This is a critical look at the theoretical underpinnings and practical work of Paulo Freire. Freire's influence over the last two decades of educational research and practice is remarkable. Much of the discourse on education throughout the world makes reference to him. Paulo Freire has joined in writing more than a dozen books. In addition, he is the subject of at least 185 articles from 1971 to 1993. Freire is referenced in the mainstream Prodigy Electronic Grolier Encyclopedia as having designed the most effective of current literacy programs.⁽²⁾ Now the former education director of the largest city in Latin America, Sao Paulo; Freire is also a leader of the Workers Party in Brazil, "which is influenced by his thought", and an intellectual leader of the Socialist International.⁽³⁾ Hence, if by the sweep of his fame alone, academic attention to Freire is deserved.

Freire's aim is to simultaneously strike four keys in the struggle for social justice: literacy, or as Freire says, the way we "read the word and the world", critical consciousness, the creation of liberation, and escalating economic production as people come to understand their surroundings. He links literacy, education, production, and social change; a harmony rising from the interrelationships of the four. I suggest that what is miraculous, or Promethean, in his project is not a singular contribution that he has made to any one of these factors in isolation, each of which has been detailed by many predecessors, but the unity and interpenetration that he believes rises from the correct application of each. In short, I believe Freire claims that his sense of literacy leads to critical consciousness (conscientization, a word Freire popularized and later dropped) which foments and buttresses movements for social justice. These movements depend on production and national economic development. And this linkage alone is what has driven the fascination with his undertaking.

For example, in an interview with literacy specialist David Reis, Freire carefully spells out how his position on literacy leads to critical consciousness which leads to, or supplements, revolution--or liberation, an interpenetrating weave in which one factor overlaps all others, but which can reasonably be presented as an equation. Consciousness involves "intentionality toward the world". Freire refers to an "archaeology of consciousness" which masters the word in order to understand and change the world. By discovering the truth--which ever arches ahead of understanding, through literacy techniques--and overcoming the oppression of cultural silence, people become superior to the myths which have chained them, overcome irrationality, and make their own liberation. "So the process of liberation is not a gift which I give to you. I think that the same thing concerns salvation, from the theological point of view."⁽⁴⁾

Freireians Colin Lankshear and Moira Lawler are more detailed. "Literacy has a potential role within attempts by subordinate groups to engage in political action aimed at resisting present inequalities of structural power (and their human consequences) and bringing about structural change."⁽⁵⁾

However, Frank Smith differs with Freire in nuanced ways. While he does signal the relationship of literacy, language and power, he notes in the conclusion of "Whose Language, What Power", an explanation of his largely thwarted efforts to conduct whole language literacy classes in South Africa, that the power of the African National Congress did not grow out of the barrel of an inkwell and, Mandella, "was gaining international authority and recognition, though few people saw anything he had written in English or in any other language".⁽⁶⁾ This underlines the problematic links that must be made in constructing a chain of literacy, consciousness and liberation.

Reginald Connolly demonstrates another internal ambiguity. Freire "believes that there is no neutrality in human praxis, and so education is either for domestication or for liberation. If it is for liberation, then the very methods and techniques in use for domestication must be inappropriate....Power is inseparable from education. Those who hold power define what education will be, its methods, programmes and curriculum."⁽⁷⁾ But how shall we recognize the resolution of the tension between the needs of those in power, the commonly doctrinaire visions of social change available to most people, and the unlimited stretches of developing critical consciousness?

Freire is the forefather of a vision of education and knowledge which radiates from suggestions he makes in his early articles published in English in 1970, "The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom" and "Cultural Action and Conscientization", and which are elaborated throughout his continuing work; that is, a profound, complex, and sometimes cryptic self-proclaimed dialectical view of the unity of the construction of knowledge and social change. His vision penetrates a surprising range of fields: social work, ethnography, anthropology, political science, prison reform, and social revolution. There is convincing evidence that Freire influences not only educators like Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, and Michael Apple but philosophers and practitioners like Stanley Aronowitz and Elaine Browne who reach well beyond his immediate field of adult education and literacy.

Peter McLaren says, "Freire's work has been cited by educators throughout the world and constitutes an important contribution to critical pedagogy not simply because of its theoretical refinement, but because of Freire's success at putting theory into practice."⁽⁸⁾ Harvey Graff, in debunking illusions about literacy as, for example, a tool for employment, nevertheless points to Freire as having taken up literacy "as a tool for liberation and social change".⁽⁹⁾

Philosopher Maxine Greene turns to Freire to assist her in defining freedom and humanization as, in his words, "the overcoming of alienation".⁽¹⁰⁾

Freire deeply influences North American classroom educators. "Rethinking Schools", a monthly newspaper produced by rank and file teachers with a circulation of more than 10,000, reaching directly into the hands of classroom teachers, uses Freire's theories as a matter of routine. Bob Peterson, using Freire's contribution, writes, "There are five characteristics that I think are essential to teaching critical/social justice: A curriculum grounded in the lives of our students, dialogue, a questioning problem/posing approach, an emphasis on critiquing bias and attitudes, and the teaching of activism for social justice."⁽¹¹⁾

Jim Walker, co-founder of the Sydney-based "Radical Education Dossier", points out that Freire, who he believes is a the author of a pedagogy which will "turn back and attack the very movement towards humanization and liberation it is designed to promote", is especially effective because he is a voice from the Third World, in a period when Third World voices are uncommonly threatening to international capital.⁽¹²⁾

Freire's ideas now have helped forge history, twenty years of application throughout the world. He is credited with founding a pedagogy "grounded in a powerful awareness of the roots and operation of inequality and hierarchy".⁽¹³⁾ His literacy projects, frequently under his own direct supervision and daily involvement, focus for the most part on exploited colonies: Guinea Bissau, Grenada, Tanzania, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. However, Freireian projects have also been put in place in countries like Cuba and South Africa which defy some of the more common notions of colonial status. In addition, Freire's colleagues have attempted to duplicate his work in the decidedly first world of U.S. universities as well as the K-12 arena.

However, Freire seems to have been elevated to the role of, in Aronowitz' words, an "icon", a subject of awe rather than what he would likely prefer, that is, a catalyst for further examination.⁽¹⁴⁾ Study of Freire has often been less than rigorous. There have been limited attempts to critique Freire's theories. Parts of the post-structural left attack him for resorting to crude Western habits like reason and logic while others criticize his ignorance of technology and his stress on individualism rising from his analysis of the relationship of singular consciousness and social action.⁽¹⁵⁾ The liberal left often meets Freire in the only most laudatory and testimonial terms, some flatly obsequious as evidenced by fawning question put to him in his dialogical, "talking", books. This, for example, "Now some people have complained to me, sometimes, that Paulo Freire is such a brilliant teacher, such a gifted facilitator, He's asking all to be like him...what do you say?"⁽¹⁶⁾ Some of Freire's admirers resort to simple wishful reading. Henry A. Giroux, for example, tries to comfortably place Freire in his own post-modern framework in the introduction to The Politics of Education:

"Freire has rightly argued that domination cannot be reduced exclusively to a form of class domination. With the notion of difference as a guiding theoretical thread, Freire rejects the idea that there is a universalized form of oppression....Freire steps outside standard Marxist analysis by arguing that society contains a multiplicity of social relations, which contain contradictions and can serve as a basis from which social groups can struggle and organize themselves". ⁽¹⁷⁾

Yet Freire has repeatedly lauded the most orthodox of available existing Marxisms--and says, "I do believe that what in fact exists universally is struggle, class conflict with, however, differences in the form it takes from one context to another" ⁽¹⁸⁾. He has said, in the past, that it is the primacy of class that is the wedge to analyze social systems⁽¹⁹⁾. Even so, in his latest work, Pedagogy of Hope, Freire inverts himself and declares his own postmodernist position, at once a position which elevates gender/sex and race, yet a position which retains a strong sense of class struggle and the need for organization, a position which distinguishes him from most of post-modernism, particularly from Aronowitz.⁽²⁰⁾ Here, I will concur with the Freire that sees class struggle as the lynch-pin of history and will apply this understanding to his work.

There are few recorded efforts to systematically historicize the narrative of text and life that Freire has contributed in practice. The Freireian methodology is critiqued in theory--inside his texts, but absent the historical underpinning of praxis that Freire himself would insist upon, the methodology cannot be enriched. Without a grasp of praxis, iconicized, reified, Freire's contribution can only turn into its opposite, an idealism, a literacy of literacies rather than a meditation of the world and its political relationships. Freire as the initiator of a pedagogy for liberation could become the point person in the creation of a wider market for education theories which merely build hegemony--and comfortable yet apparently socially conscious careers--in more sophisticated ways.

Hence, I propose to examine questions like whether or not Freire's literacy campaigns enjoy success from on-site study, and whether or not literacy education "for critical consciousness" has empowered, organized, or sustained mass movements toward social justice or democratic equality--or if these goals are actually out of Freire's reach. I hope to contribute to the effort to historicize the links of literacy, consciousness, and fundamental social change by scrutinizing the record of Paulo Freire in a critical way, frequently employing Freire's own methods of criticism, that is, dialectical and historical materialism.

Freire insists his project is dialectical and materialist. Paul Taylor's fine recent work, The Texts of Paulo Freire, underlines Freire's assertion that dialectics and materialism drives much of Freire's work. Taylor argues that Karl Kosik, a Czech communist, had a deep influence on Freire, to the point that Kosik, "brought out the crypto-Marxist in Freire". Taylor proceeds to demonstrate an overview of dialectics and materialism, a view which locates humanity as the potentially conscious creators of history, and places much of Freire's work within that frame.⁽²¹⁾ Freire himself in Pedagogy in Process, his sharpest materialist description of human history, traces the Marxist position of the importance of production as a motive of human necessity.⁽²²⁾ Moacir Gadotti, a close collaborator of Freire's, puts Freire's reliance on dialectics in clear terms, "the whole of his theory of conscientization has it's roots in Hegel".⁽²³⁾

In order to approach the problem that I pose, can and do Freire's theoretical and practical contributions match the promises he and others make; I adopt Freire's method of analysis, dialectical and historical materialism. I offer my understanding of this vision of the world in some detail in the addendum to this chapter. I will historicize Freire as a theoretician, a person, and a practitioner, demonstrating for better or worse that he is a Brazilian of the Workers' Party. Next, I will offer an overview of Freire's explanation of the links between literacy and critical consciousness, production and liberation. In order to understand Freire's theory, one must come to grips with his unique combination of Christianity, Hegelian dialectics, and his appropriation of the Marxist orthodoxy in the Theory of Productive Forces, an amalgamation that allows Freire to embody the dialectical unity of sectarianism and opportunism. Finally, to closely investigate his practice, I will examine his leadership of the Grenadian literacy projects during the period of the New Jewel Movement.

In this vein, I think it is necessary to examine the partisan nature of the history of events. To carry out such a project necessitates the dialectic of quantitative and qualitative research. Demographics and ethnographics require one another to form a research unity. Theoretical propositions must be contextualized in practice. Hence, this study includes history, demographics, and voices. The frozen moments of number counts, always useful, are, I hope, enlivened with the ethnographic statements of actors from whom we can discern, in Geertz's terms, a conspiratorial wink from a flirtatious one, where we can discover what issues are rising up and what ideas are fading away.⁽²⁴⁾

To grasp, in a profound way, Freire's practical work, it is necessary to unpack his theoretical convictions. There is a jagged line from Freire to Althusser's and Gramsci's thinking about the dialectic of being and consciousness, from there through the Frankfurt school and it's inheritors, and finally back to Hegel--and God, these latter two at the base of Freire's thinking. In addition, "He has reached out to the thought and experience of those in many different situations and of diverse philosophical positions; he remains a practicing Catholic and still relies, in his words, on "Sartre, Mounter, Eric Fromm, Ortega y Gasset and Mao, Martin Luther King and Che Guevera, Unamuno and Marcuse'". ⁽²⁵⁾

This remarkable range of thought may explain why Freire is notoriously obscure and apparently contradictory. This interchange should give an indication of Freire's sometimes eclectic ambiguity. In response to a question challenging the notion of an existing external reality, Freire says, " If Peter or John or Mary comes to me and makes a well-structured speech, telling me there is no reality, and if afterwards Charles comes and says, 'Paulo, your pedagogy is totally based on the analysis and transformation of reality, so how do you feel after that speech?' I'd say they are naive." ⁽²⁶⁾

At base, I will contend Freire is an irrationalist; his stated world view is fundamentally incoherent in theory--but open to analysis in practice. The quest for a systematic understanding of irrationalism, within its own theoretical framework, is difficult for obvious reasons. In Freire, we find theory apparently at odds with itself. However, I will argue that what is here is actually only self-contradictory in limited ways, and is finally in line with Freire's practice. It is important, I believe, to detail more of the ambiguities within Freire to understand at once his rich humanity, and to understand that he may be too content with some contradictions which might lead others in unrewarding directions. Freire insists that education is not neutral and, indeed, that neutrality in education is not desireable. "Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." ⁽²⁷⁾ Yet he contends that at a certain point in his teaching method, the teacher must become neutral, to not tell but question, expecting that the student will spontaneously deconstruct hegemony from experience, as if this were more ethically honest or less directive than a straight-forward prescription. The ethical sense to which he finally turns to explain his decisions is motivated by an unproblematized religious-political view. It remains unanswered, within his texts, as to whether ethics are constructed first in the mind or result from social practice. Freire has never questioned the statement of his ardent co-author, Ira Shor, "A classroom is not a political meeting".⁽²⁸⁾ Freire repeatedly refers to external political reality as focused by a class analysis but, at the same time, easily subsumes class beneath culture and confuses language with production. Freire's frequent insistence that he is a humble man aside; there is some evidence to show that he participates in the consecration of his own image. John DeWitt, part of a Harvard study group with Freire during the latter's tenure at the university says, "Of course he became an icon. He needed to. He fostered it. He was building himself throughout his stay in Boston. He had to. He had a wife and five or six kids. What was he supposed to do? "⁽²⁹⁾ Freire is a devout Catholic, a faithful member of the most encrusted institution in the Western world which relies absolutely on mythology, who believes in de-mytholigizing and changing the real world. "Being a Christian, a revolutionary, these are very close. It assumes the total humility of telling me that I am a man trying to become a Christian; I am a Christian. I invite you to think about how much this is a revolutionary statement which is strongly inside the people." ⁽³⁰⁾ His Christianity is balanced by a characterization of the church as an institution which refuses to undergo its own "Easter experience".⁽³¹⁾ Freire talks frequently about the relationships of masters and slaves in comments that hint he is combatting feudalism, but never thoroughly addresses the question of racism, not even in Brazil where the historical base of slavery still plagues the struggle for equality.⁽³²⁾ He has never held a wage job and makes the case of the oppressed. He regards time spent at Harvard and Geneva as exile and considers himself a man of the harsh frontiers of Northeastern Brazil, though his fame was won by leaving the area. He declares that he is a revolutionary--and worked with truly orthodox Soviet-camp regimes--yet he spent his most productive years working for the United Nations and the World Council of Churches, and as denouement Freire becomes the Minister of Education of Sao Paulo, Brazil, the largest and most industrialized city of the country, where he was deeply concerned about school building construction. Remarkably, Freire's distress misses the 3,000 homeless children per year murdered by the Sao Paulo police who find them annoying.⁽³³⁾ Freire says, "from the beginning, I have tried to get rid of little primers".⁽³⁴⁾ Yet, in nearly every instance where he has worked on a literacy project, he has left behind a primer.⁽³⁵⁾ Freire declares, "I AM a woman", and proclaims his sympathy for the women's movement. But in the same interview says, "I am thinking about buying my wife a computer."⁽³⁶⁾ Later, he says, "I spent sixteen years in exile, with Elza helping me to survive by looking all over for things that tasted like home cooking.⁽³⁷⁾ Freire claims his philosophy is always dialectical, always open, but finds no flaw in maintaining that, "Peasants who think critically cannot be manipulated. Critical consciousness and manipulation are irreconcilable".⁽³⁸⁾ Indeed, he argues, rightly I think, that the issue of cultural invasion is best answered by whether one is correct or incorrect--in the interest of the people or not.⁽³⁹⁾ Freire calls himself the "Vagabond of the obvious", one who humbly demystifies the veils which hide Oz's wizards; but Freire routinely employs experts from sociology and demography to unpack community power relationships and is prepared to rely on the expertise of usually middle class teachers to lead social deconstruction. He is, from Harvard to Geneva to Sao Paulo, a most privileged vagabond. His work is hardly obvious. Freire himself is not uneasy, finally: "I have the right to be contradictory".⁽⁴⁰⁾

This is not an merely an expose of binary contradictions, but an introductory effort to quickly display the complexity within Freire. There are complexities within his theories and within his behavior that make him difficult to comprehend--or follow in practice. This is what underlies the multitude of appropriations of Freire's work, grasped simultaneously by liberals holding state power, Catholic liberation theologists, and revolutionaries engaged in life and death struggles. Freire is pilfered piecemeal by some who want literacy and a modest dose of consciousness, but no vigorous social change. Sweden, for example, took his techniques, but dodged his politics.⁽⁴¹⁾ And his contradictions can be exploited by both the most orthodox of sectarian leftists, by opportunist liberal reformers, and by technicians--all of who can reasonably lay claim to a selected quote from the master.

Given that his internal contradictions and ambiguities may make him easily misappropriated, Freire's complexity is what leads to the order of the work at hand. It is not possible to take up Freire only on the basis of his texts--which only examines internal contradictions--and expect to use his ideas to further the course of social justice. Only a unitary examination of theory and practice rooted in history can make that possible. It is only viable to appraise Freire, whose words clash into one another, through his own practice and the unchallenged work of those who have, say, religiously, applied his beliefs and techniques. On the other hand, if we grasp his philosophical base, we should be able to broadly predict future outcomes. It is Freire's own position that methodological errors have ideological foundations.⁽⁴²⁾

This, then, can lead to a new level of praxis, a higher stage from which to further elevate educational and social struggle. In sum, then, this is an inter-disciplinary effort relying heavily on work outside education like political science, history and sociology. But the assertion is that education offers the prism to focus this theoretical endowment in the praxis of social change. For me, this is where the derivative nature of my field draws its appeal, the opportunity to find content in an inter-disciplinary approach.

Hence, my writing takes this path: I will first present a historical and chronological picture of Brazil, especially Freire's Northeast, and Freire himself. This requires some detail if the work is to develop its own material and intellectual base. I then examine Freire's promises about literacy (language and power), consciousness, and social justice, and I argue that what is new here is the unified symphony Freire predicts from their interplay--when others have seen only isolation or cacophony. I will then trace Freire's ideological groundings from Christianity through Hegel to his brands of Marxism. It is my hope to demonstrate the tracks from history and origins to philosophy. Here I also hope to offer theoretical explanations for the unity of orthodoxy--sectarianism--and opportunism in Freire and suggestions for other approaches. I turn next to Freire's practical work. I concentrate on a particular case: Grenada. Grenada's experience offers a laboratory of literacy before, during and after a popular revolution in which Freire was involved and where I have some personal experience. I conclude with an attempt to focus Freire's contribution to education and social change--and suggestions for practitioners who hope to see the struggle continue and succeed. My hope is to present theoretical and practical proposals drawn from research and experience so there can be forward movement drawn from historical practice.
 
 

In Marx's words, "I am not a Marxist". I prefer his, "criticize everything". Nor am I of presently de rigueur Frankfurt school. I agree with Ruth Wilson Gilmore who says, "One must live a life of relative privilege these days to be so dour about domination, so suspicious of resistance, so enchanted by commodification, so helpless before the ideological state apparatuses to conclude there is no conceivable end to late capitalism's daily sacrifice of human life to the singular freedom of the market." ⁽⁴³⁾ I find the current fascination with the Frankfurt tendency to be more reflective of the crisis of the collapse of the middle class, into which Freire--well off enough to have servants early in life--was born, than a turn to greater understanding.⁽⁴⁴⁾ It is curious that movements so consumed with the evils of white European males must rely so heavily on white European males--Hegel to Derrida to Laclau--and turn away from the dramatic work in theory and practice developed in the Third World, especially revolutionary China. In any case, I consider that the stick is important in the construction of hegemony--at least as important as the carrot. What lies behind reward systems, I think, is fear.

Rather than in the Frankfurt tradition, or in line with or the interstices between Freire's other critics, I attempt to find my own place in a dialectical and historical materialism outside both the encrypted orthodoxy that is usually unspoken as Stalinism and the post-modern and ungrounded solely dialectical sense that there is no external reality but merely positions, no working class, no hope for dramatic social change beyond the encapsulated rituals of voting and no rationale for disciplined and organized social action beyond the most marketable forms of nationalism. I remain full of hope for the human trajectory of equality and democracy: in that order.⁽⁴⁵⁾ This base becomes important as a tool in unraveling the potential and history of Paulo Freire whose own language is steeped in the tradition of dialectical and historical materialism--in the most orthodox ways.

My hope is founded on my own ideas about history and change, a process which I think is more coherent than not. I believe nothing comes from nothing.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Things, people, and ideas, exist, external to you and me. And I believe things change. I believe people can understand, influence, predict, and reflect on things as they change. These processes can be understood and sometimes, indeed often, calculated. There are common truths about the human experience and common questions we ask. How do we explain our society? How do we as people relate to the whole of reality? Is history the history of class struggle? If not, even with the obvious failure of socialism, what other than irrationality prevails? On the other hand, where could hope be found in the disproved orthodoxies of Marxism?

To locate my own view in the most particular referential way, I argue from a stand closest to those developed by Georg Lukacs in The Destruction of Reason and Ira Gollobin in Dialectical Materialism. While I would part company with each in some matters of importance (for example, Gollobin's belief that there is such a thing as a non-antagonistic contradiction, or the Lukacs who slips into his own idealism in History and Class Consciousness--which he, correctly I think, retracted), the reader looking for considerably more detail in the intellectual ground and guide for my view would do well to look there.

Unfortunately, most writing applying dialectical and historical materialism offers no base to the reader from which to work. This is especially true of Freire who is inclined to borrow from Althusser, Mao, Lenin, and Che Gueverra without dissecting the vast differences between the members of the group. In the course of this paper, I will try to demonstrate how Freire employs, and sometimes stumbles on, his interpretation of dialectical materialism.⁽⁴⁷⁾ With this in mind, I offer this very brief understanding of dialectical materialism which will counsel my investigation of Paulo Freire.

In the beginning there is the material world. This assertion of the primacy of external matter is, in my view, materialism, and is the base of rationality. Again, as in basic physics, nothing comes from nothing. Things exist and they have a history. The physical world is primary to the mind, yet the mind is part of the physical world. "I am, therefore I think." Ideas are both a reflection of the material world and are themselves a material force. Indeed, ideas become part of the material base of existence when they are acted upon by masses of people.

All things are interrelated, interpenetrating, interdependent. Nothing is random, nothing isolated. As Freire often says, "The word can only come from the world".⁽⁴⁸⁾ Interrelationship, mutual dependence, and interpenetration form the foundation of totality, that is, the completion of reality.

Dialectics comprise the study of contradictions--and how things change. I have said things exist, apart from the mind. Now I assert that things change. Matter is in constant motion. All things are also processes. All things are composed of contradictions.

The key historical material reality is production. People must work to live. Within this reality is the present key contradiction, the contradiction between collective nature of production, and private, individual ownership of what is produced. This gives rise to privilege, social classes, and class struggle--and "every idea is stamped with the brand of class".⁽⁴⁹⁾ This is the source of the contradiction which drives much of Freire's work, domination versus humanization, or, in Marx, exploitation and revolution. To misread or ignore the material base is to button the wrong button--everything that follows is amiss.

In studying motion, which derives from contradictions (action and reaction for example, there are helpful principles which aid in the understanding of things in flux.

The main principle is the unity and struggle of opposites (for Mao, "one divides into two, in all things").⁽⁵⁰⁾ This simply means that all things are made up of internal oppositions, plus and minus in mathematics, sound and silence in music, or, in literacy and social change, critical consciousness versus technical training. If all ideas are stamped with the brand of class, then the ideas which all people hold are in constant struggle: the individualism represented by capitalism for example versus the collectivity also required by capitalist forms of production. Or, to go on, the need of capitalist profiteering to promote racism contradicted by the discoveries of even bourgeois science, both played out in the minds of masses of people.

Within contradictions, struggle is permanent, unity temporary. Internal motion is primary over external. To unlock questions of matter, which is simultaneously made up of many contradictions, it is necessary to find the main contradiction, that which drives the rest, and the primary side of that contradiction (which side will prevail?).

The second principle is that quantity becomes quality. The classic example used here is degrees of heat added to water to make steam. Quantitative changes add up to a qualitative leap, again, steam. Of course, the quantity added must be the right quantity. Adding rocks to water does not make steam. In the struggle over ideas, the repetition of racist messages in advertising or the mass media is likely to have a qualitative impact on mass behavior.

The third principle might be called the reinvention of the new (in the classics, the negation of the negation). First, this means that when change occurs, it is irrevocable, not circular, but that which is new, steam, or a higher stage of political or social consciousness, carries forward aspects of the old--a spiral. The steam has aspects of the old water, yet it is an entirely new form of matter, can never be restored to what it was, and embodies new contradictions of its own; so too with literacy (a newly literate reader of print is a new, yet also the old, person) social consciousness, and social change. The revolutionary struggles to crush slavery in fact ended slavery as a world system, never to return; yet vestiges of slavery remain, in racist ideology and in remnants of slave based practice, for example, in the migrant fields in Belle Glades, Florida.⁽⁵¹⁾

In order to comprehend things as they change, it is helpful to virtually photograph them, to freeze them as they pass in motion, a process which is necessarily limited but can support an enriched understanding of the profound intricacies of matter in motion. Hence, we create categories of dialectics which are, within and between themselves, composed of contradictions, interpenetrating with one another. Each of these contradictions, then, is related to the others, and contains within it a primary and secondary side. Categories of dialectics, to enhance analysis, include:

a. Appearance and essence: Knowledge flows from the external to the internal, growing richer as it progresses in depth. The folk saying, "You can't judge a book by its cover," applies here. Racists elevate appearance to the level of essence, arguing that people think with their skin.

b. Form and content: The folk homily, "beauty is as beauty does", is apropos here. Form influences content, but content determines the nature of matter. Racists made a fetish of head size, cranial bumps, etc., and missed the more critical content of the humanity they approached.

c. Relative and absolute: in science, truth is relative and absolute at the same time; gravity exists, but only relative to the objects at hand. While truth is finally a partisan question, linked to the necessity to retain power and privilege, truth is also absolute. Dialectical materialism contends, for example, that it is in the interest of elites to obscure social reality, while insurgents need to expose it, as in the case of racism. Moreover, in the abstract, our grasp of matter is necessarily relative, in that it is possible to apprehend matter in passing, yet it is possible to be sufficiently certain of reality to act.

d. Finite and Infinite: infinity can only be made up of finites. Things exist as they are, for specific moments, but things change infinitely. The concept of race is finite in human history, important and a matter of life and death now, but limited to a particular epoch.

e. Possible and Actual: Things are simultaneously what they are and what they can be. A seed can become a flower. A seed cannot become an airplane. The possible rises out of the internal nature of the matter at hand. Racism directed at the Vietnamese, for example, denied both poles of this contradiction, on the one hand it denigrated the actual abilities of the Vietnamese people and leveled them as inhumans, "gooks", on the other hand, it denied the possibility of masses of people united around a common idea--even when faced with the most technologically advanced society in the world.

f. Chance and Necessity: People are born into specific locations within our social structure by chance. Their actions rise, frequently, from necessity which rises from the social position of their birth. It is chance that millions are born to hunger. It is necessity that they struggle for food. All things necessarily change but the means of their change can appear to be accidental. Sperm meets the egg, and vice versa. Pollen meets the seed.

g. Particular and the General: Generalities are made possible by the study of the particularities of matter, and weaving the specifics into verifiable patterns. In The U.S., racism is a special kind of problem, different in each case, for Japanese people, Korean people, Afro-American people, Native American people, Chinese people, multi-racial people, and white people (each with varying problem also related to varying levels of coloration); but the general problem of racism remains largely the same.

h. Likeness and Difference: People, as a whole, are more alike than different. However, racism, rooted in the anti-scientific views of eugenics, falsely elevates difference over likeness. Liberalism, on the other hand, ignores antagonistic material class interests and elevates the vision of "humanity" over opposing forces of contention.

i. Cause and effect: Dialectical materialism seeks to locate the causes behind symptomatic effects, and properly applied, looks for causes in the material world. Racism means death.

j. Objective and Subjective: The objective is external reality. The subjective is comprised of the effort to comprehend and act on reality. When they coincide, a new reality is created. When the subjective effort misses the objective target, things go wrong, Little Big Horn for example.

k. Theory and Practice: Practice is the beginning and end of the knowledge cycle which moves from initial perception to abstraction to action and reflection. The effort toward unity of theory and practice, praxis, is the test which distinguishes dialectical materialism from other philosophical visions which, finally appeal to faith. Theoretical anti-racism is impossible in the absence of anti-racist practice.

Laws and categories of dialectics are convenient fictions placed on a reality which is infinitely intricate and ever-changing. Every analysis captures a moment which is complex--and gone, and all analysis is influenced by the social reality of exploited labor and class struggle. Hence, all ideas are incomplete, partisan, engraved with the motivations of class. Our grasp on reality is tested and enriched only through practice. And each category of dialectics, depending on the historical moment, has a dominant side. For example, in the case of theory and practice, I believe practice usually moves ahead of theory. The material world changes more rapidly, and is more rich in complexity, than our understanding of it. However, depending on material conditions, which include ideology, theory can force practice forward. The strength of dialectical materialism, finally, is that it is the only vision of the world which calls for a rational examination of itself by human beings, without resorting to mysticism and calls for faith. At this historical juncture, we have competing ideological proposals driven by competing material interests at work in the interpretation of truths, questions, and especially change. But the debate of the last several centuries remains fundamentally unchanged: is the world a construction of the mind or is it external to people? From this flows a series of debates over whether or not reality can be comprehended, whether or not there are a variety of wedges to use to drive into an understanding of history. I suggest, in contrast to some of Freire's writing, that what underlies material interest is, sweeping above all, not a melange of sex/gender, race and nation, but social class.
 
 

I argued at the outset that the crux of what is seductive in Freire is the Promethean formula Freire urges on educators and agents of change. This formula involves the interaction of literacy, critical consciousness (conscientization), liberation and production or national economic development. Freire's construct overlaps with Marxist (social democratic) and Christian views of organizing for social change.

There is little new in Freire's proposal absent this formula. For example, Plato believed that literacy enabled people "to learn to examine and evaluate objectively both the world and themselves".⁽⁵²⁾ What is new is the claim to interrelationship. As an organizing tactic, that literacy instruction should rise out of the surroundings of participants, that participants should not be treated contemptuously, that what they read should be drawn from their lives, and that well-motivated people can learn to read, even phonetically: this is not out of line with much writing in the field back to Dewey and Nearing--and further, even the Jesuits.⁽⁵³⁾ That it is to the advantage of people to strip away those ideological veils which encourage them to act in contrast to their own interests predates Marx--indeed that too goes to an early Christian claim. That social inequality buttressed by ideological pillars grates against any form of justice or hope for peace is Biblical, as is the call to take corrective action for a better world. This is the thinking embedded in liberation theology based on the New Testament.⁽⁵⁴⁾

An analysis of slave rebellions should show literacy in and of itself is not necessarily a motor for social change. Indeed, Literacy instructor Elspeth Stuckey argues that literacy is far more likely to be a Trojan Horse, a tool for obfuscation, than mechanism for resistance.⁽⁵⁵⁾ Freire recognizes this possibility of the inversion of knowledge as well when he warns of the potential of counter-revolution through anti-dialogical education bureaucracies, "which undermine the revolution".⁽⁵⁶⁾ For Freire, illiterate cultures, those which do not read and write printed words, while perhaps equal to literate cultures in every other way; are most surely less powerful. While he is careful to demonstrate respect for oral cultures, Freire never proposes that critical consciousness is fully realizable, actuated, in the absence of the grasp of the written word. Nor has he ever been suggested that liberation is conceivable without written bearings. It is the linkage of these elements, literacy, consciousness, production, and revolution, and its promotion through organizations like the World Council of Churches and groups like the Workers' Party as the catalyst, that is seen to be remarkable and results in what Giroux calls "a language of critique and possibility".⁽⁵⁷⁾ Although Freire frequently relies on language as the basis of change, he goes well beyond undeclared possibilities and urges specific actions that are matters of life and death. Freire's practice, if not detailed in his theory, suggests that he accepts revolutionary violence in the name of social justice.⁽⁵⁸⁾ At base, this would indicate Freire's formula for social change through literacy and consciousness is an extraordinarily serious proposition.

In this section, I will demonstrate that the Promethean formula I have suggested is indeed Freire's. As I elaborate on the formula, I will open the discussion on Freire's ideological stand, the role of idealism undermining dialectics. In following chapters, I will discuss Christian roots in the concern of language over matter, move on to Hegel, Marx, and incorporate Freire's practice especially as it relates to Grenada. Finally, I will look at the writing market which has grown outward from Freire and argue that his voice is, sharper than any other, the voice of a particular class--the middle class in crisis--with a particular social vision that rises from its material interests. Yet I will insist that the value in his works lies in the reconstructed application of the process which he promotes, dialectical materialism.

The Promethean formula that Paulo Freire says leads to liberation interweaves literacy, consciousness, production, and liberation. I think there may be little serious controversy about the issues of literacy, consciousness, and liberation, at least taken individually. There should be inconsiderable dispute about Freire constructing the interrelationship of three factors: literacy, consciousness and liberation. After all, books titled "Pedagogy of the Oppressed", "Education for Critical Consciousness", "Literacy, Reading the Word and the World", "The Politics of Education", are headed in a rather definite direction. There is probably a good reason for some commotion about what direction that might be--at least if we stick only to Freire's theory. And there is textual debate about Freire's sense of production as it relates to critical consciousness which must be unpacked. Therefore, to lay the ground, I will review Freire's key discussions about literacy, consciousness, and liberation. I will critique the junctures that Freire creates which he believes are both anti-elitist and directive. I will show how the factors of the formula interrelate. I demonstrate that Freire does in fact incorporate the function of education as an instrument of production into the picture. I will position Freire's ideas about the role of literacy and education in movements for social change.

It is important to keep in mind, though, that literacy, consciousness, liberation, and production are intricately intertwined in Freire, so much so, it is nearly a matter of watching a film frame by frame to separate one element from the next. Freire says literacy is "an effort to liberate...not another instrument to dominate", which means it is a process imbued with politics in each of its steps.⁽⁵⁹⁾ Literacy is a political issue, related to and designed to restructure consciousness, which is meant to lead to liberation. Even so, as in the process of codifying categories of dialectics which are likewise tied together, it is helpful to seek to momentarily isolate one issue from the next, to freeze a frame, to gain a more particular understanding of the process as it unfolds.

Literacy, for Freire, rises first in spoken language, itself an effort to grasp and act on the environment. "Learning to read and write means creating and assembling written expression for what can be said orally."⁽⁶⁰⁾ But there is an intensified sophistication built into the process of reading, a sophistication which leads beyond the reflection of the world and toward the recreation of the world with a greater sense of understanding.

"This movement from the world to the word and from the word to the world is always present, even the spoken word flows from our reading of the world. However, we can go further and say that reading the word is not merely preceded by reading the world, but by a certain form of writing it, or re-writing it, that is, of transforming it by means of conscious practical work. For me, this dynamic is central to the literacy process".⁽⁶¹⁾

This is related to the Hegelian dialectical notion of humanity described by Georg Lukacs, paraphrasing Marx, which insists that it is "not enough that though tend toward reality, the reality must itself move in the direction of the thought", in other words, one determinant always influences and often becomes the other determinant.⁽⁶²⁾ In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire refers to Lukacs' interpretation of this dialectical movement and carries it further still, "action is human only when it is not merely an occupation but also a preoccupation, when it is not dichotomized from reflection".⁽⁶³⁾ So reading, writing, and re-writing is, for Freire, a highly charged political process, an act which exposes the designs of oppressors on the one hand, yet creates and recreates the newly literate on the other. This means literacy must be driven by particular content. Freire sees the mechanical process of literacy as insufficient. It is not enough to simply decode print; what must be addressed is the relationship of power, knowledge, and signals of reality which are designed to delude or disclose, and then to act on that understanding. In addressing mechanical decoding, Freire distinguishes illiteracy from political illiteracy.⁽⁶⁴⁾ Language is, for Freire, enwrapped in a struggle for authenticity, a struggle toward the truth and action designed to enrich truth. The word is, "the essence of dialogue itself...There is no true word that is not at the same time praxis. Thus to speak a true word is to transform the world". ⁽⁶⁵⁾ Literacy itself is built on consciousness already present and which is:

"...a consequence of men's beginning to reflect on their capacity for reflection about the world, about their work, about the power to transform the world, about the encounter of consciousness itself, which thereby ceases to be something external and becomes part of them...I see validity only in literacy projects in which men understand words in their true significance, as a force to transform the world." ⁽⁶⁶⁾

So the method of teaching people to read the word is intricately tied up with Freire's desire for people to read and act on the world. Form is driven by the content which Freire calls "problem-posing", itself a concept which is finally fixed by its own content over its form.⁽⁶⁷⁾ Indeed, Freire believes one, form, is drawn from the other, content, yet they flow one into the next. Freire's method for literacy, best presented in Education for Critical Consciousness, involves five phases: (1) research into the spoken language of the subjects with emphasis on the discovery of words which are culturally, politically, and phonetically familiar, yet useful as a base for phonetic expansion and political discussion, (2) selection of generative words which will syntactically and politically make possible reading instruction, that is, words which can be manipulated to create other words and expand meanings constructed by participants, (3) the selection of codifications into which the generative words are fitted, that is, "representations of typical existential situations of the group..which open perspectives for the analysis of regional and national problems", (4) the "elaboration of agendas" sufficiently flexible to meet the needs of the group, and finally (5) the "preparation of cards with the breakdown of phonemic families which correspond to the generative words.⁽⁶⁸⁾ Dialogue with the subjects as a group begins at phase two when researchers begin to revise the agenda they have established and makes codification possible.

To put this method in relief, education researcher Carol Edelsky in "Literacy, Some Purposeful Distinctions", begins to critique Freire's approach, when she asks whether the students are "subjects or objects or both?" She notes that much of the reading instruction is comprised of exercises, a practice she sees as often at odds with the development of interactional knowledge, yet she gives Freire the benefit of the doubt in that he is on a quest for more than "instruction for instruction's sake", that is, for critical consciousness. Still, Edelsky suggests that it is quite possible the Freireian dialogue is contradicted by exercises in reading--like the phonemic flash cards Freire develops with his students that only construct words from words, not for meaning--other than the initial meanings determined significant by researchers--which serve to divert real communicative purposes.⁽⁶⁹⁾

Beyond this, interestingly, there has been but modest debate about the literacy method itself, and the bulk of Freire's writing focuses on the purpose of the method, and the tactical process which underlies it, rather than precisely how things are accomplished. There is little outcry from the whole language movement criticizing Freire's phonetic approach (which may be more useful in Portuguese but which has been adopted uncritically in English speaking countries like Grenada), the use of flash cards, or the questionable interactiveness of setting the agenda through expert research. This may be because Freire is indeed iconicized, or because many whole language theoreticians and practitioners agree with Freire's politics, in Edelsky's words, that, "literacy should be for repairing a society which only works for the few", and are willing to ignore what they perceive as secondary differences.⁽⁷⁰⁾ In either case, there is a considerable body of evidence within the whole language contribution that the construction of meaning clashes irrevocably with the focal concentration on phonics that appears in Freire's work, and that, according to Constance Weaver, "students may be able to do isolated skills work without difficulty, yet not be able to construct meaning effectively".⁽⁷¹⁾ Students using a phonics-centered approach are given information in fragments, disjointed parts, which prevents them from understanding how language molds and shapes meaning. The student is left with contrived, contradictory and artificial rules which deny the subtleties of language like graphophonics and the value of skills like predicting. The whole language argument, when made most sharp, is that the form of instruction, in this case phonics as the centerpiece rather than a sub-heading, goes beyond influencing the content, rather in this case it determines and subverts it--wrenches construction of meaning from the hands of the learner and locates it solely in the hands of the instructor who alone is in possession of the rules. While Freire has largely escaped disparagement from this quarter, he has, on the other hand, attacked "Romantic" or simply interactive and "Cognitive", or problem-solving approaches to literacy which he suggests are, respectively, unable to deal with the political questions and fail to make problematic "class, gender or racial inequalities" and, on the other hand, cannot resolve questions of "cultural reproduction...they are rarely able to engage in thorough critical reflection".⁽⁷²⁾ In other words, Freire negates these approaches because, in avoiding the political nature of literacy instruction, they tend to recreate things as they are. It is the content, again, which determines the worth of the form. Always, for Freire, the crux is the construction of a literacy programs "tied not only to mechanical learning of reading skills but, additionally, to a critical understanding of the overall goals for national reconstruction".⁽⁷³⁾ In sum, for Freire, the content of the literacy program finally stands above the form and this is what makes his program more effective, again, in his mind, liberating. This also explains why it is that the bulk of his writing is not directed toward his literacy method, but to his political vision, organizing strategies, and tactics.

Freire argued his method was effective early on. In Education for Critical Consciousness, he claims readers in his initial projects using this method were reading beyond the hesitant capacities of most beginners. Then he credits Elza Freire with the notion that because their method of education was rooted in an anthropological understanding of their culture, students, "Discovered themselves to be more fully human, thereby acquiring an increasing emotional confidence in their learning which was related to their motor activity."⁽⁷⁴⁾ There is no record of research following up on this striking assertion. Nevertheless, Freire's belief that there is data demonstrating that people have learned to read and learned to read in a problem-posing way itself poses its own series of questions, that is, what drives the program beneath its politics, what transcends the interests of instructors and students, what is the particular method of application, and why does it work

Here I turn to concentrate on Freire's answers: the creation of motivation, dialogue, the use of particular kinds of primers, and the curriculum within Freire's literacy program.

John Dewitt, a Detroit literacy instructor and Freire biographer, joins Freire in recognition of the critical nature of motivation in literacy programs by commenting, "Those who have a why to read can bear almost any how".⁽⁷⁵⁾ While Dewitt contends it makes little difference what method is used with motivated people, Freire is clear on the issue of inspiration in a discussion with Myles Horton, a community organizer, educator, and adult literacy specialist in his own right. Freire says, emphatically, "Do you see the power of interest, of motivation?"⁽⁷⁶⁾ Moreover, Freire notes that UNESCO reports show that "programs of adult literacy have been efficient in societies in which suffering and change created a special motivation in the people for reading and writing".⁽⁷⁷⁾ The special motivation to which Freire refers here is linked to an increased sense of potency related to the possibilities of literate understanding. Freire argues that people must be convinced that there is a relationship between their literate, politically literate, ability to comprehend print and the power they can exert in the world.

Freire outlines a three pillars of an appropriate literacy campaign, much like those of organizing campaigns: a firm knowledge of the community, the particular students, and the educator's knowledge of herself. He works, in each instance, from an understanding of the particular to the general, literacy and consciousness aimed first at individuals, then designed for a group.⁽⁷⁸⁾ First, he discovers the issues that capture the attention of the individuals of the community, then relates that to the community as a whole, as in individual interest in community irrigation, but then he immediately focuses on how it is that issue relates to the needs of the individual participants in the instruction group.

It is through dialogue that illiterates are expected to grow motivated and to transform their vision of words and their actions in the world into a new form of literacy. Dialogue is the factor that mediates the relationship between the teacher and the student, in Freire's practice, often an upper middle class instructor with considerable expertise and a working class or peasant student. Dialogue is the connection of the knowing with what is coming to be known, the negotiation of reality, the struggle for a true understanding of reality, and the subsequent recreation of reality through knowledge. "Dialogue is the loving encounter of people, who, mediated by the world, 'proclaim' that world".⁽⁷⁹⁾ For Freire, it is through debate and discussion, which rises from the students' experience and avoids manipulation via the instructor's ethical stance, that literacy is constructed. The dialogue itself is pushed by the students' recognition of pictures from their surroundings, their choice of words to represent the pictures, and their extended ability to capture the world through the connection of drawings and print.⁽⁸⁰⁾ Still, again to put Freire's position in relief, Paul Taylor, an incisive analyst of Freire's texts, notes that there is frequently a remarkable directiveness here in that it is the instructor's choice of picto-graphs which serve as a center of the dialogue and it is the instructor who writes while the students read in the Freireian method. Hence, those who write, those who do re-shape the world and the word, are finally the experts. Taylor claims this is manipulative in itself.⁽⁸¹⁾

Freire makes this accusation interesting, "In rejecting manipulation, I would never accept thoughtless spontaneity".⁽⁸²⁾ In other words, the literacy he is teaching, its content, has a course to follow, is not blowing with the winds in the classroom. Again, while Freire is stressing the problem-posing form of his literacy instruction, which is tactically at least intended to gain the motivation and interest of the student, he has not lost his sense of the central role of political content. This is a relationship worth working through as it appears again in Freire's beliefs regarding the links of leaders of revolutionary vanguards and the mass of people. At once, Freire suggests that the frequently vast class differences between teachers and students can be overcome by good will and a proper political position through which the tactical link is made, without manipulation, by drawing the students into a deliberate and specific understanding of their surroundings. Language, for Freire, overcomes the vast gap of material interests of the state, the instructor, and the student. But this dialogue and promise is not rooted in nothing. It is based on his analysis of what is good for people, that is, Freire believes love for the people can mediate an ethical stance which must strike beyond class borders.⁽⁸³⁾ A loving curriculum is thus transcendent, beyond traditional political bounds. Yet Freire also contends no education is neutral and none can be endlessly open--offering all datum as options for the students course. Not only is it impossible to invite every alternative, it is clear that Freire is willing to withhold some options for the purpose of political expediency. Taylor demonstrates that Freire is quite prepared to censor political bad news. He deliberately left out a letter from his "Letters to Guinea Bissau", a letter from Freire to Cabral criticizing Cabral for imposing literacy programs in the colonial, dominant, language.⁽⁸⁴⁾ Literacy programs, in Freire's view, are clearly subordinate to the policies of the social democratic party and, hence, production, "...literacy education should become concrete through projects in areas where in accordance with the polices of the party carried out by the government, certain changes in the social relations of production are either already taking place or are about to be initiated."⁽⁸⁵⁾ The objectives finally serve as the sextant, "You lose the objective of your dreams when you become spontaneous".⁽⁸⁶⁾

This is not to say the teacher in a capitalist school should abandon literacy instruction in favor of revolutionary rhetoric, "..we cannot neglect the task of helping students to become literate, choosing instead to spend most of the teaching time on political analysis...Clearly those who are illiterate need to learn to read and write." Still, Freire concludes, "reading and writing words encompasses the reading of the world...critical understanding."⁽⁸⁷⁾ So, we return to the position that education is not neutral, none of it; and what is at hand is the appropriate literacy method and the content of critical understanding.⁽⁸⁸⁾ This is a weave that is simply impossible to untwine.

Freire might agree. He says, "Look, my political position is A, B, C. This political position requires that I maintain consistency between my discourse and my practice".⁽⁸⁹⁾ At base, Freire says, "A person is literate to the extent (that they) use language for social and political reconstruction".⁽⁹⁰⁾ At issue for Freire is change: in whose interests shall we conduct literacy classes, based on what ideological structure, toward what ends?

At least in post-revolutionary periods, Freire sees literacy programs as part of the mass line of the party which he describes in form as "anti-elitist".⁽⁹¹⁾ This means that people should read, and read critically, but their critical reading is largely confined by the revolutionary party's mass line. In Guinea- Bissau, this meant coordinating the literacy programs with the political content of positions taken by the local revolutionary party, thus " an indispensable relation is established between the adult literacy programs and the political committees..." This clear direction, the political view underlying the purpose of the party program, other than that the link between the literacy program and the people and the party is meant to erode elitism, is left unproblematized in any detail; anti-elitism, for example, would not on the face of it distinguish a Maoist from a Trotskyite.⁽⁹²⁾

The line of the party, of course, would reflect on the use of primers or the books "which reinforce a passive, receptive attitude which contradicts the creative act of knowing".⁽⁹³⁾ Freire distinguishes primers from "reading texts which do not set up a certain grouping of graphic signs as a gift and cast the illiterate in the role of the object rather than the subject of his literacy".⁽⁹⁴⁾

Instead, Freire prefers texts which are "a part of a visual-graphic channel of communication and which in great part should be elaborated by the participants themselves."⁽⁹⁵⁾ In other words, acceptable primers, textbooks, are drawn from the particular surroundings and interests of the students, mediated by the needs of political change. These reading texts are the documents which Freire has left behind in Grenada which we will examine below. However, Freire's development of generative terms and themes is work accomplished by demographers, sociologists, experts whose role is as much to guide the political content of the meetings as to openly structure their form. It is the use of dialogue, again, which is meant to ensure their ethical linkage with the material interests of the students, an enigmatic ideological link of language and materiality.⁽⁹⁶⁾

In any case, the direction of the literacy project, which is of primary interest here, is that hope lies in the fact that "educational practice is always directive" and that the potential elitism in directiveness is absolved by the common interests of the students and the instructors who are made equal by discussion and love.⁽⁹⁷⁾ But it is necessarily through literacy that consciousness can be constructed which will lead to a liberating vision.

The nature of the dialogue is what forms the basis of critical consciousness. "Conscientization occurs within the literacy or post-literacy process".⁽⁹⁸⁾

Freire's construction of the word "conscientization" itself has an important history and is the subject of debate in many literacy classes. Conscientization is a mix of Latin derivatives which link conscience, "knowing along with another, knowledge within oneself", but which has also come to represent "inward knowledge", to conscious which also has roots in, "knowing something with others, knowing in oneself", and on to consciousness, "knowledge as to which one has the testimony within oneself, esp., of one's own innocence, guilt, etc..."⁽⁹⁹⁾ Freire takes up consciousness as, "never a mere reflection of but a reflection upon material reality. If it is true that consciousness is impossible without the world that constitutes it, it is equally true that this world is impossible if the world itself in constituting consciousness does not become an object of its critical reflection".⁽¹⁰⁰⁾

Consciousness, for Freire, is a task of "denouncing and working against the dominant ideology...This unveiling is one of the mains tasks..to illuminate reality..To make reality opaque is not neutral. To make reality lucid is not neutral".⁽¹⁰¹⁾ While literacy is a skill which recreates human thought, critical consciousness is a particular and desireable way of addressing and recreating reality. For Freire, critical consciousness does not occur spontaneously, but is built under special conditions with specific goals. He emphasizes that, "Critical consciousness represents the development of the awakening of critical awareness. It will not appear as a natural by-product of even major economic changes, but must grow out of a critical educational effort based on favorable historical conditions".⁽¹⁰²⁾ The towering role of ideology, the crucial task of the educational effort, is an important sign-post of Freire's vision of the power of political ideas.

Again, as in the content-driven directiveness of literacy, so the directiveness of the project toward an express kind of consciousness, "There is a directiveness which never allows education to be neutral...the educator cannot wait for the students to initiate their own forward progress into an idea or understanding..the educator must do it."⁽¹⁰³⁾ The crux of the matter, for Freire, is the educator's political position, ethically applied through dialogue, toward proper ends.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾

Freire felt, at a certain point, the term conscientization was being reified, turned meaningless, and he claims he abandoned its use. He has said that, "Conscientization is one of the weakest parts of my work...I neglected the problem of social classes and their struggle, I opened the door to every sort of reactionary interpretation and practice".⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ Freire here turns to a discussion of the importance of revolutionary organization, and the vital role of critical consciousness in that project.

Still, what Freire claims he strives for is: "the critically transitive consciousness..characterized by depth in the interpretation of problems, by the substitute of causal principles for magical explanations, by the testing of one's findings, and by openness to revision.."⁽¹⁰⁶⁾

Freire believes that to be critical is to be engaged in struggle, "We should not submit to the text or be submissive in front of the text. The thing is to fight with the text, even though loving it, no? To engage in conflict with the text".⁽¹⁰⁷⁾

Critical consciousness aims at the sense of totality signaled by Lukacs above, and the notion of social change that strains through all of Freire's work. "A critical approach addresses interrelationships, in a critical classroom this means going beyond the sub-system of education and becomes criticism of society".⁽¹⁰⁸⁾

More, "a permanently critical attitude integrates a person into the possibility of action to create history, rather than being crushed, maneuvered by myths, which powerful sources have created...The more men accurately grasp causality, the more critical their understanding of reality will be".⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ Understanding of reality is held together with a grasp of class struggle. When discussing what it is a critically conscious group of students should know, Freire says, "they will...know the history of the working class, and the role of people's movements in remaking society...The working class has a right to know its geography and its language--or rather a dialectical understanding of language in its dialectical relationship with thought and world..."⁽¹¹⁰⁾ John Dewitt, as I have shown, indicates Freire believes that a truly critically conscious person simply cannot be fooled.

The process in reaching critical consciousness is nonetheless important. Freire argues that "Liberatory education is fundamentally a situation where the teachers and the student both have to be learners, both have to be cognitive subjects, in spite of being different. This is for me the first test, for teacher and students both to be critical agents in the act of knowing."⁽¹¹¹⁾ Here Freire points back to his early concept of critical education as an attack on "banking" education, that is, the form of education which locates knowledge solely in the educator and the institution, which denies the interaction and reconstruction of knowledge in the interpretation and use of texts. In addition, Freire also attacks the belief that the students bring no knowledge to the classroom and are there simply to withdraw from an account of ideas held by the instructor. In his most recent, Pedagogy of Hope, Freire reminisces about a game he used to rupture this process with a group of students who insisted that he was, after all, the expert. Freire drew a line on a blackboard, cutting the board in half. He proposed the he trade questions with the group, and that they keep score on the board. His first question to them, "What is the Socratic Mineutic?", scored a goal for Freire. Their first to him, "What's a contour curve got to do with erosion", scored one for the class. This exchange proceeds for twelve goals, one for each side, a tie, the class leaving convinced of their own bank of knowledge, and abilities.⁽¹¹²⁾

Freire builds, therefore, a sense of the self-worth of the students and their own knowledge, uses their knowledge system as a base for literacy projects, and aims the literacy projects at goals which can be reached by a variety of paths. This then is the consolidation of literacy and consciousness, the inextricable braid of print literacy and consciousness that impels the Freire project. The combination positions the student with a reconstructed view of reality.

Nevertheless, although critical consciousness is an important step on the path, even while one may be impenetrable to deception, one is not yet whole without concrete political action, and without socialism. "A more critical understanding of oppression does not yet liberate the oppressed, but (it) is the right direction"...The revelatory, gnosiological practice of education does not itself effect the transformation of the world, but it implies the transformation of the world".⁽¹¹³⁾

Beyond this is the transformation of the world in specific ways. Literacy education "is not the same thing as changing reality itself. No. Only political action in society can make social transformation, not critical study in the classroom. The structures of society, like the capitalist mode of production, have to be changed for society to be transformed".⁽¹¹⁴⁾

Thus, we are left with the understanding that Freire does indeed believe literacy, consciousness, and education are irretrievably chained together, interlaced in a project to, in Freire's words, "create an education destined for freedom". ⁽¹¹⁵⁾

Freire's formula interrelates liberation, freedom and production in much the same way that literacy lays the foundation for consciousness. Consciousness, critical consciousness, is expected to be led toward revolutionary action. National economic development forms the basis for liberation. Because Freire hesitates on the question of development, perhaps recognizing a basic unresolved contradiction in his theory and practice, I can make this case far more easily through Freire's practice. But proof lies within Freire's theoretical framework too. For example, in Freire's earliest work, Education for Critical Consciousness, he makes it very clear that he supports the "battle for development, which urgently required an increase in technical personnel at all levels", but he adds, "neither could we afford to lose the battle for humanization of the Brazilian people." ⁽¹¹⁶⁾ In a later period, a time when I think Freire adopted a more radical stance in regard to revolution, he again underlines the importance of technological development and ties technological development to the intellectual process:

"Considering that technology is not only necessary but also a part of man's natural development, the question facing revolutionaries is how to avoid technology's mystical deviations."⁽¹¹⁷⁾

Freire strongly believes education plays a key role in ameliorating the differences between revolutionary leaders and the mass of people. Freire contends that it is through the spiralling dialectic of understanding, the increased consciousness and hence power offered by education systems, that the historical differences of educators, political leaders, and the masses can be transcended. Through the education system, "I think that the rediscovery of power has to do with attempting to reduce the gap between the party which speaks on behalf of and the sectors on behalf of which it speaks".⁽¹¹⁸⁾

It is important to follow this theoretical thread for a moment. Freire goes on to worry through what he sees as the necessity of permanent cultural revolution as a solution to the contradiction of elite technological control within a humanitarian project and shifts to a rather unfortunate Christian metaphor of the people and the leaders occupying "one body", encased in an analysis of the wholly ideological unity of post-revolutionary dominants and the mass of people.⁽¹¹⁹⁾ This reflects the potential of over-arching idealism, the belief that ideas can form the originating basis of reality, in Freire. Freire's term "cultural revolution" clearly references the Chinese Cultural revolution, which is regularly addressed uncritically in Freire, in the sense that it was a step forward.⁽¹²⁰⁾ The Cultural Revolution did not happen because of a mutual loss of love.⁽¹²¹⁾ The failure of the Chinese Communist Party to reach into the masses, to become one with the people, was the central issue of the upheaval. The crux of the Chinese cultural revolution was precisely what Freire hopes to overcome--in his mind--not in practice; that is, the Chinese cultural revolution was about the bureaucratization of the Chinese Communist Party rising from the growing privileges of the party leadership whose interests had become inimical to the interests of the mass of people.

Freire sometimes seeks to resolve this issue by explaining that politically correct national economic development is actually not development, but modernization. He argues that modernization is true national economic development while simple development is the crudest form of imperialism--or that development taken up in an authoritarian way is simple modernization.⁽¹²²⁾ In any case, at "a given moment the emphasis on industrialization gives rise to a nationalist ideology of development that makes a case for, among other things, a pact between the national bourgeoisie and the emerging proletariat," and he does not object. ⁽¹²³⁾ Hence, Freire adopts Lenin's vision of colonial anti-imperialism, that is, he calls for a united front of the comprador bourgeoisie and the proletariat--and he supports this process in Cuba, Grenada, Guinea-Bissau, Brazil, and Nicaragua. So, we have, at once, anti-orthodoxy in calls for permanent (but united) cultural revolution, and orthodoxy in that stage theory of Leninism (first make the anti-colonialist fight, then make the struggle for production to protect gains and gain abundance, all this is motivated by individual incentives, then discuss equality) born of Soviet necessity. ⁽¹²⁴⁾ This strong belief in Freire that ideas, love, can transcend material differences created systematically, that altruistic unity can supercede material interests and ideology can overcome structurally supported conflicting interests--all contradicted by the orthodox practice of uncritical praise for the most traditional socialist regimes, traces through Freire's theoretical work. The importance of production is again underlined in Education for Critical Consciousness, "it became essential to achieve economic development as a support for democracy, thereby ending the oppressive power of the rich over the poor."⁽¹²⁵⁾

Freire grows sharper still in regard to the link of education and production in Pedagogy in Process:

"..this implies a radical transformation of the educational system inherited from the colonizers. Such transformation can never be done mechanically...and must be based on certain material conditions that also offer incentives for change. It demands increased production. At the same time it requires a reorientation of production through a new concept of distribution." ⁽¹²⁶⁾

The potentially radical kernel here, the new concept of distribution, is never fully discussed.

More to the point, "This is a cultural project which, being faithful to its popular roots without idealizing them, is faithful also to the struggle to increase production in the country". ⁽¹²⁷⁾

And, "The team...would be attentive to the general political principles of the Party and the government--the social plan that determines what needs to be known, why, and in whose benefit, as well as what needs to be produced, how, for what, and for whom".⁽¹²⁸⁾

Freire begins to problematize the relationship of production for profit and education.

"Production will be oriented in the direction of values of exchange and not in values of use....the stimulus of production will always be of a material nature, contrary to the central thrust of an educational program as we have been discussing here. A program linked to production that seeks to build such incentives as cooperative work and concern for the common good places its faith in human beings. It has a critical, not ingenuous, belief in the ability of people to be remade in the process of reconstructing their society".⁽¹²⁹⁾

In Freire's most recent, Pedagogy of Hope, he argues somewhat more concretely that he opposes the form of post-revolutionary education that is "no longer an education faithfully dedicated to a critical understanding of the world, but an education strictly devoted to the technical training of a labor force". He urges a "critical, vigilant, scrutinizing attitude toward technology, without either demonizing it or 'divinizing' it". ⁽¹³⁰⁾

But Freire's sense of the post-revolutionary education system, subordinate to the political process, is always called back by the exigencies of national economic development, "Together with production or productive work...education should in this transition period become a stimulus to the necessary deepening change in society".⁽¹³¹⁾

The unity and struggle of Freire's assemblage of literacy, consciousness, revolution, and production brings together what I believe are the great strengths and weaknesses in Freire and opens possibilities for further investigation. Within the formula are Freire's concepts of dialectical materialism, the role of ideology and leadership, the importance of dialogue and love, the lighthouse part played by history, the necessity of political parties as agents of change, the nature of social practice as the test of consciousness, and the requirement that liberation be linked to intensified national economic development.

Freire's own notion of struggling with text, and calling practice into question, serves as the standard for this section which initiates an effort to grapple with what Freire recognizes as frequent criticism of his work as idealist.⁽¹³²⁾

I sharply disagree with Robert Mackie who claims," Paulo Freire has only one desire: that his thinking:

May coincide historically with all those who, whether they live in those cultures which are wholly silenced or in silent sectors of cultures which prescribe their voice, are struggling to have a voice of their own.⁽¹³³⁾

Freire, in his theoretical approach, goes well beyond that. But the fundamentally binary, and ahistorical, view that exploited people are silenced (rather than always resistant and sophisticated) does underlie much of Freire.⁽¹³⁴⁾ I note the racist section of Pedagogy of Hope, written by Ana Freire, which indicates black people in Brazil are just overcoming their timidity--this in the face of her own knowledge of repeated forms of rebellion and resistance. That this accusation of timidity is not directed to the Brazilian middle class or the mass of clergy is evidence of the nature of the comment.⁽¹³⁵⁾ Nor can I concur with Taylor's proposal that Freire's method simply "works".⁽¹³⁶⁾ There is more at issue here, as Taylor knows, and it is the purpose of what the method works for, and the type of problematizing that grows from the purpose, that must be questioned. Freire insists that the process of his plan for education is tactical, propelled by the political position of the teacher and, finally, "As a liberating educator, I am very clear about what I want".⁽¹³⁷⁾ Godotti, a key player in the Workers' Party of Brazil and self-identified Freireian, sees Freire's ideas transforming capitalist education in "socialist democratic" ways--through the policies of the Workers Party.⁽¹³⁸⁾

Freire is only infrequently precise in his theoretical writings about just what it is that a liberating educator is--other than one who offers freedom and rigor--toward what end? Indeed, his obscurity is frequently noted. John Elias is generous when he calls Freire "eclectic".⁽¹³⁹⁾ While Freire claims a liberating educator must recognize the dialectical relativity of knowledge, he agrees that the educator must be politically grounded--in precisely in what? Uncertainty? The ethics of the moment? Situationist ethics? Actually, Freire is quite directive. He refers to an "inductive moment" when "the liberating educator cannot wait for the students to initiate their own forward progress into an idea or understanding, and the teacher must do it".⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ The best way to unravel what it is he believes constitutes political location and liberation is to carefully undo his theoretical base and observe his practice, with the historical background as a critical contextual preface.

On the one hand, the appearance is that Freire relies on a fundamentally idealist approach, that is, the belief that language or ideas determine reality; on the other hand, he takes a undeveloped interpretation of materialism and applies that to the world of deeds. Sartre, above, noted a similar error in Hegel. And I agree with Sartre that missing a proper interpretation of material reality necessarily makes it impossible to apply a dialectical understanding of that reality. Hence, not being materialist means an analysis cannot be fully dialectical. I believe Freire's philosophical error has nearly equivalent historical roots in Marxist practice and theory and that this error, uncorrected, will cost human lives. A call for revolution is not an abstraction. Despite Freire's insistence on critical reflection, his ironically uncritical support for the Allende's, Cabral's, Bishop's, Mao's, and Gueverra's of the failed socialist past, can become the foundation for recapitulated failure.

Conscientization can be seen as a blend of the dialectical understanding of knowledge as a social construction, or the internal/external idealist dialectic that lies at the heart of missionaryism, that is, the externalized sense of the base of human motivation in a god coupled with the internalized sense of guilt that overrides common interest. Freire has never, in text, fully worked through just how one is to distinguish love for all people, humanitarianism, and class warfare, love for some particular people. Indeed, some of Freire's work is deeply concerned with freeing the oppressors. This demonstrates the reversal of dialectical understanding that occurs when ideas are privileged over materiality. Despite Taylor's insistence that this is a "pedagogy WITH the oppressed", there is a clear tendency within Freire's insistence on direction to indicate that this may be pedagogy FOR them.⁽¹⁴¹⁾ Even so, the issues are: conscious from what, of what, to what end, and how? What should be the content of understanding the problem of social classes? Freire moves in a sophisticated way here and makes contributions beyond what he thinks is a weak link. To the contrary, rather than a weakness, I believe the role of consciousness, as a material weapon, is one of Freire's great strengths--but also the heart of his turn toward dialectics disconnected from the material world.

I reiterate Freire's concept of critical consciousness, "Never a mere reflection of but a reflection upon material reality. If it is true that consciousness is impossible without the world that constitutes it, it is equally true that this world is impossible if the world itself in constituting consciousness does not become an object of its critical reflection".(my emphasis)⁽¹⁴²⁾

This is a critical point. It combines the Freire who, elsewhere, tilts toward idealism, and the Freire who, sometimes, insists on the dominance of the material world and class struggle, "in a class society all humanization is impossible".⁽¹⁴³⁾ I believe the paragraph above best encases his beliefs about the origins of consciousness, that is, the faith that the world does not precede consciousness but is simultaneous with it. Taylor has noticed this position as a form of Manichaenism, an inheritor of the Gnosticism which Freire references repeatedly in Pedagogy for Liberation.⁽¹⁴⁴⁾ Gnosticism, the ideas of an early Christian sect taking its name from the Greek, "to know", is marked by the sense that God and the world rose within humanity, and, more pointedly, claimed " an esoteric wisdom, sharply distinguishing between the initiated and the uninitiated". Gnostics rely on a series of saviors, all of them human, who unite with their god-head to bring knowledge and salvation.⁽¹⁴⁵⁾

Now Lenin, who Freire uncritically notes is a key base of understanding the link between ideas and materiality, theory and practice, attacks this kind of philosophical gnosticism in his early Materialism and Empiro-Criticism.⁽¹⁴⁶⁾

In assailing Berkeley and Mach, who made similar claims about the duality of consciousness and the material world, Lenin restates their position as, "the object and the sensation are the same thing and therefore cannot be abstracted from each other".

Lenin then moves to describe the consequences of this position:

"if the 'assumption' of the existence of the material world is 'idle', if the assumption that (a) needle exists independently of me and that an interaction takes place between my body and the point of the needle is really "idle and superfluous", then primarily the 'asumption of the existence of other people is idle and superfluous. Only I exist, and all other people, as well as the external world, come under the category of idle 'nuclei'".⁽¹⁴⁷⁾

Lenin argues quite sharply that this form of idealism, which pretends to link the material world with consciousness but in actuality disengages one from the other, is contradicted by the fundamental base of dialectical and historical materialism ,that is, that "things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us..."⁽¹⁴⁸⁾. He then notes that failure to secure knowledge with the material world damages the possibilities for enriched dialectical understanding, since materiality is far more complex than the imagination.

Lenin moved from this position, enriched it, in his later Philosophical Notebooks, going beyond the belief that knowledge is but a reflection or copy of the world, arguing, "Cognition is the eternal, endless approximation of thought to the object. The reflection in man's thought must be understood not lifelessly, not abstractly, not devoid of movement, not without CONTRADICTIONS, but in the eternal PROCESS of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution".⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ But Lenin reiterates that in the beginning, there was the world.

Freire appears to want idealism both ways. that is, he wants to hold to the idealist belief that consciousness does create being, while, within this framework, apply the sextant of dialectical materialism. God, for Freire, stands above and outside dialectical materialism, a useful tool in God's universe. Beyond Gnosticism, this is more pointedly the kind of agnosticism, the decision not to know--or abandon--the relationship of being determining consciousness, that Lenin censures. It is also this form of consciousness, which surely can be formulated in only the most unique of minds, that can serve as the base for the sense of individualism, uncritical hero-worship (for, say, Allende, Mao, Cabral, Bishop and the other icons of the orthodoxy--post-Stalin--whose good will is so strong that it overcomes the rather obvious collapse of the social systems they each hoped to assemble) that strains through much of Freire's writing.

If critical consciousness can be wrapped up in Freire's comment to Dewitt noted earlier, that it amounts to permanent impenetrability to the inveigling whispers of power, liberation must be a step further still, an affirmation of power itself. Indeed, "education has a lot to do with the reinvention of power", that is, the reinvention of the new, more commonly seen as the negation of the negation.⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ The sense of liberation presented in Freire takes the dichotomous approach that is likely to arise from the agnosticism that sweeps across his sense of education and consciousness, that is, he is unable to link the dialectical relationship of liberation in the mind, revolution in political affairs, and the abstraction of freedom for humanity. He comments, correctly I believe, that liberating education must also "be thought of as something that goes on outside the classroom in social movements which fight against domination".⁽¹⁵¹⁾ And, inside the classroom, a liberating class is constructed around an exploratory approach, an experimental attitude, self-motivation and collective determination of rigor, and democracy in which we are once again told by Freire, "You learn democracy by making democracy, but with limits".⁽¹⁵²⁾ Just how it is that Freire will balance, on the one hand, an endlessly open and critical liberated intellectual approach, with the inegalitarian necessities of a revolutionary political party, even a federation like the Workers Party he helps to lead, is not entirely clear. Except, again, we must recognize that there is a bottom line, limits. And Freire knows this has often not worked too well. In an exchange with the North American educator and organizer, Myles Horton, Horton says, "..a revolution to my knowledge has not changed any schooling system or any that I've known about. School systems stay pretty much like the way they were before."

Freire responds, "Yes".⁽¹⁵³⁾

Both then note modest changes in a few Latin American school systems but agree that, fundamentally, things are much the same.⁽¹⁵⁴⁾

The turn toward idealism in literacy for Freire is the well-spring of idealism in political analysis, since he directly binds one to another, literacy and the primacy of language, representations before matter. His education project is clearly a partisan one. "The educator must know in favor of whom and in favor of what he or she wants. This means to know against whom and against what we are working. I don't believe in the kind of education that works in favor of humanity"⁽¹⁵⁵⁾ Yet, I argue, it appears because of his over-arching idealism, he is able to shift to the proposition that when he leads a literacy project, when he changes the consciousness of people, he does so from "a human point of view".⁽¹⁵⁶⁾ Now, the problem remains: is the project of social democracy (that is, the Workers' party of Brazil) in the interest of the mass of people, even humanity, or is it a false North Star?

In discussing leadership and the masses, educators and students Freire makes an idealist and directive twist: ideas and talk overcome material differences---the inegalitarian relationship of the student, the teacher and the government--and growing understandings of material conditions are maneuvered to an express political vision of the environment. I propose that all of this likely hinges on the question of whether the material analysis is on point or not, a question I will put to Freire's analysis below. The form of the method is secondary to the content, yet the form is important and influences the content. In any case, I contend this link, the educator to the student and the state, needs to be more thoroughly historicized or practically worked out in Freire's work--a contention that suggests at least that Freire's appearance of openness may be contradicted by clear stratagems designed to urge students to see the world, not simply in their own way, but Freire's--and to use his method of analysis to do that.

However, in addition to the material split of elites and the people, what Freire never fully works through is the fundamental role of technology as a propeller of social change--and the subsequent social underpinnings to post-revolutionary ideological inconsistency. For example, he wants the masses of people to "take control of their history", but he has never suggested that post-revolution elites, those who benefit from inegalitarian decision-making and reward systems, might have a material stake in inequality. At bottom, this seems to be the most orthodox of Marxist theory, the theory of productive forces, applied throughout the socialist world, which sees change as coming first through the creation of abundance via industrialization. Yet, it is Freire's great strength, I believe, that he continues to insist on the importance of ideology--the potential of critical thinking within radical movements. ⁽¹⁵⁷⁾ His quandary is how to link the two--ideology and the movement of society via changes in the means of production, and his inability to make this tie is caused by his insistence on ideas as origins. But Freire relies on the faith that national economic development, production enhanced by education, will carry people forward to a better world. He is not able to fully reach into the contradiction here, an elite in control of a socialist society with material privileges that soon develop their own stratified ranks--and ideas about the technological needs of education. This cannot be solved by language and good will--or education. Again, this is, at once, Marxist orthodoxy, the theory of productive forces; and opportunism, the belief that ideas can overcome antagonistic contradictions of material interests. Freire has not found a way to reach beyond what may be a contradiction he recognizes, a tightrope act he is willing to risk in theory, but a risk he does not take in practice. After all, he does worry through the nature of elites within revolutions, and he has struggled with social inequality post-revolution. On the other hand is the paradox: what is the possibility for a truly critical intellectual movement of production in a society still based on inequality, socialism. After all, it appears to me that there has never been a socialist society that was anything but capitalism with a benevolent head.⁽¹⁵⁸⁾

As I indicated above, I believe there are strengths in Freire's method that might allow students to employ it to their own advantage, even those identifying their interests as different from his. I agree with Freire that is probably too much to believe that students will spontaneously reach that understanding.

But Freire wants to go well beyond the spontaneity implied by reliance on the student's inherent ability to unveil the relationships of power, at least in the student's immediate world.⁽¹⁵⁹⁾

He is after a revolution, but he recognizes that the process of reaching the revolution can influence its later content.

I want to underline that there is great strength offered here, a rational kernel as it were. Freire submits a process which can press well beyond the idealism which surrounds his view. The problem solving process, if we adopt it as a process and continue to critique Freire's direction, is a useful tool, indeed, it is a nice description of dialectical materialism.

It is within this problem-solving process that there is the recognition of the power of conscious exploration, the ability to self correct, that is sometime dormant within more brittle approaches to dialectical materialism, the orthodoxies which say that things can change only after technology has material conditions of production. I believe this is indeed the language of possibility, the stretch beyond orthodoxy that Freire offers, that is useful to those who want to pick up where Freire ends. However, Freire recognizes it is a radical few who will have the time and ability to make the requisite intellectual leaps.

In any case, I believe these paragraphs illustrate the fact that Freire ties production into his formula of literacy and consciousness for liberation--and open the key questions for exploration. Now, in turn, I look to the history that drives Freire's work, his theory, and his practice.
 
 
 
 

Paulo Freire, in describing his admiration for Gramsci, says, "for him, the philosophy of practical action was history". ⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ He says that to understand something one must "become soaked in the cultural and historical waters of those individuals involved in the experience." ⁽¹⁶¹⁾ Freire goes on to describe how it is that history is the method for analyzing the specificities of an area--and of a man. And Freire, who considered his period in Geneva and at Harvard to be exile, frequently insists he is a man of Northeastern Brazil.⁽¹⁶²⁾ Indeed, at the earliest possible moment, he returned to Brazil, though to the prosperous Southeast. Moreover, Freire is a radical, a founding member of the Workers Party of Brazil--and supporter of other Marxist options, who chooses education and literacy as the nucleus of his decidedly political work on the side of the oppressed. ⁽¹⁶³⁾ On his own terms, he is a fair subject for a historical and political examination. Hence, this section gives a historical overview of Brazil, its Northeast, slavery in Brazil as an entre to understand the importance of the master-slave discourse, the Brazilian left--Christian and Marxist. Throughout, I demonstrate the relationship of literacy to struggles for social change. This exploration will be carried out in some detail. I believe it is critical to my thesis to demonstrate that Brazil is an advanced capitalist nation, long out of feudal or even crude colonial relationships. In reviewing Brazilian history, and focusing on the Northeast, I identify several themes that underlie Freire's work: especially the dramatic social inequalities in the region--and their sources. In taking up slavery in Brazil, I provide some of the underpinnings for what becomes Freire's continuing references to masters and slaves--and I question why it is he has not come forward with a more cogent analysis of Brazilian racism. It is equally important to grasp the background of the left, and the Christian liberation theologists in Brazil for that blend goes to the heart of the solutions Freire invites. I question whether what appears to be a unity born in struggle, may in essence be pluralism likely to disperse, at considerable cost. I then review Freire's chronology within this framework in an attempt to lay the groundwork for the formation of his ideas.

Brazil is third only in land mass to the United States and Canada in the Western Hemisphere. With more than 150 million people, it is one of the few countries in the world to show steadily increasing rates of population growth for the last century--a factor encouraged by government policies. Brazil in the seventies determined to press forward in both economic and population growth, bucking pressure from the U.S. to limit its 3% per year growth rate, one of the highest in the world. It is geographically the largest country in Latin America and has historically had the largest gross national product. In the midst of the economic boom of the early seventies, Brazil pushed its way "from twenty-first to fourteenth in rank among developing countries, based on per capita Gross National Product" (GNP).⁽¹⁶⁵⁾ By 1991 Brazil was tenth among the world industrial powers with a $375 billion GNP.⁽¹⁶⁶⁾ Brazilian citizens share an imperial but pervasive language, Portuguese, as well as the choice of dual Portuguese citizenship. Even so, Portuguese itself is coded with the inflections and grammar of class distinctions.⁽¹⁶⁷⁾ The overwhelming majority, at least 90%, of Brazilians are Catholic, though Catholicism is regularly challenged by political movements attacking the church's relevancy, and by Protestant Evangelists whose crusades are presently sweeping across all of Latin America.⁽¹⁶⁸⁾ About three-quarters of the population now lives in cities, an increase of about 30% in the last 30 years.⁽¹⁶⁹⁾ The industrial work force increased remarkably since 1960 to more than 20 percent.⁽¹⁷⁰⁾ Labor unions have a long and active history in Brazil, as does the U.S. labor movement. The U.S. based American Institute for Free Labor Development trained "over 50,000 Brazilian trade unionists in their in-country programs" and sent another group of 400 to the U.S. for advanced work. ⁽¹⁷¹⁾

The Brazilian auto industry quadrupled production from 1968 and 1974. By 1975 the country led all of Latin America in auto production, by far, with more than 1.5 million vehicles. VW, General Motors, Mercedes Benz and Ford are all heavily invested in Brazil, relying on a historically friendly state to boost profits.⁽¹⁷²⁾

The country is divided into five distinct regions: the North and the Amazon basin, the Northeast, the East, the South and the Center-West. The economy in North is built around rubber, fishing and some cattle breeding, in the Northeast around sugar, cattle breeding and cotton, in the East around coffee, cocoa and industry, the south around industry and the Center-west around cattle. About 45% of the population lives in the Southeast, 14% in the South, and 35 % in the Northeast. But, as of 1970, the period for which the most reliable figures exist, the Southeast earned 66.5% of the nation's income, the Northeast but 12%. As a whole, the top 20% of the country's earners control 63.3% of the total national income, the lowest 40% control just 9.8%. These figures represent a shift toward greater, not less, inequality over the last twenty years.⁽¹⁷³⁾ Indeed, today the World Bank, an institution with an interest in not noticing inequality, calls Brazil the "most unequal country in the world".⁽¹⁷⁴⁾ The education system itself is recognized in the literature as being segregated, primarily by class. For example, the "concentration of income in the hands of the already affluent has led" to a dual economy in education for adults and children in Brazil. ⁽¹⁷⁵⁾

People in the Northeast die early. They live an average of four fewer years than a Sao Paulo resident, ten years less when they live in the Central Northeast--the backlands. The Northeast is Brazil's poorest region. There is no indication this is changing.⁽¹⁷⁶⁾

The nation is also divided by race, in striking material ways. Brazil suffers from a rather elaborate code of racism, ranging along a scale of power from European Caucasian to African to Mestizo to Indian. People self-identify themselves in surveys, probably skewing the results somewhat. Even so, self-identified white people live longer, by about seven years, than non-whites. In 1980, 54.2 % of the population designated themselves as white, 38.8 % as brown, 5.9 % as black, and 0.7% as yellow. This is a considerable shift from a 1872 census, suspect for the same reasons, which identified 38.1% of the population as white, 19.7% as black, and 42.2% of "mixed blood".⁽¹⁷⁷⁾ Reasons for this change will be discussed in the context of Brazilian slavery. Even during the boom years of industrial growth, the disparity in regional incomes remained the same or grew worse--as did the inequity in income between the rich and the poor, whites and people of color. The country remains not merely economically and regionally stratified, but racially split as well. ⁽¹⁷⁸⁾

A slow economic recovery in the early 1980's based on industrial development mostly located Latin America's largest industrial city, Sao Paulo in the Southeast, led to a boom in the late 1980's and a trade surplus of $12 billion. Yet a massive trade deficit remained. Many Brazilians began to find surcease in the old folk saying, "Owe someone fifty thousand dollars and they control you; owe them $100 million and you control them." If Brazil defaulted on it's debts, huge U.S. banks like Citi-Bank would likely be in crisis. Still, on the heels of the industrial surge, the country is now self-sufficient in steel, aluminum, rubber, and plastic.⁽¹⁷⁹⁾

Ten million people live in urbane Sao Paulo. The Government claims a 10% unemployment rate but "seven million live in shacks, shanty towns and deteriorating conditions...and (about) 14% are illiterate".⁽¹⁸⁰⁾ Like most of Latin America, Brazilian infant mortality rates are high, about 65 per thousand, and related to fluctuations in the minimum wage.⁽¹⁸¹⁾ The North American Committee on Latin America, investigating countless thousands of street children in Brazil, alleges that young girls are routinely sold into slavery/prostitution, especially "up the river" to the mining regions and the remote areas of the Northeast, that one thousand of these "marginals" are murdered by death squads each year, and that the government winks at their deaths.⁽¹⁸²⁾ While popular mythology has long had it that Brazil is a racial democracy, a country where class counts so much more than race that it is only economic barriers that need to be overcome, a myth for which Brazilian philosopher (and a favorite of Paulo Freire) Gilberto Freyre is largely responsible, it remains that racial color coding is one of the lynch-pins of Brazilian inequality.⁽¹⁸³⁾ Wood points out that Brazil, "was justifiably famous for its "...intermarriage, and the rarity of outright legal segregation. Yet, black people, color-coded as always, were "bypassed by the development process." But prejudice is a state of mind. Discrimination relates to practice. In 1976 the average wage for whites was "twice that of non-whites". ⁽¹⁸⁴⁾ Remarkably, in 1979, Brazil was "the world's second largest exporter of food, while 40% of its population still suffer(ed) from malnutrition".⁽¹⁸⁵⁾ Depending on the source, illiteracy in all of Brazil ranges from 33 % to 50 %.⁽¹⁸⁶⁾

Just how things got to this juncture, specifically how it is that a tiny percentage of the population came to control the wealth and the quality of life while the vast majority is left in apparent poverty and ignorance, is a key issue here.

Of the past 150 years, Brazil has lived under fascist or feudal governments for about 120. Moments of bourgeoisie democracy are interspersed in this record, but those years are not sequential. Invaded by the Portuguese explorer Alvares Cabral in 1500, the one and one-half million indigenous people resisted, died, and retreated to the interior, pursued to some effect by the Jesuits who built a lasting base for Rome in Latin America. Interestingly, the Jesuits used organizing tactics similar to those later adopted by Saul Alinsky and Freire, a pair whose commonality is recognized by Paul Taylor.⁽¹⁸⁷⁾ The Jesuit invaders needed to learn the language and adapt to some of the customs of the indigenous people, to come to understand their issues, to find answers to those issues in the teachings of the Catholic church, to convince people to act according to the teachings in order to addresses their problems, and finally to institutionalize the teachings in the language of the church.⁽¹⁸⁸⁾ Their considerable success is surely in part to their sophisticated technique.

The Brazilian territory was, within the justice framework of European law, legally taken by Portugal because the land was on the eastern side of a line dividing Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the western hemisphere. Brazil remained Portugal's for two hundred years until, in the early 1800's, the royal court of Portugal fled to Brazil to outrun Napoleon. The presence of the royal family retarded independence revolts like those occurring in the Spanish colonies. With the collapse of Napoleon, the royal family returned to Portugal in 1820, leaving a scion, Dom Pedro, in charge. In 1822, Dom Pedro severed ties with his family, declared Portuguese independence, and the country became and independent monarchy. Dom Pedro's son, Dom Pedro II, ruled the country until 1889 when he abdicated under pressure from the merchant classes who were annoyed with a proclamation--with the effect of law--issued by his daughter Isabel, freeing Brazil's slaves. Hence Brazil gained emancipation without the bitterness, and richness, obtained in a vast national struggle. Brazil, theoretically, became a republic in 1891. ⁽¹⁸⁹⁾

The Portuguese, the first colonists of Latin America to do so, initiated agricultural and manufacturing industries rather than turning solely to the exploitation of gold resources.

Sugar, based in the Northeast, became the main export and from that dietary decadence rises much of Brazil's current reality. The sugar economy required huge tracts of land and cheap labor. Hence came land ownership concentrations in the hands of a few--and slavery. Land concentration in today's Brazil can be traced back to the time of the Portuguese crown, racial stratification back to slavery, regional divisiveness back to the tailing of marketable resources in the colonial world. Sugar production on concentrated lands created a semi-feudal class of owners who did as they pleased, beyond the reach of any state on their huge tracts. A dip in the world price of sugar after 1750 through the Northeast into a depression from which it has never recovered and caused a shift to cattle production in the interior. The Northeast lost its key economic role in Brazil. Gold discoveries and the intense international demand for rubber, coffee, and cotton during World War I caused population shifts toward the south, especially the southeast and to the Amazon basin. The industrial expansion of the latter half of the twentieth century continued the population and economic shift to the Southeast, especially Sao Paulo, but it must be noted again that the enhanced economic base never meant an improved life in the Northeast, nor did it mean that poor and working class people could cultivate their lives or land. It simply meant, for the most part, that those who had--mostly white people, a group extending into the upper middle classes--got more ⁽¹⁹⁰⁾

From 1891 to 1930, Brazil lived as a republic for those in the middle and upper classes. Voting was prohibited for women and illiterates. A unity of the military, the intelligentsia, and the landowners began to grow which was crystallized in a populist-fascist revolution led by Getulio Vargas in 1930. Vargas ruled in a corporatist fashion, patterning himself after Mussolini and Franco, for 15 years. Vargas offered a velvet glove of company unionism based on a state-sponsored form of paternalism surrounding an iron fist of anti-communist, anti-socialist laws nd practices. Vargas "also offered the benefit of favoring the expansion of the internal market and protecting it with its right wing nationalism from foreign competition that could easily strangle the developing national industry".⁽¹⁹¹⁾

The industrialization which surged with the Second World War caused a corresponding increase in the size of the industrial working class and the merchants. This merchant/capitalist class had interests in competition with the old bourgeoisie made up of landowners and traders. They had a need for a technological intelligentsia, people involved in and capable of expanding productive forces beyond those at hand, and this group, as it grew, frequently identified their interests with that of the rising sector of the bourgeoisie. Vargas took the road of most politicians--he did what was necessary to stay in power (indeed, as the industrial base developed he began to loosen his grip on the unions--and to use corporate style unionism as a populist base) but kept a keen eye on the needs of the most powerful. But his drift to the left sufficiently worried the military that they staged a coup, seizing power and implementing a direct form of militaristic fascism, in 1945. Important under Vargas was a system of state-labor relations which subsumed labor unions in a government-directed network of councils which reduced the political participation and weakened the bargaining power of the unions, and, in addition, determined their organizing base frequently along lines of their position in the economy, one union for each occupational category--rather like the AFL's origins in the U.S. Wages were fixed by law. Strikes were largely illegal, theoretically a violation of the populist state, and labor disputes were encapsulated by a system of courts, including labor elites and corporation heads, which shifted struggle from the job to the bureaucracy. Labor leaders were often trained by the U.S. AFL-CIO sponsored American Institute for Free labor Development, long known as a front for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.⁽¹⁹²⁾ The military-corporatist rule worked, at least for national economic development. "The period from 1945 to 1960, Brazil's fastest phase of development, was ruled by the National Front".⁽¹⁹³⁾

In 1950, Vargas came back to power through an election and remained in office only until 1954, when he committed suicide. He was succeeded by Juscelino Kubitschek, a centrist who drew support from liberals, the Soviet-backed Brazilian Communist Party, and fascists, simultaneously. He proposed to bring "fifty years of development in five" and to build a new capital in the central region, Brasilia.⁽¹⁹⁴⁾ Kubitschek's ambition, necessarily requiring huge expenditures to develop transportation and energy was, coupled with massive inflation. This, linked to the restiveness of Brazilian labor which gained strength as it was organized by the expansion of industry, resulted in Kubitscek's electoral loss to Janio Quadros. Quadros, elected on promises of jobs, industrialization, and the end of inflation, probably an impossible task, committed suicide after only days in office and was replaced by Joao Goulart. Goulart quickly moved toward Vargas' populist/fascist tactics but could do nothing about a 100% inflation rate, labor unrest, and hints of a growing leftist movement coalescing beyond the reach of the usual liberal/leftist/Christian coalitions. He was driven from office by a lightening strike of the military on 1 April 1964. The left, which had openly followed Goulart, was quickly smashed. The military coup, which took a wide view of defining enemies, arrested hundreds of priests and lay workers. Yet the military takeover was enthusiastically supported by the Vatican.⁽¹⁹⁵⁾ Freire was jailed and exiled. Six successive generals then held office under similar Vargas-style populist/fascist programs until 1984 when open elections were held. This opened the possibilities for legal liberal-leftist-Christian activity and many opposition groups resurfaced. Paulo Freire returned to the country in the midst of a general amnesty.

Several currents are important to note here. First, the industrialization of Brazil coupled to its deep ties to world imperialism make it clear that this is not, as some would have it, a semi-feudal country.⁽¹⁹⁶⁾ Even though traces of feudalism remain, like remnants of property relations on plantations or mystical beliefs as organized into movements by churches, Brazil