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Carmel Borg (Ed.) L-Edukazzjoni hi Politika: Kitbiet Freire. Horizons, 2013. 416 pp.
This is not the first text dedicated to Paolo Freire by members of the Faculty of Education at the University of Malta. As Henry Giroux reminds us, “one of the best sources on the life and work of Paulo Freire” is Peter Mayo’s Liberating Praxis: Freire’s Legacy for Radical Education and Politics (2004).
With Carmel Borg’s edited selection of translations, there is now a text in Maltese among the various languages mediating the Freirean thought.
Besides an introduction and detailed biography, the editor selected a number of texts representing a comprehensive gamut of Freirean themes.
When, in his Mirages et Miracles (1985), Alain Lipietz wrote that the 1980s saw the ‘Brazilianisation’ of the US, he was not exactly heaping praise on the military superpower’s labour market.
In The Brave New World of Work (2000), Ulrich Beck generalised the term to the broader West.
He intended it as a reference to a workforce characterised by travelling vendors, small retailers or craftworkers, personal service providers, and those performing in multiple fields of activity, working under precarious conditions.
Short-term jobs, terminable or renewable, were on offer for students, women outside full-time employment, and immigrants as a seasonal or year-long experience.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Freire was thinking about Brazil. Later, narrating the international impact of the book, he commented that oppression was a global experience. Ways to tackle it might differ, but like the Brazilianised workforce, oppression observed in Brazil was observable worldwide.
Narratives of oppression fill some of the most vivid descriptions in Borg’s set of translations (see especially pp.140-144; all page references from text). Freire regularly returned to themes from Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Foremost, and still observable in classrooms, is that of passive students described as empty vessels waiting to be filled, the banking concept of education wherein students received ‘deposits’ from teachers they duly returned at the end of the course. If banking education mythicised reality, preserving culture and knowledge, Freire proposed to demythicise it through transformative problem solving.
In Education for Critical Consciousness, Freire reflected on society in transition.
He discussed contrapositions between old and new during such phases, with reactionaries confronting progressives.
The ‘old’ in Brazil was a closed and backward society, illiterate and elitist, economically subordinate to foreign markets as it busily exported raw materials (p.60). The 1930 revolution led to import-substitution dependent on industrialisation.
This increased in the post-war, but when, in the 1960s, not ready to lose their hard- won rights, combative working class sectors entered into conflict over work-related rights, it was time again for the military.
The impending Cuban anti-capitalist threat since 1959 legitimised widespread repression in Brazil, and in the rest of Latin America. The military regime supported a change to manufacturing exports and foreign investment.
The new internationalised economy, ideologically supported by no ideology but neo-liberalism, focused sights on markets (p.171), away from spectral democracy.
When in 1964, Brazilian President João Goulart was ousted from power, Freire had to escape from the country. If historical narrative could justify one facet of Borg’s title, ‘education is politics’, this event might suffice. The implications were broader.
In 1964, four million Brazilian children did not have a school, 16 million youths over 14 years old were illiterate (p.73). Freire argued that unless people were educated in order to participate democratically, transitions would be imposed.
The literacy programmes of the Recife Project for Adult Education, co-ordinated by Freire, were closed. They included discussions about nationalism, profit, political developments in Brazil, development, illiteracy, democracy, legitimacy of rule, participation by the people, and distribution of wealth. These themes, and others, were problematised; it was not merely a knowledge exercise.
It assisted in building up an attitude, overcoming passivity, freeing culture from being an exclusive space. Later, the Sao Paolo municipality provided Freire with another opportunity to realise his ideas (p.132).
Marx pointed out the need to consider the education of the educator (p.107). Freire discussed this in Education for Critical Consciousness. Rather than teach, the educator was to assist learning (p.79).
In Mentoring the Mentor: A Critical Dialogue with Paulo Freire (1997, pp.163-184), Freire argued that education was not exclusively a technical practice. In the earlier The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation (1985), he elaborated on conscientizacao, whereby literacy and critical awareness were inseparable.
It was the synthesis of a dialectical relation between the limits of moral claims built exclusively from concrete experience, and the troubled awareness that ideals did not change reality. Freire acknowledged that conscientizacao might appear idealised, but believed that the aforementioned dialectical relation promised transformation.
One reward was pointing out the oppressor inside the oppressed (pp.127-8), the related paralysing effects of fear (pp.147-8), and the incoherence that followed from it (p.156 et seq.), as when the oppressed oppress others.
The editor selected a number of texts representing a comprehensive gamut of Freirean themes
In the Freire and Macedo dialogue from Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (1987), one topic was the cultural character of education. If, as the title proposed, education was political, they agreed it was also cultural (pp.114-5). They referred to formation of subjects in formal schools.
Freire’s understanding of culture rejected sex, race and social class determinism. Although they did affect people, the latter could transcend their impact as they strove to give meaning to liberty in terms of a passion for life and justice. For the same reason, Freire rejected the mechanistic and authoritarian vision of socialist realism because it did not conceive liberty (p.161).
However, for Freire, the formation of the subject did not mean individualism.
Similar to the Italian Don Milani, another educator critically admired by Borg, Freire worked in times of major transformation. In both the Brazilian periphery and the Tuscan semi-periphery, Freire and Milani intervened in the world, never intending to be impartial.
Sensitive to power distribution, they were in Samir Amin’s terms, “intelligentsia proper” as against “operatives, serving the established ideological apparatus”. They were critical thinkers, competent and capable of inspiring liberating action within a sustained programme tackling challenges faced by the subordinate.