# Chapter 6 of The Politics of Education # Introduction Marxism is a Theology Communism is a Religion # Recap - Unless your child is in a very fortunate situation, they go to one of Paulo Freire's schools. - We live in Marcuse's world: repressive tolerance, new sensibility, intersectionality, sustainability - Paulo Freire has been adopted universally in colleges of education and made central to them - All these things we hear about (Culturally relevant education, etc) repackaging of Freire, SEL roots to Freire, - Distance between social work and educator is not that far (according to Freire) - This is why our children can't read - Freire is on a relentless attack against skills-based learning (function and literacy out, political literacy in) - Literacy means being literate in a Marxist socio-political sense (education about consciousness), or being formally educated in the existing system (maintains oppression) ## Reinvent Education - Reinvent as Marxist theory - Make education theory a Marxist theory ## Chapter The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom - Adult literacy framed as a process - Compare 2 approaches to adult literacy - Create the Marxist theory (reproduce Marxism as Pedagogy) ## Setup - We will go into a Marxist Theory of Man, and then look at 2 conceptions of the "illiterate" and use them to understand what education really is. - Caricature of Education and Literacy - Move it away from caricature into the liberation approach - The illiterate as "Empty" and the illiterate as "Marginal" - People are either empty, and need to be filled-in (with the existing society); or - They are marginal. When you realize this, the Marxist theory of education comes into being - Structural Marginalization and thus Marxist Theory of education - Erase Teacher and Student and shift into Educator and Learners (synonyms are politically actionable) - Sewers of the word (evangelistic planting of the word across the world) - Learn the read so you can speak the word (as a political entity) to proclaim the world - Proclamation is done through denouncing the existing world and announcing the new world in a continuous revolutionary process - Redefine knowledge and what it means to be educated ## Adult Literacy The adult literacy process is a cultural action for freedom (from any constraints on your subjectivity). You are a subject with a consciousness and subjective experience of the world. You have the capacity to imagine the world as you wish it was, create it objectively in the world via labour, create your vision - puts you in a dialectical relationship between your imagination and yourself (see yourself as a creator having created the world). You see the thing in your mind become manifest in the world. You free yourself from anything that might contrain the limits of your subjectivity, even if it's reality, to create a free world where nobody is oppressed. ## The Chart White, non-white, total - in poverty, not in poverty, total - Math question acts about non-white not in poverty - What is the probability that a child selected at random in 2008 would be in poverty - Probability they are white and in poverty - Probability they are non-white and in poverty - Is poverty independent of race? - Use probabilities to explain - The use of generative concepts foisted into a math lesson - Just census data? But if we had other data showing that statistically-speaking young black men are responsible for more crime, then people would be pissed and said there's a political agenda behind your use of statistics - Using statistics of something non-political teaches the lesson, but a deliberate choice to use race and poverty engenders thinking about race/poverty and allows for hijacking of a statistics course to talk about this - See the politics behind the lesson - CRT in the schools / classroom guided and informed by CRT - Paulo Freire has had more influence on north american education since John Dewey ## Phonics Teaching adult literacy to peasants, but really re-tooling literacy to mean Critical Consciousness (political literacy) Away from Phonics to Generative Words Nonsensical syllables (Portugese is more of a phonetic language than English) English - you don't learn to identify syllables, but sound-out words through letters (phonics) Against that - literacy involves learning words that raise consciousness: struggle Creating the working-class intellectuals that Antonio Gramsci called for - a rising up of the working-class intellectuals who are going to be educated from within the system about the struggle of their oppression. Pennsylvannian lesson could have used anything, but has to focus on creating political literacy of oppression to raise Marxist political literacy The codification of this approach appeared in a Seattle Mathematics policy document. King County in Seattle. Adopted in other places, evidently. ## Blending of Social Work and Education SEL implemented in every subject on purpose is designed to bring Social Work and Education into the same space. Intervening with a Marxist take on Political Literacy to reframe all of education. Taught to be political activists in a Marxist sense - reading/writing/math lesson as proxies to introduce political points 1/3 of American students can participate at grade-level. ESG is the scam that's pulling us into this tyranny - all the money circulates around doing stuff like this. Winning prizes and points in this system Great Reset agenda - pearson and those who mnage their pension funds ## Troll's Truism By Nicholas Shackles - The Marxists in general use Troll's Truisms as their primary method When someone says something that is blatantly true, but if you dig into the point it's blatantly false. Philosopher Dan Dennett stole this and called them deepeties - based on what children say. ### Example: Love is just a word - Yes, but you missed the word: "So much of this stuff looks like deliberately missing the point, so you can make a political point" ## Freire's Truism "All educational practice comes from something that could be called an educational theory" (it's always present - so better to use a conscious one than an unconscious one) - Marxist truism in general is "Do it the Marxist way, because everything else is unconscious at best and ideological at worse. Theory and practice can transform the world". - Marxism all the time: - X is happening in the existing system - X is not happening correctly (problematics) - We have special knowledge to understand what's wrong and what the end goal should be There's always an educational theory and a theory of man behind it - we should be deliberate, and the only legitimate one to use is one that's conscious. ### Example In CRT, the school is already racialized - When we bring up race, we're deracializing it Introduce discrimination to level the playing field 39:44 ## Orientation Reproducing that essential idea of Marxism in teh context of knowledge being the bourgeois property. "Orientation in the world, so understood, places the question of the purposes of action at the level of critical perception of reality" Some of us have a critical perception of reality. We have an awakened consciousness of the purpose of action. People who perceive that we are transforming reality, and know the purposes fo rwhich we aredoing so, get to be the ones who get to orient what we do with the world. Reproducing Marx's ontology of man. Starting point for everything being advocated for in the book. With man as a subjective agent with conscious awareness of his subjective experience (why he orients a religion of pathos, with the subjective experience and emotional content. This being what separates man from animals)." The people who perceive that we are transforming reality and know the purposes for which wea re doing so are to be the ones who get to orient what we do with the world. Freire is reproducing Marx's ontology for Man. ### Fundamental Difference between Man and Animals "If, for animals, orientation in the world means adaptation to the world, for man it means humanizing the world by transforming it." (Humanizing is Marx's whole project). Animals adapt to the world around them, making them subject to a sovereign logos, whereas man has something more going on. It's man's duty, because of his capacity to be a conscious subject and creator, and to see himself as a creator through his conscious awareness of his subjective experience that he can articulate in thought-language. Because of that, man does not adapt to the world - man humanizes the world by transforming it. The world becomes the thing that man can envision in a particular way in his head. Man is a human - man's subjective consciousness is humanistic in orientation because he's a man, so Man works upon the world to make the world more like human consciousness - his object. Man is humanizing the world. Marx may have written it this way - the transformation of Jungle to Garden, or Jungle to City. Garden is the Dialectical synthesis that you want - City is gritty and grimy and has problems and crime and strict laws etc. You want to build the simulacrum of the City in a Natural environment. For Man, the purpose of life is to humanize the world by transforming it. People who paricipate in this are on the right side of history. This is a deep religious view - where the duties of conscience to law and religion come in. The duties of conscience in Marxist Theology are to Humanize the world by transforming it. Man's purpose in Being. Orientation in the world for Animals means Adaptation, for Man it means humanizign the world by transforming it. The dialectical process means that as you make the world the world in turn. You reflect on that in praxis and then make the world in the next step. A Humanized Man is a truly Social Man or in other words Socialist Man who lives in Socialist Society, in a humanized perfected garden as depicted in Soviety realistic art. This is a deep religion. The only people who can do this correctly are those who understand the purpose. The orientation of man in the world is humanizing the world by transforming it, but he had previously said "orientation in the world, so understood, places the question of the purposes of action at the level of critical perception of reality". (Only Marxists perceive reality, because they're not caught up in 'ideology'). This is why they believe that the uniquely, as gnostics, get to dictate how everyone will do things. "For animals, there is no historical sense. No options or values and their orientation in the world. For Man there is both an historical and a value dimension. Men have the sense of project in contrast to the instinctive routines of animals." (Repackaging of Marx) "Naive or critical is not praxis. Though, it may be the orientation in the world, in not being Praxis it is action ignorant both of its own process and of its aim. The inter-relation of the awareness of aim and process is the basis for planning action, which implies methods, objectives and value options. (Only the Critical View can be Praxis. ************ ~49 min) Freire was repackaging what you see in historiy and class consciousness. But going on with this ontology of man There's men and animals and something makes them different. Man is subjective agent that has conscious awareness of his subjective experience - orients a religion of Pathos because he puts that subjective experience and its emotional content as center. You no longer have God as the Logos (Rock of reality) - you have God as Pathos (Subjective experience). "The action of men without objectives, whether the objectives are right or wrong, mythical or demythologized, naive or critical is not praxis. Though, it may be th eorientation in the world and not being praxis, it is action ignorant both of its own process and of its aim. The inter-relation of the awareness of aim and process is the basis for planning action, which implies methods, objectives and value options." You have to have objectives. Methods, objectives and value options. And only Marxists will have the right ones (coming). People of purpose are creating a world (humanized world - everyone else creates the oppressive world). Package all of this into education and make it so the manner of teaching itself, as well as the selection of texts, betrays the presence of a philosophy of man. Will be set to exposing the bad one while the true (Marxist) one should be the one chosen because it's smarter, more moral and more clear in its purpose than the others. The conscious, humanizing transformation has to be adopted by all of us. Teaching Adults to Read and Write must be seen and understood in this way. Men with objectives will do the praxis on the world, which requires having methods, objectives and value options. Teaching adults to read/write must be seen and analyzed and understood in thsi way. The critical Analyst will discover in the methods and texts of educators and students, the practical avalue options which Only someone with a mechanistic mentality, which Marx would call "grossly materialistic" could reduce The society is structured in a way such that people who are literate or educated or knowledgeable is itself a Marxist-style structural phenomenon. Having access to knowledge/literacy/formal education is a false status (Bourgeois property) bestowed through ideology of pedagogy in society. The good life, like being in the garden, is man's birth rite, and is not something that we have to work hard to pry from nature. It's your birthrite to live in the flawless garden. We don't have to work hard for a good life, with fragile systems having to be maintained. Of course, in rel life you have to work really hard to organize and preserve against nature. But in their view, everything is through entitlement. Man's birthrite was eroded when the division of labour had been created (God was put into service to maintain the division of labour. We all should have the good life without having to do anything). Everybody has a rite to be in the highest echelons of society, fully accepted, and if they're not it's because society has rendered them illiterate/unknowledgeable/uneducated/disabled/marginal/etc. Their birthrite is at the center, where power lives (where you cn see the totality), and the ybelong there by birthrite so they must force their way. "Still more, the structural perception of illiteracy revealed in these texts exposes the other false view of illiterates as marignal man. Those who consider themselves marginal must, nevertheless, recognize the existence of a reality to which they are marginal. Not only physical space, but historical, social, cultural and economic realities. The structural dimension of reality. " *The dialectical interplay of an oppressive superstructure justifying its power and existence with the exploited infrastructure that does all the productive, valuable work that it's stealing from in order to continue existing. The class-relations, class antagonism, or the social relations which are characterized by class antagonism. Everything is stratified system in conflict across the line of stratification because the upper class is illegitimately exploiting the lower class and creating a mythology, or ideology, to justify continuing to do it - like being educated or having knowledge.* "In this way, illiterates have to be recognized as beings outside of, marginal to something. Since it's impossible to be marginal to nothing, but being outside of marginal to necessarily implies a movement of the one said to be marginal from the center where he was to the periphery." This is where the Marxian/Freirean belief is that the birthrite is at the center. By not learning to read, the illiterate man had previously been at the center of his own village/community/commune, and then the division of access to society through education came into the picture and took the man from the center in his own commune and moved him out to the marginals in the periphery. There's always language like this, describing the center vs the margin. Center this. Decenter that. Decenter maleness. Decenter power. Because they want to occupy the center, where the power is, which is also the point from which you can see everything and control everything. Really, they want to center themselves in their narcissistic Universe. This recalls where Marx said in his Critique of Hegel's Phiolosphy of the Right: "Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain, not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or conolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. This criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded is illusions and regained his senses so that he will move around himself as his own true son. Religion is only th eillusory son which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself." Center and margin, all the way back to Marx, man is supposed to put his Narcissistic in his navel that he can't stop gazing at, at the dead center of the universe, because he is the creator whose subjective view creates the object around him. This is what centering is all about. You assume that you're supposed to be the center and just got pushed out to the margin/periphery. If you get moved to a location in a society (margin vs center), you got moved there by the people who create maintain and benefit from the structure, so those people are your class enemies, and that is your class antagonism. Thus, you awaken to that level, one of the lower levels of class consciousness, that you wil use to become a revolutionary proletariat. You have been wronged by society - you not being able to read was you being wronged by society becaues it decided that being able to read was valuable. "This movement, which is an action, presupposes, in turn, not only an agent, but also his reasons." See, he wants to maintain the good life for himself. He made literacy matter so that he could center himself and maintain control over all you stupid illiterates. "Admitting the existence of men outside of or marginal to structural reality, we may legitimately ask "Who si the author of this movement from the center of the structure to its margin? Do so-called marginal men, among them the illiterates, make the decision to move out to the periphery of society? If so, marginality is an option, with all that it involves: hunger, sickness, rickets, pain, mental deficiencies, living-death, crime, promscuity, despair, the impossibility of being. However, it's difficult to accept that 40% of Brazil's population, 90% of Haiti's, 60% of Bolivia, 40% of Peru and more than 30% of Mexico/Venezuela, 70% of Guatemala would have made the tragic choice of their only marginality as illiterates. If, then, marginality is not a choice, marginal man has been expelled and kept outside of the social system and is, therefore, the object of violence." Literacy came to these places, where people were doing just fine in their communes. Literacy came, started to structure society (cities), and ejecfted those people to the margins because they didn't have the necessary skill to participate in the new society that came in/established itself from within. They were forced out of the center of society by society adopting a new technology, literacy. This was an illegitimate thing, because he's making the case that "that which is considered literacy" is a "fiction that did this" and the people who benefit from maintaining that fiction are the agents of that action / the author of that movement from center to structure. This is reproducing, in the context of literacy or education/knowledge, the Marxist theory. I you are illiterate, you are illiterate because the society made literacy matter and made you illiterate - you are the object of violence of that system. Teaching you to read, though, is also an act of exploitation and violence, because it's depositing into you the exact same exploitative mechanism by bringing you into the society which was the thing that oppressed you in the first place, so now you become complicit in the exclusion of everybody left behind when you become educated. That logic is very easy to prey upon in cloistered communities - urban ghettos, white appalachia. This is what centering someone is supposed to do. You are, by birthrite, centered, but structural forces of whatever dynamic came along and pushed you out to the margins against your will. Kimberle Crenshaw said we need to map those margins and figure out how to create solidarity so that we can create a meaningful politic of identity and an anchor of subjectivity so that they can reclaim or be moved to the center. An inversion of society. Rather than learning to participate successfully in the existing society and build it up by its bootstraps, you are taught to invert/turn inside out the existing society by making what is out at the margins at the center. Imagine a donut being ripped and flipped around inside out. That is the process being described. This is why we must decenter whiteness and center diverse voices - claptrap/nice sounding language to say that we must invert society in a Marxist way. This perverted, poisonous, Marxist view of how the world really works, which is a nasty gnosticism that believes that the poor suffering, vunerable narcissist that's doing this has been flung into a world that wasn't catering to him and his entitlement sufficiently. This is what Freire is saying education must be remade to do - invert society and blame everyone else and say they are at the advantage. "In fact, however, the social structure as a whole does not expel, nor is marginal man a being outside of. He is, on the contrary, a being inside of, within the social structure, and in a dependen trelationship to those whom we call falsely autonomous beings. In authentic beings for themselves (the educated. They believe they have autonomy because they're in this position of privilege, but it's false autonomy ebcause they're actually just reproducing the existing system. Only the conscious are the truly agentic people in society. Everybody else has false consciousness and false agency - falsely autonomous beings all inservice to the existing mytholog yan dsocial structure. Man becomes plaything of the social structure, of the discourses, if we get postmodern, that shape it. or that which is considered knowledge within it.) We have reached the first stage of class consciousness. You are marginal/illiterate/uneducated. You have been made marginal by a system that you didn't choose that deposed you from your birthrite at the center in the garden of eden. God expelled you unjustly. He was a tyrant that wanted to control you and threw you out when you figured it out. You've been expelled from your birthrite and he's created an entire mythological religion for why yuo had to be expelled. He gets to stay in, in heaven, while you are on earth suffering in a world that you were flung into and didn't ask to join in the first place. You have been thrown into it againts your will, you have been marginalized, and there are people who are marginalizing you. #### Step 1: - You are a class, the oppressed, and you are suffering #### Step 2: - You were pushed there by people who falsely claim superiority over you, and they ordered society to exclude you for their own benefit #### Step 3: - This is a dialectical system - the antagonism that you feel is not oppressor vs oppressed, but oppressor interacting with the oppressed to create this dynamic and maintain it. A higher level of critical consciousness #### Step 4: - You are unique in your role to be able to overturn this. It was your birthrite to be at the center. #### Step 5: - Knowing how to takeover through the operations/tactics/strategies (methods, objectives and value-options for installing the new world) What Lukaczs tells us is that the class consciousness proceeds in stages and concerning the actual class consciousness, it's not just a matter of knowing that you're a class that's oppressed or knowing that you're being oppressed by another club or even that you are in class antagonism with it; it is about knowing your role in changing that situation and, in fact, knowing at the highest level what tehe end point is supposed to look like - understanding the whole totality which can only be seen from the center (which you're being illegitimtaely excluded from) - That's Marxism and how Marxism sees the world - so resentful and believes hat it belongs and is entitled to the center and that it's being unjustly excluded by people who jus twant to keep them out because when you're at the center you can control everything *When Jews Became White Folk - position themselves as white and hten move themselves to the center of whiteness so they can be the setters of what Whiteness means* Hitler accused the Jews of the same thing ### The Social System You are actually within the social system, are an integral part of it, are creating it, and if you take conscious direction of it, you can seize the means of production and shape society and if you know the endpoint, then you have the consciousness necessary to do it. That's what Freire is preaching to. What this boils down to is: - Anything that's not going your way isn't just someone else's fault, but is the fault of everybody who occupies what you see as a dominant class - If you don't understand that context, thne you don't understand your life or its conditions - That's what culturally relevant education is about and SEL is facilitates Replacing phonics and literacy or mathematics or whatever with the conscious generative concept is a key part of the Freirean Pedagogy Model of Critical Pedagogy. Every subject becomes about raising critical consciousness and the multiple stages of critical consciousness, including the poitn where you get to be the Gnostic who understands the secrets of the universe (to liberate man from anything that might restrain his subjective view - including reality (the entire existing society and its operation and the thing that people say we need to have for it to function, because of reality)) Margin of society must be understood in the way that Marx and Hegel understood it - the parts can only be understood in terms of the whole. Lukaczs is very clear about this ### Lukaczs "The whole system of Marxism stands and falls with the principle that revolution is the product of a point of view in which the category of totality is dominant." - The people who believe that they understand the totality of society (its current and future operation) - activists who know where it's supposed to go, because they're on the right side of history - That is the point upon which all of Marxism stands or falls. If that's correct, Marxism is correct. - Lukaczs argues this at length in History and Class Consciousness 1923 - wrote over 3 years as the Hungarian Soviety Regime fell apart (he was deputy Commissar of Education where he installed comprehensive sex education) History and Class Consciousness: "The proletariat must be made conscious as a whole. Not just in terms of their class consciousness, but also in terms of the unique role that the class must play in society which is ultimately, " - The state will wither away because it will go to a stateless/classless society where everything will be spontaneous. - Marx argued that the awakened class is chasing after self-annihilation. Its liberation arrives by destroying the system that makes there be classes in the first place. If the proletariat succeeds, they destroy the class system entirely and there is no class of any kind - we have a global commune. No class system, no need to manage the class, no need to work out the contradictions and conflicts between classes. The entire society has been turned into the center. "Even the illiterate as marginal man in just accepting that he's marginal is wrong, unless we understand that marginalization is itself an active systemic phenomenon created by class division and antagonism, which is produced by those and maintained by those in the superstructure who benefit from it and generate the relevant ideology of society that maintains their position." Exactly what he argues concerning the superstructure earlier in the book. The infrastructure can't shape society at all because it's excluded from the center, where all the power is. The superstructure falsely positions itself in the center of society, with everything revolving around it like a false-son, until man learns to revolve around himself as his own true son, and then they give themselves, therefore, illegitimtaely the power to shape all of society and push to the margins people who have different views that might threaten their power. Class consciousness and class conflict theory in a nutshell. Property = being educated. Formally educated in the corrupt system. ### Iron Law Iron Law of Woke Projection: They are producing a false education model where people who tow the party line get the credentials and the credentials don't reflect education at all (you graduate from high school and 30% can't read). "A less rigorous approach, one more simplistic and less critical - more technical - would say that it was unnecessary to reflect on what it would consider important questions, such as illiteracy in teaching adults to read and write. Such an approach might even add that the discussion of the concept of marginality is is an unnecessary academic exercise. In fact, however, it is not so. In accepting the illiterate as a person who exists on the fringe of society, we are led to envision him as a sort of sick man for whom literacy would be th emedicine to cure him - allowing him to return to the healthy structure from which he has become separated". Sounds like the book of Genesis. Sick with sin, with grace enabling him to return to the garden from which he has been expelled. "Educators would be benevolent counselors scouring the outskirts of the city for the stubborn illiterates - runaways from the good life - to restore them to the forsaken bossom of happiness by giving them the gift of the word." Directly an inversion of the gospel and the direction is to go proclaim the concept to the world. "In light of such a concept, unfortunately all too widespread, literacy programs can never be efforts towards freedom. They will never question the very reality that deprives man of the right to speak up. Not only illiterates, but all those who are treated as objects in a dependent relationship. These men, illiterate or not, are in fact not marginal. What we said before bears repeating: they are not beings outside of, they are beings for another." *The existence of a formal education system, or concept of literacy, or fo a society which makes use of literacy, produces slaves. They're slaves to the system that believes all of this, and the people that place themselves illegitimately at the center of this system are the ones enslaving everyone. They have become the productive objects - beigns for another - of the dominant classes. By learning to read and do math or become educated. Education is just part of the superstructure that justifies the oppressive, existing society.* "Therefore, the solution is not to become beings inside of, but men freeing themselves." Destroy the entire system - you're not outside or inside of the system. There is no center or margin - the entire place becomes the center because you destroy the system itself. Solution isn't to get educated. Structure is the sum total of the relations between the uperstructure and the infrastructure that condition the range of subjectivities of everyone in society. They are the oppressed category within abroader structure. The infrastructure and superstructure are not just in conflict with one another, but are in an antagonistic relationship where each is producing th eothers in various ways, but the superstructure holds all the cards through illegitimate methods that they've produced for themselves and can't even see. "Alienated men, they cannot overcome their dependency by incorporation into the very structure responsible for their dependency." So they can't actually become literate or educated or have knowledge in the existing system because the existing system itself needs to be destroyed. There is no road to humanization except the authentic transformation of the dehumanizing structure. ### Lukacsz "Class consciousness is identical with neither the psychological consciousness of individual members of the proletariat nor with the mass psychological consciousness of the proletariat as a whole, but is, on the contrary, the sense become conscious of the historical role of the class. The proletariat has been entrusted by history with the task of transforming society consciously." And that's going to be achieved through annihiliation. The total annihiliation of the system that produces this structure which produces class society in the first place It's not to become literate but, rather, to destroy that there needs to be literacy in the first place. And you do this by destroying the society that values literacy, and rethinking/reimagining one from the ground up where everybody starts out as equals. ### Freire "From this last point of view, the illiterate is no longer a person living on the fringe of society / a marginal man but, rather, a representative of the dominated strata of society in conscious or unconscious opposition to those who, in the same structure, treat him as a thing." Society has to be understood in totality. That's what Lukacsz said, that's what Marxism is about, that is the ESSENCE of Marxism. They are not to be understood as someone on teh margins of society, but somebody who is oppressed from the entire relations of society. You are a representative of the dominated strata of society in conscious or unconscious opposition to those who, in the same structure, treat him as a thing. People teaching you math are dehumanizing you by depositing the knowledge valued by the existing system into you, as though your own knowledge of the world and your state of oppression isn't more important or valuable. Rather than letting you be a generative force to change society. The proletariat has been entrusted with the task of transforming society consciously. Class consciousness is neither the psychological consciousness of individual members of the proletariat nor with the mass consciousness of the proletariat as a whole, but it si on the contrary becoming conscious of the historical role of the class to transform the society consciously. "Thus, also teaching them to read or write is no longer an inconsequential matter of of memorizing an alienated word, but a difficult apprenticeship in naming the world." "Name the world as it is for them, which they denounce." *The Critical Theory was developed because you can't describe the good world from within the existing world, but you can criticize those parts of it that you don't like. You denounce the existing world and by naming it, nad making oppression visible, you announce the new world* "In the first hypothesis, interpreting illiterates as men marginal to society, the literacy process reinforces the mythicization of reality by keeping it opaque and by dulling the empty consciousness of the learner with innumerable alienating words and phrases." A difficult apprenticeship in naming the world. "By contrast, in the second hypothesis, viewing illiterates as men oppressed within the system, the literacy process as cultural action for freedom is an act of knowing in which the learner assumes the role of knowing subject in dialogue with the educator." The learner is a knowing subject - bringing something isgnificant to the table in the educational process - and they are dialogue as equals with the educator. We are going to go away from student and teacher to learner and educator, who are in a relationship which is a difficult apprenticeship in learning to name the world through critical consciousness. So you don't have to teach people to read, because inconsequential matters like syllables and memorizing alienated words and tasks and techniques doesn't achieve any of that. "For this very reason, it is a courageous endeavour to demythologize reality - a process through which men who had previously been submerged in reality begin to emerge, in order to reinsert themselves into it with critical awareness. Therefore, the educator must strive to an ever-greater clarity of what, at times, without his conscious knowledge, illuminates the path of his actions. Only in this way will he truly be able to assume the role of one of the subjects of this action, and remain consistent in the process." ## Paulo Freire in a Nutshell With the orientation of recreating the Marxist theology in the context of education, where the bourgeois property becomes knowledge/educated/literate - the point of Communism is to abolish bourgeois property. Abolish being educated. Abolish literacy. Abolish knowledge. We have other ways of knowing, and we have to make room for them. Decolonize the curriculum. Colonial knowledge recreates the most oppressive parts of society. Replace the curriculum with different curriculum which centers different ideas, voices an faces. As a rule of thumb, nobody chooses their words more carefully than Marxist theorists. Far from being gobbledybook or word salad (it's not, they know what they're saying), their phrasing is the result of obsessing over the smallest possible connotative shades. This is because they see words as powerful and creative - literally generative magic spells that structure the world and, thus, condition those who inhabit it. They, therefore, choose their words, which often seem strange, with extraordinary attentiveness. Lest their language, through its subtle creative magic, on the imagination of both its producer and recipient reproduce structures of dominance. In short, every word, to a Marxist theorist, is a political dog whistle, that hides meaning and enacts power. No word simply means what it means. Every word, they deliberately choose, is chosen with wizard's care. We also see this with apparently peculiar tendency in the verification of other terms. Marginalized instead of marginal. Minoritized instead of minority. Racialized instead of racial. The active process of making marginal, making minority or making racial (or making illiterate, or disabled), where it otherwise wouldn't be, must be highlighted (or centered). Something cannot merely be in the minority. Something else - an act of dominance - must be defining people as minority by comparison. Minoritizing them. This is, of course, an act of dominance that creates and maintains oppression. So it places subjectivity in the dominator and objectifies the oppressed - alienating them in exactly the same way Marx obsessed over. Freire called this a "false form" of subjectivity and agency. This is why you see Kimberle Crenshaw say "I am black becomes an anchor for subjectivity". Or why she says "Critical Race Theory" is a verb. It's an action verb back against the action that's marginalizing, for them. You also see this tendency in the choice of the word learner in place of student. The learner is not the same as the student. A learner is a subject in his own learning. A student is the object of a teacher and his vocation, that produces dominance. Nevermind that a student is also a subject in the process of study. For the Marxist, for whom social eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee (power dynamics) are paramount - a student only exists in relationship to the teacher, unless he is a natural student engaged in a self-directed study (learning). A learner, by contrast to the objectified student, is someone who learns. It's utterly unambiguous. No teacher's object. The learner is the active subject of his process of learning. As active co-learners, active co-subjects in the process of learning about the society. The learner is, to use the key Marxian word, again, centered in his process of learning, where the student is made marginal to it by the dynamic of teaching. To paraphrase, as Marx had it in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the Right, the student orbits around the False Son of the teacher, while the learner makes him into the true son at the center of his own learning universe. As God, in himself, is the learner. Not so for the student who is but a teacher's pupil. This ostensible peculiarity in linguistic form, then, is not peculiar at all. It is the precise sort of obsession characteristic of a religious fanaticism. Its product is not gobbledygook, either: it's Hocus Pocus, by which the mundane is transformed through subtlety into the sublime. The word by which the bread of the world becomes the sacramental host. It isn't word salad, it's the word that transforms the self into the bread of life. It's a kind of alchemy that when consistently got right in accordance with Praxis (which is learning through being in the world) opens up the gates to the kingdom from which Man finds himself temporarily expelled. Those who are learning - the conscious can perform the sacramental rite. For the contemporary Marxist, through speaking the word, one proclaims the world. Man replaces God at the center of his own universe and so, through his speech, creates the world he inhabits and creates himself. Man is the process of becoming , as well. Becoming conscious of himself as his own creator. Creation comes from speech, then. To speak, though, man must learn how. To learn to speak, he must become a learner. A man in conscious dialogue with himself in the world. This is praxis, which is reflexive. A man who is a learner, then, cannot be a teacher's student. That would emprison him and the teacher's creation, not his own. That relationship also must be one of dialogue: learner with learner - equal to equal - one creator with another. Mere instruction cannot create, it can only reproduce that which already is, and thus that which, as goethe explains, has already perished. The sigh of the oppressed people, Marx said, is the religion that believes God spoke the world into being, saw that it was good, and then rested on the 7th day, the day after completion. That world, to Marx, is a dead world. The completion of the world which is always in the process of becoming is a lie. The world dies in the instant it sees itself as complete. God, in declaring it done, merely asserts his dominance over a particular stage of being - over a dead world held under his dominion. God, then, is the tyrant, and a jailer of man in a dead world he wants to maintain and rule. Man can be set free when he realizes that this is a dead God. The creation of dead men who wanted to maintain the world, as it was, at an earlier historical time, when it was under their control. In Marx's relity, the world can never be completed, because it is always becoming. Transforming from what was, through what is, to what its creators continually create it to be. The revolution is perpetual - a revoluation that stops has died, and the world it left off with is likewise dead. There is no living God but man, through whom the world continually becomes. God is dead. Becoming is the nature of being, and becoming is dialectical. We are all learners, active subjects in the process of learning and transforming ourselves and the world. Teachers are dead Gods. False Sons who denounce nothing, announce nothing new, and merely declare an alienating world taht *As will be seen in the Dialogical model - the educator and student are in dialogue-based relationship.*