practice, encouraging and empowering learners to challenge and question what they were told so as to uncover there the inscription of the dominant ideology. Education would be a weapon for the transformation of both the wider society and the individuals within it. Education would be a force for change.
‘Weapon’, ‘force’ – these metaphors remind us that education has been, and still is, a site of contest – a battlefield where rival ideologies struggle. Teachers and learners are in the thick of the struggle, which has been carried on with increasing determination in recent years as the likes of Michael Gove and Michael Wilshaw in the UK (whenever they can take time off from attacking one another) have worked to subordinate all aspects of education to the neo-liberal agenda. The oppressed are no longer only the illiterate rural peasantry in South American countries. Increasingly, and with justification, teachers have come to recognize themselves as included amongst the oppressed. As recently as December 2011, Wilshaw, taking up his post as leader of the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, told education managers and policymakers that: ‘If anyone says to you that “staff morale is at an all-time low”1 you will know you are doing something right’ Teachers and learners together are nowadays oppressed – hence the enduring relevance of the concluding words of Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
The oppressor elaborates his theory of action without the people, for he stands against them. Nor can the people – as long as they are crushed and oppressed, internalizing the image of the oppressor – construct by themselves the theory of their liberating action. Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders – in their communion, in their praxis – can this theory be built. (Freire, 2012: 73)
Where does the present work – Pedagogy of Commitment – belong, and what contribution does it make, in this ongoing contest? It must be said that there is little here that breaks new ground. By the late 1980s, when the first of the speeches and seminars printed here were recorded, Freire was riding on his immense reputation, and was losing his way. Some of the texts collected here record the tired, perhaps disheartened observations of a public figure with little new to tell us, who seems at times to have lost sight of the vision that inspired him in those early years. We would not have expected this, for example: ‘What is the teacher’s task? In simple terms, we might say that the teacher’s task is to teach, and the students’ task is to learn’ (Freire, 2014: 15). Or, more disconcertingly:
There is something more that is essential to the educative situation. That something more is the curricular content, the programmatic elements of the school, which I, as a teacher, have the obligation to teach, and the students have the obligation to learn. (18)
Can this be Freire? Later, he has things to say about the way teachers dress: ‘They should always be clean, have a pretty dress, tidy clothing’ (64). And what about this bald statement: ‘When you instruct, you educate; when you educate, you instruct… there’s… no learning without teaching’ (83)? No reader of Freire’s major works is going to like reading these tired and traditional views, and to be made to acknowledge how far Freire has come and how thoroughly he has lost his way. He tells a seminar audience: ‘I apologize for my apparent lack of humility, but I still maintain that Freire’s days aren’t over’ (69). We can entirely agree. But the Freire whose days are not over is not the speaker here. This speaker is too accustomed to fame, to the huge audiences gathered to listen to him with uncritical rapture – a footnote tells us that 3500 educators had come to hear him on that day (31). ‘I will be dying in little time’, he tells this audience in 1996 (25). He died the following year. It is troubling to glimpse him in these last years. We should be grateful that these later presentations are published so that the rounded figure of this wonderful man can be fully appreciated, but we will not find here anything to remind us of the message that set the world of education ablaze in the 1970s.
