Category Archives: education

If I Didn’t Know it Was True, I Would Think It’s a Wild Conspiracy Theory

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I just finished reading James Lindsay’s new book The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education (2022). I recommend it to anyone concerned about education in the United States and, indeed, the world. If you are a teacher or a professor, if you have children or grandchildren, if you care about future generations, read this book. Or listen to Lindsay’s podcasts. If you know someone that falls into these categories, share this post with them. If I did not know from forty years of experience in higher education that Lindsay is telling the truth, I would think he was spinning a wild conspiracy theory.

In his book, Lindsay documents the work and influence of the Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire on American schools of education and, through the teachers trained there, on all levels of education. Until a week ago I had never heard of him, but he is one of the most influential theorists in contemporary education. His methods are used in virtually every school in the United States, public and private. Much of the time teachers, administrators, and facilitators have no idea of the theoretical background of these methods or of their aims. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, for I hate to think they know what they are doing.

Background

South American liberation theology—a mixture of Marxism and Roman Catholicism condemned by Pope John Paul II (1978-2005)—was a formative influence on Freire. And the religious aspect of his work comes through quite often. He speaks of his educational method as inducing “conversion,” and an “Easter” experience. He speaks of hope for the coming “kingdom of God,” that is, socialist utopia. Che Guevara is at the top of his list of saints. Freire’s first book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was published in 1970, but the book that made him famous in the United States was his 1985 book, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation. When I say that Freire is a “Marxist,” I am not speculating or trying to discredit him by association. He makes his adherence to Marxist analysis unashamedly clear in his own works.

Educational Aims

In traditional education the goal is to transfer to students the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in the culture in which they live. Freire calls this the “banking” or “nutritionist” view of education. It reproduces the teacher in the student and hence perpetuates the status quo of society. But through his Marxist lens, Freire sees society divided into those who have power and those who don’t, the oppressors and the oppressed. Society should be changed radically in a socialist direction. He offers his method of education as a means to this radical end. Freire redefines what it means to educate, to be educated, and to know. “To educate” means to awaken the oppressed to their status and empower them to take charge of their lives by working for societal change. “To be educated” means to be awake to the power dynamics in society. “To know” is to be attuned to the nuances of your own experience as oppressed. The oppressors, too, need to be awakened to their guilt and complicity in oppression. The “oppressed” become perpetually angry and offended, and the Woke “oppressor” enters a life of self-loathing and perpetual apology. And everyone becomes an activist.

The upshot of all this, according to Lindsay, is that students get robbed of a real education in reading, writing, mathematics, and every other content area. And they become “emotional wrecks” in the process.

The Method

Freire’s method unfolds in three phases: generative, codification, and decodification. “Teachers and students” are replaced by “educators and learners” who learn together through a “dialogic” (conversation) method. In the first phase of the dialogue, the educator generates from the learners information about their “lived experience” in search of hidden relationships of power, privilege, and oppression. In codification, the educator creates an image that pictures these structures of power, privilege, and oppression in an objective way so that the learner can see them from a distance. The learner, then, comes to see themselves in this generalized image, but now they understand themselves as a part of a class of victims in an unjust power structure. Thirdly, the process of decodification applies the Marxist analysis to the codified image. Decodification awakens the learner to the systemic causes of their oppression and to the possibility and necessity of wholesale societal change. It sensitizes them to the subtle ways in which traditional language, rules, traditions, expectations, and norms serve to justify and reinforce the power structures of stratified society.

Applications

The Marxification of Education explores dozens of ways Freire’s educational theory and its offshoots are applied in colleges, universities, and K through 12 schools. I can highlight only two. Read the book!

Race

The Freirean educational model is a perfect way to educate learners in Critical Race Theory. CRT contends that the United States is systemically racist and has been so from its founding. Only a radical reordering of society along antiracist lines (diversity, equity, and inclusion) can address systemic racism. In Freire’s “generative” phase, learners are canvased or surveyed looking for indicators of unequal power between people of color and white people. The next phase encodes those indicators in objective images, for example, a video clip of a white person double checking to see that their car doors are locked after parking in a black neighborhood. In the third phase, the coded images are decoded and interpreted through the lens of Marxist theory, that is, Critical Race Theory.

Sexual Minorities

Perhaps you have wondered why many public schools require young children to read or listen to books such as Gender Queer (written in comic book style) and others that contain pornographic illustrations of sex of all kinds and at all ages? And why would school districts and public libraries sponsor “Drag Queen Story Hour”? I did not understand these trends until I read Lindsay’s explanation of the aim and method of Paulo Freire’s theory of education. Reading Gender Queer and watching a grown man dressed in “women’s” clothes dance provocatively are part of the generative and codification phases of learning. These experiences elicit information from children about their understandings of gender, family, and sex, which can then be used in the decodification phase. The drag queen is a living illustration that rules are made to be broken, that the present social/moral order possesses no real authority but is imposed by those who benefit from it. Drag Queen Story Hour is a defiant and irreverent attack on the “oppressive” societal structures associated with sex, family, and gender identity. Children are thrown into a world without boundaries, they are robbed of their childhood, and their education is stolen from them. And Freirean educational theorists call it “learning.”

Optional Homework

Lindsay discusses many other terms and concepts associated with Freire’s educational theory. You may have heard of some of them without realizing their theoretical meaning. Do a quick search on some of them. Wikipedia usually has the basics even if it tends to sanitize the ideas a bit:

Cultural Competence, Comprehensive Sex Education, Culturally Relevant Teaching, (Transformative) Social-Emotional Learning, Problematization, Knowledges, Critical Pedagogy, Liberatory, Project-based learning, Decolonization, Conscientization, Queer Marxist Theory, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Antiracism, and Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED).

To be continued…

In Praise of Ignorance

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What does it mean to be an educated person? I posted an introductory essay on this topic in June, 2022. I promised to continue this theme, but more pressing issues distracted me. I concluded that…

Acquiring an education is a self-conscious process of learning the inner workings and interrelationships of the major sectors of the society within which we live—economy, politics, art, literature, law, science, technology, ethics, and religion.

I want to continue exploring the idea of education, focusing today on one mark of an educated person, intellectual responsibility.

Learning and Ignorance

I have been an educator for half of my life and most of the other half I was studying to become one. I have read more books than I can count; and I have written a few. I still feel ignorant! Hence, in this essay I want to address the place of ignorance in intellectual life.

I have found it a rule that the more we learn the more we become aware of our ignorance. The deeper we probe a topic the more we realize its connections with other areas of knowledge. And those areas are connected to still others. At some point it dawns on us that the web of mutually conditioning connections spreads out infinitely in all directions. Not only must we admit that we do not know how far our ignorance extends, we must also acknowledge that things we do not know could affect the meaning of the things we believe. That is to say, becoming aware of the extent of our ignorance casts doubt on what seemed certain.

The Skeptic

Let me differentiate what I am saying from thoroughgoing skepticism—the thesis that we know nothing at all. Suppose I gain by close inspection some empirical knowledge of a certain mountain peak. I learn about its resident animals, plants, and many of its physical features. These facts will not change no matter how much I learn later about the rest of the mountain and its setting in its mountain range. These facts would remain the same even if we mapped its entire setting on earth, in the history of geology and biology, in the solar system, in the galaxy, etc. But coming to know this extended web of connections would expand our understanding of the origin, history, function, and significance of this mountain peak. Gaining such information would not convince us that our previous knowledge was erroneous, but it would show its incompleteness.

I believe we could apply this same procedure to almost any assertion of fact or truth whether philosophical, theological, historical, or scientific: that God exists, murder is immoral, the American Civil War ended in 1865, or that knowledge can best be defined as true, justified belief. If a belief is true, no new information can make it false. But new information can deepen our understanding or expand the meaning of a belief.

What does this exercise have to do with being an educated person? An intellectually responsible person knows enough about an area of study to be able to give good reasons why gaining further knowledge about that area and its connections with other areas will not falsify the knowledge they have gained so far. At the same time, however, educated people are aware of their ignorance of other related facts and truths that could deepen and expand their current understanding. Unlike the skeptic, the educated person’s awareness of their ignorance is hard won and productive of further knowledge.

The Dogmatist

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the skeptic is the dogmatist. Dogmatists identify their isolated beliefs with absolute truths, that is, truths whose meaning is fully and unambiguously present in the very words of the assertions. Dogmatists are not open to modification, deepening, and expansion of their beliefs by pursuing additional information. Like the skeptical attitude, the dogmatic mentality is not productive of further knowledge.

Neither the skeptic nor the dogmatist measures up to the ideal of intellectual responsibility. Educated people should know enough about the wider context of their beliefs to defend them against total denials but also be aware enough of their ignorance to learn from their opponents. The attitude of which I am speaking combines intellectual confidence with intellectual humility in a way productive of continued learning.

Hope

Dogmatists fear that admitting the least smidgen of incompleteness in their beliefs will plunge them into complete relativism and skepticism. Skeptics dread making commitments for fear that they will be disappointed. Both lack the Christian virtue of hope. Hope embraces unwaveringly the truth it knows, believing that it is only a taste of what is to come. Hope unites confidence and openness in a way productive of joy. Both dogmatists and skeptics are miserable.

What Does It Mean To Be An Educated Person?

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What does it mean to be an educated person? This question assumes that becoming an educated person is a valuable goal. Also presupposed is the fact that people are not born educated but must achieve this state through a process of learning. What, then, does one need to learn and how may one become an educated person?

Perhaps the first thing on which to get clear is that one does not need to know everything to be considered an educated person. To begin with, human beings cannot know everything. Much about nature, human history, and culture is not known by anyone or has been forgotten. Future human beings may discover and invent many things hardly imaginable today. Additionally, there is too much knowledge available even now for any one person to master in a lifetime.

The educated person of fifth-century B.C. Greece or eighth-century Persia would not be considered educated for life in twenty-first century America or France. Your ability to negotiate life in rural America won’t sustain you in New York City. Nor could the New Yorker make it on the farm. These examples hint at the nature of education and the basis of its value. Education is a process of gaining at least the minimum of knowledge and skills needed to thrive in a particular society and age.

I think it is helpful to distinguish between acquisition of technical skills—brick laying, cooking, farm animal care, or welding—and acquisition of social skills, the so-called “liberal arts.” In our society we don’t consider a person “educated” simply because they are skilled at husbandry or car repair. We reserve the label “educated” for a person who possesses the knowledge and skills that enable them to engage fully and gracefully in all sectors of the dominant society in which they live. Of course we need to understand our subculture as well, but we don’t need a formal education to achieve this goal. We acquire this knowledge in the same way we pick up our local dialect.

(Note: Acquiring “cultural competence” is all the rage in education circles these days. It seems to mean learning about other people’s subcultures–especially “marginalized” cultures–when what is needed is for everyone to learn how to live in the national/international culture.)

Usually, then, acquiring an education is a self-conscious process of learning the inner workings and interrelationships of the major sectors of the society within which we live—economy, politics, art, literature, law, science, technology, ethics, and religion. Since each of these institutions has come to be what it is today over a long period of time, study of their history is an essential part of understanding their present constitutions. Communicating effectively and gracefully with people from different places and backgrounds is an essential social skill. Reading, writing, and speaking well are, therefore, essential marks of an educated person. And no one can learn to write well or speak well without reading examples of well written literature.

The process of education requires some institutionalization: libraries, schools, presses, and publishers. The reason for this is simple: the knowledge and skills needed for education has been produced over centuries by millions of people living at great distances from each other and speaking different languages. This knowledge must be collected, winnowed, concentrated, and, for the last 2500 years, usually written in books. Becoming an educated person is a process of assimilating the knowledge and skills discovered and developed by many other human beings. Becoming an educated person is a social affair, a process of socialization or even humanization.

As a cautionary note, something has gone terribly wrong if education itself becomes a narrow subculture that so alienates students from the major institutions of society that they cannot skillfully and gracefully live within them.

Questions for future essays: What does it take to be an educator? What does it mean to be a theologically educated person? What does it take to be a teacher of theology?

School — No Place for a Child

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Some days I need to yell, “The world has gone crazy!” This is one of those days. Let me tell you up front that my wife and I homeschooled our children, and we’d do it again. So, this essay is not a cool analysis. One more caveat: I come from a family of public school teachers. I think many teachers do the best they can given their situation, and they are all underpaid. This “yell” is about the system and the culture, not about the individuals trapped in it. Okay, ready?

Yes, I mean it. A school is no place for a child. As a child nears 5 or 6 years of age she or he is made to believe that starting school is a glorious coming-of-age transition. You’ll become a big boy, a big girl. You’ll learn to read and write and do all sorts of fun stuff! You’ll get to make decisions for yourself—which actually means that you will give in to pressure to do what your peers are doing. At six years old the baby bird must leave the warm nest and learn to fly. At six! Is that crazy or what? You’ll learn to deal with ubiquitous bullies and pick up the ways of the world from older kids. Why? Because the world is full of bullies and you’ve got to face the world sooner or later anyway! (Actually, the only place I have ever been bullied is at a school.) Away from the protection of mommy and daddy you will be taught and protected by an underpaid and over-stressed teacher, who has 30 children to look after. And teachers are all-knowing and all-seeing. They always know what goes on in the play yard, the hallways, the athletic fields, and the restrooms. You might get a teacher who views the world like your parents and your church does or you may end up with teacher who views God, morality, life, and love in radically different ways. You don’t know in advance.

And what will you learn in the education factory, the state-run orphanage for parented kids? You will learn the least common denominator of moral values. Government schools are supposed to be religiously and morally neutral, and that “neutrality” is the heart of their religion and morality. You’ll read the books, hear the stories, and engage in the sort of activities that are designed to make you exactly like everyone else, a compliant, tolerant, and uncreative citizen. Excellence, creativity, thoughtfulness, and individuality are discouraged because they are disruptive. Everyone is equal, everyone is special, everyone is gifted, and everyone is right. And no one thinks.

The parent-child bond must be broken (at six years old!), because parents teach their children all sorts of crazy stuff about religion, race, and gender. Useful skills like language, writing, and mathematics must be subordinated to the really important task of socialization for life in a “pluralist society,” that is, of teaching children not to judge anyone for anything…except of course for believing in the difference between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, and good and bad. Or, for believing in the superiority of one’s own culture or religion. And the informal “socialization” you learn is how to survive in a school culture with 10 adults and 200 children near your own age. Such a social skills have nothing to do with those you’ll need in the real world.

Okay, I’ve had my “yell,” my rant if you like. I am not asking you to join my chorus. I just wanted your attention. My main goal is simply to plant a question in your mind: Does it have to be this way for me and my family? I want you to know that if you feel like there is something not right about giving up your parenthood when your child is five or six years old, that there is something crazy about that notion, you are right. And you don’t have to do that. You are not the crazy one.