Book Review

Pedagogy of Freedom:

Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage

Author: Paulo Freire

Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield

Place: Lanham, Maryland

Date: 1998

Data: 143p + xxxii

Pedagogy of Freedom is aptly described by Stanley Aronowitz as Paulo Freire's 'last testament'. It states clearly, succinctly, and poetically Freire's educational creed, providing a compelling account of his vision of what it is to be an effective progressive teacher in highly reactionary times. This inspiring book should be read carefully and discussed in the critical manner Freire has long advocated by all who take seriously the task of becoming teachers.

Freire addresses himself explicitly and directly to teachers. He asks what is involved in education and in becoming a teacher who educates, and reflects on educational practice from a 'progressive' perspective (which he defines as 'a point of view which favors the autonomy of the students', p. 21). His account is situated in the concrete reality of present day schooling, within the specific context of 'neoliberal pragmatism' - which Freire critiques and denounces vigorously. As always, the theoretical and normative grounding for his work is in the pursuit of education, which promotes human enhancement - becoming more fully human - for all persons.

The book both states a utopian vision and advances a thoroughgoing critique of the ongoing debasement of education at the hands of 'neoliberal pragmatism', info-capitalist agendas for 'globalization', and a fatalistic, uncritical, and unbridled embrace of technology as the basis for future progress.

With respect to his vision, Freire insists on the importance of maintaining hopefulness and holding on to possible dreams for what education can be. We must not merely capitulate to what education has become under current policy regimes. Our utopian dreams for education must, however, be coherent, substantial and grounded in an ethic of human being and becoming. Freire spells out, justifies, and 'operationalizes' key educational principles and values to be made incarnate in the work and lives of teachers and learners. These include building on learners' 'epistemological curiosity' by means of pedagogy grounded in 'methodological rigor' and other necessary aspects of 'professional teacher competence'. Freire eschews soft practice that yields to some client or market-driven ethos and, in so doing, abdicates the teacher's responsibility to resolve dialectics of freedom and authority, creativity and discipline, curiosity and rigor, spontaneity and method. He highlights the ethics and aesthetics of the educator's craft, and reminds us of the need to make our own practice consistent with our words, to embrace hopefulness and due risk, to believe change is possible, and to retain the right to constructive and productive anger. As always, the key to educative pedagogy is recognizing that education is always and necessarily a form of intervention in the world.

On the other hand, Pedagogy of Freedom is a sober and timely reminder of how wide the gulf has become between an ideal of education involving active, collaborative rigorous and critical engagement with the world in order to know it better and build it more justly; and policy 'models' of schooling which [would] hostage teachers and learners to the demands and alleged 'inevitabilities' of neoliberal visions of 'globalization' and info-capitalism. Each page calls us to recover our vocation and resist the domesticating and dehumanizing tendencies of 'the scourge of neoliberalism' (p. 22). The courage and integrity of Freire's critique reflects the permanent courage and integrity of his life itself. Pedagogy of Freedom is a rallying cry, calling us to 'speak true words' as educators and to disavow excesses of postmodern relativism that effectively nurture the march of intensified injustice and inequality.

An abiding value of this book is that it provides on almost every page clear, concrete and practical examples of the principles and values espoused. There is no mystery or mystification in Pedagogy of Freedom. It is 'straight up'. I share Stanley Aronowitz's view that this is Freire's most important book since Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In light of my own recent experiences in teacher education, I believe we would do well to make this book an integral part of our teacher education programs and to wrestle with it in the spirit it commends: rigorously, critically, methodically, and with a proper ethical concern.

Selected quotations from Pedagogy of Freedom

"This small book is permeated by … the total sense of ethics that is inherent in all forms of educational practice, especially as this practice pertains to the preparation of teachers. Teacher preparation should never be reduced to a form of training. Rather, teacher preparation should go beyond the technical preparation of teachers and be rooted in the ethical formation of both selves and history. But it is important to be clear that I am speaking not about a restricted kind of ethics that shows obedience only to the law of profit. Namely, the ethics of the market." (p. 23)

"To learn … precedes to teach … [T]o teach is part of the very fabric of learning … [T]here is no valid teaching from which there does not emerge something learned and through which the learner does not become capable of recreating and remaking what has been thought … [T]eaching that does not emerge from the experience of learning cannot be leaned by anyone." (p. 31)

"When I enter the classroom I ought to be someone who is open to new ideas, open to questions, and open to the curiosities of the students as well as their inhibitions … I ought to be aware of being a critical and inquiring subject in regard to the task entrusted to me, the task of teaching and not that of transferring knowledge." (p. 49)

"[In] the fatalistic ideology current in neoliberal thought, the victims of which are … the popular classes, [t]he excuse is that nothing can be done to alter the course of events. Unemployment, for example, is [allegedly] inevitable as the world moves into a new end-of-the-century era. Yet the same fatalism does not apply when it is a question of trillions of dollars chasing each other around the globe with the rapidity of faxes, in an insatiable search for even greater profits." (p. 57)

"It's impossible to talk of respect for students … without taking into consideration the conditions in which they are living and the importance of all the knowledge derived from life experience, which they bring with them to school. I can in no way underestimate this knowledge. Or that is worse, ridicule it … As an educator I need to be constantly "reading" the world inhabited by [those with whom] I work, that world that is their immediate context and the wider world of which they are a part." (p. 62, 76)

"… the absence of hope is not the "normal" way to be human. It is a distortion. I am not … first of all a being without hope who may or may not later be converted to hope. On the contrary, I am first a being of hope who, for any number of reasons, may thereafter lose hope. For this reason, as human beings, one of our struggles should be to diminish the objective reasons for that hopelessness that immobilizes us." (pp. 69-70)

"To teach and to learn have to do with the methodically critical work of the teacher instigating the comprehension of something and with the equally critical apprehension on the part of the students." (pp. 106-107)

"Educative practice carried out with feeling and joy does not preclude serious, scientific education and a clear-sighted political consciousness on the part of teachers." (p. 126)