Pseudo-Freirian Adult Education

The foregoing examples--i.e. Freire's approach as motivational device, as therapy, and as means for both liberation and profitability--all demonstrate a failure to grasp the political economic assumptions underlying Freire's work. These views blunt the explicitly political thrust of his work and detour into reformism (i.e. the pursuit of social change only insofar as it is compatible with existing capitalist institutions), away from Freire's own revolutionary approach. This depoliticization and cooptation of Freire's radical pedagogy produces what Kidd and Kumar term "pseudo-Freirian adult education".10

While we cannot wholly ascribe such interpretations of Freire's work to simple lack of understanding (indeed, we must recognize that such misunderstandings are to some degree caused, i.e. predictable, given the class position and class interests of adult educators), we must nevertheless recognize that the lack of familiarity with his political assumptions is widespread in North America, even among those who adopt a critical stance, and this contributes to such distorted views.

Freire and Marx

One important source of misunderstanding of Freire's analysis of the macro-context of education may be traced to what D'Arcy Martin calls an "impressionistic" analysis of political economy in Freire's writings. 11 Robert Mackie argues that what Freire delineates is indeed a Marxian view of class struggle, i.e. a contradiction between classes which can be resolved only through revolution carried out by the oppressed, but he does not go on to sufficiently analyze the political economic basis of class struggle, preferring instead to concentrate on the cultural dimension. According to Mackie, Freire "deserts Marx at the very point where Marx is most effective". 12

Similarly, in a recent article on Freire's politics, the author suggests that what is lacking in his work is a consistent materialist approach fully grounded in class analysis:

Very rarely does Freire try to analyse the tensions in society in terms of the material conflicts between social classes. He often gives us very interesting social-psychological analyses of oppressor-oppressed situations, but these tend to remain in abstract unrelatedness to actual historical situations.13

Therefore, his views run the risk, in Mackie's words, of "evaporating into mere rhetoric" and his talk of revolution tends to become "utopian and idealized". 14

Because Freire does not develop adequate political economic 'tools' for examining the context and process of liberatory education, we are not easily able to perform our own analysis within the Canadian context. For this reason, it is not surprising that many adult basic educators see Freire's political views as 'culture bound', as applicable only to the 3rd World settings which are the immediate objects of his attention.