Paulo Freire’s Radical Democratic Humanism

Abstract

The name of Paulo Freire has reached near-iconic proportions in the United States, Latin America, and indeed in many parts of Europe. Like the cover comment by Jonathan Kozol on the U.S. edition of Freire’s major statement Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1990), his work has been typically received as a “brilliant methodology of a highly charged political character.” Freire’s ideas have been assimilated to the prevailing obsession of North American education, following a tendency in all the human and social sciences, with methods of verifying knowledge and, in schools, of teaching; that is, transmitting knowledge to otherwise unprepared students. Within the United States, it is not uncommon for teachers and administration to say that they are “using” the Freirean method in classrooms. What they mean by this is indeterminate. Sometimes it merely connotes that teachers try to be “interactive” with students; sometimes it signifies an attempt to structure class time as, in part, a dialogue between the teacher and students; some even mean to “empower” students by permitting them to talk in class without being ritualistically corrected as to the accuracy of their information, their grammar, or their formal mode of presentation, or to be punished for dissenting knowledge. All of these are commendable practices, but they hardly require Freire as a cover.