Kid of the Black Hole
06-09-2009, 12:07 PM
And as far Paolo Friere goes... I don't know anything about him either, except that I know that I don't like the summabitch.
Interestingly, I looked this guy up. Turns out, he cribs rather liberally (in just about every sense of the word "liberal") from Hegel with the special caveat that he appropriates the lexicon more than the spirit (sic) of Hegel himself. I couldn't have placed the name but I was casually familiar with his work Pedagogy of the Oppressor (sic if I got the title wrong)
Unfortunately, it is hard to tell who is loopier: Freire or his detractors/commentators
To wit:
http://www.pipeline.com/~rougeforum/freirecriticaledu.htm
EDIT: I bolded the part that is most directly relevant to what Mary posted, although even that tidbit could afford to filter out some of the crazy-ass parts
In order to understand how it is that Freire can call himself a "totality," yet can say he believes in original sin on one page, and feel no need to criticize his support for the mechanically orthodox regimes in Grenada and Guinea Bissau on another page, it is necessary to take a detour to investigate some philosophical options, in this case two options, each with important subsets (Freire, 1994, p.167; Freire, 1999a, p.30). The two key options are idealism and materialism. The subsets which I hope to simplify and make understandable are subjective and objective idealism , on the one hand, and mechanical and dialectical materialism on the other hand. (2)
Idealism is most easily presented in misusing Descartes', "I think therefore I am." Or, in the bible, "In the beginning was the Word. The word was in God's presence, and the word was God" (John 1:1). Idealism suggests that the world is a construction of the mind. Subjective idealism, briefly put, is the notion that nothing exists but the mind, and all else is apparitions. No one could be a full-blown subjective idealist and function, worrying at every step that the body might fly off into space-gravity being a problem if forgotten.
Objective idealism, told well with the tale of Plato's cave, his story of the people for whom images on a wall are the reality of the world, is the belief that while all begins with the mind, or god, there is indeed a world which is of interest to the mind, or god, and is likely to be a manifestation of a microcosm of the mind. God, in this view, would be interested in class struggle. Objective idealism was later codified by the great systematizer, Hegel. For the idealist, the external world is a creation of the mind, if it exists at all. For the subjective idealist, really nothing can change. For the objective idealist, Hegel, the motor of change is necessarily the mind-which sets up all the change that follows. For a subjective idealist, there is really no possibility for historical change, as one could never tell, the only test being in one's own head. For an objective idealist, there can be history, and it can be relatively factual, if taken as the progress of the mind. At the end of the day, any form of idealism is a closed system, a turn to faith for proofs, a decision to be irrational. Irrationalism, the decision to worship the gap between what is known and what is not known, in an world of exploitation and inequality, is a partisan position (Lukacs, 1952, p.100).
Materialism is perhaps summed up well with this counter-quote to the Bible from Mary Coomes, "In the beginning was the world. Then came people. Then came the struggle for life and production, and reproduction, the deed. Ideas developed in social practice...." (Gibson, 1994, p.61). Mechanical materialism, probably best or most popularly represented by what has become known as Orthodox Marxism (an oxymoron for Marx), or Kautskyism, or Stalinism, the vision of the Second International later adopted by Bolshevism, is a belief in the inevitability of change through incremental additions: add up x amount of productive capacity and you get socialism. Marx attacked mechanical materialism in his Theses on Feuerbach, in which he emphasized, "human sensuous activity, practice....."(his emphasis). Marx repeatedly insisted that the greatest productive force is class consciousness, class struggle, but honest, and dishonest, revolutionaries ran into what they saw as the irreconcilable contradiction of consciousness, and productive economic development for abundance-sharing later.
Dialectical materialism, the study of change in the material world, is the idea that things do indeed exist external to you or me, although we are clearly part of the world, and that things change, and that human agency, including conscious agency, is a key part of social change.
I suggest in the paragraphs to come that Freire can only be considered a Hegelian objective idealist, and that as such, he represents, as did Hegel, a vital contribution to the understanding and necessity of change, but that his advice is finally a cul-de-sac from which people interested in equality and democracy must at some point depart. Hegel's contributions are monumental, as Freire's borrowing from him demonstrates. Hegel, however, lived two centuries before Freire.
While Freire wants to locate himself in the complexities of dialectical materialism, outside the bounds of either the idealists or mechanical materialists, it remains that he cannot go further than to examine the world as a creation of his mind, and to reduce the world to the dichotomies, the appearances, that his mind initially is able to comprehend, not the richness of the material world as it transforms. While Freire's language is full of discourse about domination and oppression, he is never able to transcend this key understanding and reach into the content of these factors in labor, exploitation, or sexual oppression. He is able, in pedagogy and in print, to take up questions of a central issue of life, the construction of knowledge, but he can eclectically pass but a glance at the sources of the enemy of wisdom: irrationalism (Freire, 1998b, p.42, 45).
There is little evidence that Freire had a good grasp of history, or historiography. Like many academic educators, he was rooted in philosophy and pedagogy, something of a hollow shell for a Marxist. The absence of historical understanding may have deepened Freire's objective idealism. He had few clear suggestions on how to get from what is to what ought to be, mostly an intellectualized denunciation of what is, and a utopian vision of where to be. Because of this his abstraction is pure abstraction, distanced from the complexity of material circumstances, and his ability to break out complex internal relations is mainly theory, quasi-religion, representative of educators with thin substantive backgrounds, who focus on pedagogical forms-absent history---and venture that one pedagogical emptiness slips into philosophy, and back again. With a limited grasp of history, for example, Freire is left analyzing racism in the common place terms of the right wing of multi-culturalsm-as a system of nasty ideas with no particular material base. He suggests that reason can overcome exploitation.
Allow me to pass beyond subjective idealism, since no one functioning in our world could fully adopt it and take a step with any confidence, and try to examine objective idealism more deeply through Hegel, who I think is Freire's forefather.
For the mature Hegel, not necessarily the anti-clerical Hegel who supported the violence of the French Revolution, but the Hegel of The Logic, the world is a totality, an unlimited whole, and its motive force is the absolute, ever-lasting Mind, "and whose outer form is but the manifestation of the Mind--su
ch manifestation culminating in conscious units identical with nature in the mind. That is all." Hence, people walk not because of their evolutionary relationship with the world, but because they will it (Bryant, 1971, p.21, 31--his emphasis). The world exists, things change, but things as they change are the product of an Absolute Spirit directing change to and from itself. Truth is in the Absolute spirit, and is in microcosm within the developing minds which are headed toward the Spirit. Because Hegel posited the existence of a world in change, and because he exhausted incredible, if sometimes undecipherable, discipline in examining its changes, Marx was able later to find and transcend the "rational kernel" inside Hegel's shell. Indeed, Lenin would later say that no one could understand Marx without having read, and understood, Hegel's Logic, making a problem of all he, Lenin, wrote earlier, like What is to Be Done? (Lenin, 1976, p180).
Narcissism is imbedded in any form of idealism-as anyone who knows Freire's postmodernist fan-club has probably noticed. If all one can be sure of is the mind, all one can really be sure of is one's own mind, a propensity that leads to the fetishism about the self in some forms of postmodernism, and in parts of Freire. (Freire, 1998b, p.17-21). Flowing outward from the idealist's consciousness, the representative of consciousness, language, above and predating, preempting, labor and sexuality, becomes central. It make sense that if the mind is principal, then its communicative processes constitute the key to the processes of change. This goes to the fascination of right-wing postmodernism with discourse analysis--abstracted from the processes of the material world. It follows, as well, that an idealist position will posit an eternal ethics, as distinct from ethics derived from a material analysis of social conditions, and insist that if there is to be hope, it must be couched in the language of those ethics, finally, a battle between good and evil (Freire, 1998b, p.98). As Marx repeatedly suggested, criticism of religion is always helpful in critiquing our world, and it is in Freire's.
Freire makes this analysis an uneasy one. He occasionally appropriates ideas of "over-determination," to demonstrate the relationship of culture, language, and economic structures. Yet, like Althusser, Freire remains bound in their dualism and impenetrability, rather than probing deeply into their inter-relationship. Freire, as an objective idealist, is left with language, culture, and mythology, over-determining life (Freire 1998b, p.78, Freire, 1998a, p.98, Palmer 1990, Dewitt, p.85-87). Sometimes in Freire, we find clues of the distortion of Gramsci's (and many others) views of the semi-autonomous nature-and the predictable next move, the autonomous nature--of the state, when in fact it is not mainly the state that is semi-autonomous, but capital.
"...and distribution was made to everyone, according as he had need" Acts 4:35,
While recognizing Hegel's profound contribution with the study of consciousness and transformation, and the efforts of a later philosopher, Feuerbach, Marx sought to address the question of subjectivity and objectivity through a careful examination of the material world and social practice. He suggested that the answers lay not in further theoretical contemplation: "Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem merely to be a theoretical one" (Marx, 1978, p.89). Here Marx begins to build the notion that it is not possible to be dialectical, to understand how things change, without being a materialist, without positing the primacy of the external material world-and the interaction of, human, ideas.
Marx digs into Hegel's notions of labor in order to demonstrate this thesis. "Hegel conceives labor as man's act of self-genesis--conceives man's relation to himself as an alien being and the manifesting of himself as an alien being to be the coming-to-be of species-consciousness and species-life." Marx goes on to suggest that Hegel's is an examination of the mind, "formal and abstract," and is at once superficial and incapable of offering a solution, an annulment, other than in thought (Marx, 1978, p. 121). Yet Lenin's reading of Hegel demonstrates that Hegel did indeed offer Lenin the chance to understand transformation through contradiction, as a transition of thorough-going difference, overcoming, grasped in the material world, beyond ordinary imagination (Lenin 1976 p143).
Nevertheless, Marx credits Hegel with identifying labor as the essence of human life, seeing the alienation of people from their creative lives as a critical problem in existence, and with the understanding that the genesis of human life is in relation to labor. Hegel apprehended moreover, the beginning of the philosophy of contradictions, negativity, at the heart of that process (Marx, 1978, 112). Hegel, in his world constructed in the mind, a world in motion toward the absolute spirit, understood that things change, and in studying how things change, his profoundly systematic honest investigation concluded, philosophically, that things change because they are composed of a unity and struggle (unity temporary, struggle permanent) of oppositions: Contradictions.
Dialectical materialism, counter to Lenin (and even some of Marx) does not simply invert Hegel's notion of the Idea as the beginning of matter and motion. It does not simply turn Hegel on his head. Perhaps a better metaphor would be to turn Hegel inside out. Metaphors, in this case, though, may not work well at all. To shift from the Idea to the material world, is not to merely replace one initiating agent with another, one shell with another, but to introduce an entirely new set of complexities, a compass with much greater capability than the beginning point offered in Hegel. It means, too, to replace the test of truth in Hegel, theory (the application of an abstract truth to manipulate the collection of facts) with the test of truth in Marx, praxis, social practice. This ends the linear dualism of thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis in Hegel, and suggests a sense of history best represented graphically by a spiral. Further, this makes possible a study of relationships, the unity and struggle of complex opposites, in both form and content, while Hegelian objective idealism remains stuck in deep contemplation of appearances, forms--abstracted or estranged from their related content. In practice, the left-Hegelian mechanical socialists rooted truth inside the central committee; right-Hegelian irrationalists locate truth in god, mysticism. Dialectical materialism locates truth, as a simultaneously relative and absolute phenomena, in social praxis, the developing relationships of understanding and concrete tests. Since theory trails (and sometimes leaps ahead of) practice, dialectical materialism, in contrast to idealism is an open system, recognizing the incomplete nature of understanding. The material world always hold more to be discovered. To reiterate and abridge, it is not possible to be dialectical without being a materialist, and vice- versa (Korsch, 1970, p.130-136; Sartre, 1960, p.19)). Idealism closes the system (even against Freire's many protests that his system remains unfinished), while dialectical materialism grasps, and opens it (Freire, 1998 p119). Things change, ceaselessly.
To expand, in his first and fourth thesis on Feuerbach ( early philosopher of mechanical materialism), Marx offers his initial warnings that it is not possible to be dialectical, to understand change, without being a thorough-going materialist, grounded in the understanding that being initiates consciousness--which reverberates back and recreates being-- that the material world exists in a relationship with the mind, neither
preempted by the other. He suggests that Feuerbach detaches himself from a material understanding, then contemplates his own singular ideas within the limits of his mentally constructed, dogmatic, contradictions. Marx urges a project that is rooted in the reciprocal interaction of change and the material world, of ideas and things, each creating and recreating the other.
In his critique of religion, Marx sought to do more than counter it, but to examine and surpass it, a dialectical materialist transformation. So, too, against Feuerbach, Marx wrote of the working class as the class that is "superior to society," the class that can consciously transform its conditions, not to reproduce domination, but because of the material interests of that class as the interests of all of humanity, to end domination.
Georg Lukacs sews this thread as a theme into most of his work. In "The Young Hegel," Lukacs indicates that, "contradiction is the profoundest principle of all things...." However, he continues, "this doctrine of contradiction can only be worked out adequately and consistently within a materialist dialectic in which it can be regarded as the intellectual mirroring of the dynamic contradictions of objective reality." Surely the great Hungarian dialectical philosopher would agree that the mirroring involves mutuality, reflecting, recreating, making profound, and reflecting back upon-and transforming (Lukacs, 1954, p.218).
Lukacs identifies Hegel as an "objective idealist" and describes how Hegel's dialectics had to play out.
"There can only be an objective idealist dialectics (a) if we may assume the existence of something that goes beyond the consciousness of individuals but is still subject-like, a kind of consciousness, (b) if amidst the dialectical movement of the objects dialectics can discern a development which moves toward a consciousness of itself in this subject, and (c) so if the movement of the world of objects achieves an objective and subjective, a real and conscious union with knowledge. Thus the identical subject object is the central pillar of objective idealism, just as the reflection in human consciousness of an objective reality subsisting independently of consciousness is the crux of materialist epistemology." (3)
Now let us return to Marx attacking the Young Hegelians: (They) "consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all of the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men...it is evident (they) have to fight only against those illusions of consciousness...they are fighting only against "phrases". They forget that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of the world" (Marx-Engels Reader. 1978, p149).
Moreover, a fundamental understanding of historical or dialectical materialism (in which nothing comes from nothing) is that the elements of hope for a new or better world reside in the old, including the ideas necessary to forge a bridge, really a leap, from one to the next: critical imagination as distinct from dreamy imagination. It follows that a deep study of particulars, coupled with transformative practice guided by that study, is the both the source and the route toward social change. Lukacs suggests that the objective idealist stance, in a sense, subverted Hegel's project of understanding what makes people continuously allow themselves to be turned into agents of their own subjugation, that is, Hegel's inability to probe deeply into understanding alienation (Lukacs, 1954, p.19).
Bertell Ollman believes that the route to the solution of the concept-object paradox is through the process of abstraction.
"Marx claims his method starts from the real concrete and proceeds through abstraction (the intellectual activity of breaking this whole down into mental units with which we think about it) to the 'thought concrete' (the reconstituted and now understood whole present in the mind). The real concrete is simply the world in which we live, in all its complexity. The thought concrete is Marx's reconstruction of that world in the theories of what has become known as "Marxism". The royal road to understanding is said to pass from one to the other through the process of abstraction" (Ollman, 1993, p.24).
Ollman, then, underscores the relationship of ideas to the material world rather like a numerator and denominator in a fraction whose whole would evaporate in the absence of either.
For Freire, filled with a lifetime of radical Roman Catholicism, the material world is subordinate to, and plays itself out in, the world of ideas and religion. Abstraction often comes from first examining the processes of the mind--which can never be as fertile as the "real concrete." Because the mind of a serious objective idealist combines a gaze that must be finally both consummate and omnipotent with real respect for the material world, Freire is able to present himself as a totality, not a dichotomy, yet present a philosophy of appearances and clear, unreconcilable, contradictions (Freire, 1998a, p.30).
Consider the obvious parallel of reading the word, the world, critical consciousness and revolution, with reading the word and revelation, "Blessed is he that readeth the words for the time is at hand." (Revelations 1:3) In Freire's framework, like Hegel's, where the word often comes first, God would be attentive to dialectical materialism. And reading the word would necessarily be the pathway to liberation.
Freire is no subjective idealist, one who would argue that the material world is simply an enchantment of the mind. In Freire's work, the world and the mind exist, but finally as territory in the mind of a god. This is what makes it possible for Freire to presume both a belief in original sin and in revolution. (Freire, 1998b, p.36-38, 59, 98, and 12, 14). However complex and contradictory--for Hegel could hardly be considered a patron of traditional organized Christianity--Christianity and Hegelianism are at the heart of a significant sector of Freire's theoretical base. These factors are the sources of his idealism--which Lukacs has identified as objective idealism. Freire commented that he never lost Jesus when he discovered Marx. Christianity and Hegelianism, both well-springs of Marxism, are also the foundations for Freire's reverence for equality and the importance of leadership and ideology (Gibson, 1994, p.112).
Objective idealism leads Freire to easily resolve, or personify, an apparently impossible binary: literacy for liberatory consciousness becomes literacy for national economic development (Freire, 1978, p.30). This, at the end of the day, was the project of the Grenadian New Jewel Movement, Cabral's Guinea Bissau, and one of the rocks that shipwrecked orthodox socialism. The goal, once critical consciousness and a self-actualizing working class dedicated to end the long history of the Master-Slave relationship, quickly became national economic development, with the party leadership at the head, living in the best houses around. Freedom was abandoned for the long grinding out of Taylorized industrial necessity. Critique of alienation became confused with the promotion of the gross national product. Concern about exploitation, which never extended into an honest study of surplus value, shifted to a preoccupation with greater output--in the name of socialist equality (Gibson, 1994, p239). A world view that necessarily focuses on appearances, objective idealism, does not go deeper than concern about domination and oppression, "the fundamental theme of our epoch is domination, which implies its opposite, liberation," into the essence of the creation of value, labor, and reproduction, sexuality. (Freire, 1980, p.93).Therefore, in p
ractice, this world view resolves appearances, and fails to get to the heart of things--and ideas. One of Freire's great contributions goes to this issue: that element of liberation which addresses the role of class consciousness as a precondition of social change. (Freire, 1980, p146). Also implied is the role of class consciousness in maintaining change.
Still, in the absence of a profound sense of materialism, Freire can only be superficially dialectical. Consciousness itself is never as rich and complex as the objects and subjects with which it interacts. In other words, Freire embodies a contradiction, a contradiction flowing from the binary created by his objective idealism: he believes ideas change the world, or on the other hand that national technological/economic development changes the world-- and he does not comprehend the interactions of a contradiction in which the power of one element overwhelms the other. Either we become what we wish, that is, a correct reading of the world creates a just world; or we become what the nation can develop, a form of Bolshevik-socialist mechanical materialism. This brittle binary, again, rises from Freire as an objective idealist, one who finally privileges consciousness over being and whose interest in dialectical materialism is subordinate to his beliefs in God and abstractions about reason. Freire rarely makes commonly materialist claims. The words political economy or surplus value get little attention in his works, though he does occasionally affirm or deny the pivotal role of class struggle, depending on what one reads. Freire is at once the modest dialectician and educator, often humbly imperious about his abilities. For Freire, an understanding of the infinite complexity of the real world is, in theory and practice, reduced to a naive binary, as opposed to the multitude of interrelating contradictions that are available to the materialist view. (4)
Lukacs, is especially helpful, "The theoretical cul-de-sacs of the bourgeoisie idealist philosophy , which are continually re-emerging, very often originate in an abstract and antinomic contrast between the material and the mental, the natural and the social, which inevitably leads to the destruction of all genuine dialectical connections and thus makes the specific character of social being incomprehensible" (Lukacs, 1978, p107). Lukacs' contribution is to demonstrate the framework that captures Freire. The caged bird helps build its own cage.
Freire, in both his earliest and his most recent works, tried to defend against this criticism. Indeed, he parries caricatures of the arguments of both the mechanists and the dreamy idealists. He counters those who have, unfairly and superficially I think, called him a keeper for capitalism in crisis (Freire, 1973, p.146; Freire, 1994, p.103; Freire, 1998b, p.95). It is possible, but unlikely, as Martin Carnoy seems to think, that reading Freire is going to be especially good for progressive sectors of capital. (Freire, 1998a, p.7-19). We shall see. But Freire remains stuck, in theory and in practice. The annulment of alienated consciousness, the way an estranged mind is overcome, following Freire's philosophical origins and path, is that progressives should fight for national "economic development, and to limit the size of the state." The guiding hand here should be God's, "a God on the side of those with whom justice, truth, and love should be" (Freire 1998a, p.34,35, 103).
While Freire recognizes a democratic and egalitarian utopian goal, he urges paths-- liberatory consciousness linked to national development-- idealism or mechanical materialism--which in practice have repeatedly been in harsh opposition to each other and yet are twins of the same mother, as we shall see. In practice, national economic development has never played second fiddle to equality and democracy; most certainly beacon issues to the movement for critical consciousness.
In practice, the jailed New Jewel leaders and the Minister of Education in Grenada agreed on the purpose of pedagogy, but lost interest in critically democratic citizens, because national economic development was far more important to them than critical consciousness, at least as long as the former held power. National economic development, moved to the role of the highest priority, means that criticism of the construction of profits, or surplus value, that is the exploitation of labor on the shop floor or in the agricultural field, must take second shrift.
Alienation is, in part, the estrangement of people from other people and their work because they do not control the product or process of production. Human social relations and human creativity, a unity possible today more than ever before, are split apart. Social relations are estranged by ideological systems rooted in opportunist interests--and exploitation. The potential for collective creativity in work becomes an authoritarian relationship--and boredom. Work becomes apart from real life. Work sucks.
Alienation inserts an additional insult: the more working people engage in the central aspect of what might or should be their human creativity--work--the more they empower, enrich, those who own--those who simply want them to work harder, faster, less thoughtfully--and this accelerates the construction of their own oppression. The more that is produced inside this framework, the less human people become.
Really critical literacy which addresses hierarchy and injustice is linked by Freireian magic, objective idealism, to technological national economic progress--rarely the catalyst for deconstructing inequality. Critical consciousness, which must at some point connect with the deeper realities of alienation, the creation of surplus value by work forces which do not control the process or products of their labor, is submerged by promises for justice delayed. Critical consciousness is buried in the productive forces--national economic development.
In Grenada, calls for national economic development meant considerable sacrifice for many people, even though the New Jewel Movement did have a reasonably honest system of national economics. NJM had programs for medical care, the local control and production of local goods and foodstuffs, a plan to build technology through education that predated the Asian Tigers, and a sensible scheme to boost tourism via an international airport. But people remained alienated from the literacy programs which were clearly designed to buttress the NJM economic campaign. People walked away, slept in class. They felt the literacy project was coercive, unconnected to their lives (Gibson, 1994, p.211). Moreover, the same pattern of alienation from school and work, despite the calls to sacrifice for the national economy, continues under the current government, which ironically turned to Fidel Castro to finance a local sports stadium. Cuban assistance with the Grenadian international airport was a key excuse for the 1983 U.S. invasion, and the imprisonment of the NJM leaders.
The main phrase used to sell national economic development is that, "we are all in this together." The socialist project promised that abundance would be on the horizon, and once abundance was achieved through worker sacrifice for national economic development, it would be shared. The line of today's global capital is much the same, except the promise of sharing some day is spoken much more softly, if at all. The belief that we are one, all in the same boat, is Hegelian, a remnant of objective idealism and is fully taken up by Freire. His followers, even those like Martin Carnoy with proud records of taking apart the workings of capital, are thus left with making calls to humanize the culture of the globalization of capital, a social system which Meszaros rightly calls a "giant sucking pump of surplus value." (Freire, 1998a, p.16, 36; Carnoy, 1974; Meszaros, 1995, p.422).
Freire's objective idealism on the on
e hand produces and recreates mechanical materialism on the other hand--a contradiction among many Freire is willing to live with--allowing his admirers to uncritically appropriate only parts of him, without addressing his clear contributions in their complexity. Some adopt Freire's humanism and ignore his politics, others adopt his politics and abuse his humanism. The Grenadian and Guinea Bissau revolutions appropriated the Freire for national economic development and abandoned his ideas about equality and democracy. Others, like Carnoy, lift his humanist and constructivist approaches to literacy, and hush his revolutionary politics. Objective idealism manufactures this binary, and allows Freire to live with his own contradictions.
Still, within Freire's objective idealism, is also the sense that dialectical materialism, which privileges primacy of class struggle and social practice, constitutes a coherent way to comprehend and act on the world. His demands for a critique of praxis create a fair ground for examining his own ideas and those of others. Moreover, Freire's insistence on the importance of ideas (critical consciousness) and leadership inextricably linked to the masses in any struggle for social change and education lays the basis to explore the possibilities of ideology linked to material equality (Freire, 1980, p.124). Freire says critical consciousness is, "....Something which implies to analyze. It is a kind of reading the world rigorously...of reading how society works. It is to better understand the problem of interests, the question of power....a deeper reading of reality...common sense goes beyond common sense." (Freire, 1998b, p.9)
There is much more, but as with the above you will need to use Google translator to convert it from Garble to English
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.1.10 Copyright © 2017 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.