Responding to Freire: a beginning

It’s hard to comment on Freire when I haven’t read what I imagine to be a library of responses to his work. So I don’t know if I’m repeating what others have already said or adding something new. I know from reading postings on the website (http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/research/edu20/) that there are common themes in people’s reaction to his work, and I too address some of these themes. I think within the context of the website, at least, what I have to say should be of interest. It certainly has been helpful for me to have this site to post my thoughts and thereby engage further with Paulo Freire and those sharing an interest in his work. Also, my post is a little different from the others in that it’s not so much a book review as it is a response to what I see as problems and opportunities for using Freire’s work to develop an approach to understanding human-nature relations today.

Education, for Paulo Freire, had to be an emancipatory force, one that would contribute to human development. His goal was to help illiterate people learn how to use language to engage with the “themes of their time.” In setting parameters for this educational project Freire articulated a set of inter-related distinctions between culture and nature, people and animals, the rational and the emotional, the causal and the magical, communication and extension, among others. These distinctions gave meaning and direction to Freire’s work, and other scholars have raised important criticisms about them. What seems to be missing, however, is an explanation as to why Freire’s framework continues to have widespread appeal: people around the world – in conditions that are likely quite different from those that influenced Freire – continue to be inspired by his methodology and vision. This paper considers the core distinctions of Freire’s theoretical framework, some problems associated with them, and why the framework continues to inspire scholars. In particular, I’m interested in the contributions that Freire’s framework might make to current debates within the pedagogy of environmental studies and transforming human-nature relations.

A set of inter-related distinctions

Freire believed that education ought to contribute to human development. Making sense of this development required a way of distinguishing between different states of human existence—a progression along a spectrum with degrees of human liberation. First, to define the spectrum itself, Freire needed to establish something concrete about what it meant to be human. He turned to a distinction between humans and animals. While animal behaviour could be best understood as a reflex to the world, humans related to the world through culture: humans had the unique ability to make sense of the world and to intervene in reality—to transform it. It was this human capacity for reflection, decision-making – in short consciousness – that Freire wanted to develop.

Next, Freire distinguished between different states of consciousness, suggesting that some states were further along the path towards critical consciousness than others. On the one end of this spectrum there was “semi-intransitivity of consciousness,” a state of limited comprehension of one’s immediate surroundings where “[m]en [sic] confuse their perceptions of the objects and challenges of the environment, and fall prey to magical explanations because they cannot apprehend true causality” (Freire 1973: 17). “Naïve transitivity” was not much better, “characterized by an over-simplification of problems; by a nostalgia for the past; by underestimation of the common man; by a strong tendency to gregariousness; [....]"