‘Paulo Freire: A Philosophical Biography’ by Walter Oman Kohan reviewed by Ayşe Lucie Batur

The English translation of Paulo Freire mais do que nunca: uma biografia filosófica sets out to defend the name and legacy of Paulo Freire and his pedagogy against rising authoritarianism in Brazil and elsewhere. Instead, it ends up depoliticizing Freire’s legacy by severing its links to its emancipatory, revolutionary interlocutors, both from its Marxist and Catholic sides. It idealizes the figure of Freire by presenting him as a hero, a patron of education, a pastor. This idealization serves as a form of dehumanization that complements the authoritarian attack instead of confronting it.

The author chooses to focus on the life and thought of Freire (7) by delineating five principles that are ‘gestures to inspire the political, educational, and philosophical form of any life’ (12). This is a creative way of bringing together the thought and life of Freire. Thus, instead of a chronological biography, the book is structured around these themes: life, equality, love, errantry, childhood (infancy). The current assault on the legacy of Freire in Brazil is mentioned in the Introduction but left out of the body. We come back to it in the essay in the Appendix, which provides three interviews and two essays by the author.

For those readers who do not know about the debates around Freire’s legacy in Brazil, the context is clarified in this penultimate essay in the Appendix where the author surveys some criticisms addressed to Freire. The five chapters devoted to the five principles neither explore the current attack on the legacy of Freire in Brazil, nor provide the reader with a historical picture of the influence and reach of the Freirean legacy in Brazil, South America, and beyond. Freire’s ideas and the turning points of his life story are mostly explored abstractly, without going into details of the politics of Freire or the political and social contexts. For instance, the reader learns that Freire’s main work was the literacy campaign for adults, but it is not mentioned that those who were illiterate were not able to vote in Brazil until 1988. As such, the question of literacy and its connection to particular forms of inequalities, or the particular dehumanization in the context of Brazil are left out.

The choice of leaving out the current threat to Freire’s legacy as well as the revolutionary tradition of Freire is a peculiar choice because Freire and his followers are accused of ‘Marxist indoctrination’ in Brazil where the Bolsonaro government vows to ‘purge Paulo Freire’s ideology from Brazilian education’ (5). Hence it seems that the author had chosen to bracket off the political attack on Freire but defend him by focusing on his life and ideas through abstract themes:

I have sought to demonstrate the impropriety of attempting to destroy Freire by bringing into focus his philosophical and educational values, his thought, and his life. (221)

In the first chapter, Kohan comes to Freire’s defence by casting him within a European history of philosophy on life and education. He compares Freire with Socrates and Cynics through a reading of these schools by Michel Foucault (his last seminar, The Courage of Truth), where Freire appears not only as a teacher, but a pastor and a hero. I think Foucault’s reading of Socrates and the Cynics, as presented here, do not do justice to possible inquiries into the commonalities between the Socratic philosophy and Cynic school of thought with Freire’s teaching. But by aligning Freire’s thought with Foucault, the author places weight on the later Freire and his embrace of the term ‘progressive postmodern’ in place of ‘revolutionary’ (248), without denying that Freire was a Marxist. Throughout the book, Kohan favours Freire’s later book, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1992, in which Freire visits the arguments he had made in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed twenty-four years earlier. Kohan argues that Pedagogy of Hope ‘dislocates’ the Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

… [Pedagogy of Hope] was originally conceived as an “introduction to” and ends up becoming, during the writing process, a “dislocation from” Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (104)

Here the author makes a general statement about the trajectory of Freire’s thought that remains unsubstantiated. He provides no textual evidence of how Freire’s later book ‘dislocated’ what Freire wrote in his previous book. Elsewhere, the author concurs that ‘some of the ideas presented in Pedagogy of the Oppressed can be considered obsolete within the contemporary context.’ (233). He leaves it there and does not explain which ideas those might be.

Throughout the book, there is a dual strategy of putting Freire unto a pedestal, making him a hero, a patron saint, a ‘Western philosopher,’ depicting him as a loving teacher, while at the same time uprooting the revolutionary roots of his teaching and severing the links to interlocutors such as Lenin, Gramsci, and Fanon. The author repurposes the legacy and the figure of Freire, severing the ties that link to the materialist analysis of the current capitalist system, the psychoanalytic analysis of the internalization of oppression, and the revolutionary understanding of education. What is left is a focus on the “educator” both in the figure of Freire, and in the educational setting. The author’s constant focus only on role and figure of the educator is a good indicator that the author doesn’t share Freire’s critique of the banking model of education.

The book situates the educators at the centre of the pedagogic setting. In contrast to the meanings explored by Freire, the author understand “education” as limited to the formal education provided in schools. When the author says ‘we,’ he means ‘teachers’ (cf. 182). The central and mobilizing question of Freirean pedagogy, ‘how can the oppressed liberate themselves through education?’ is not shared by the author. Rather, this question is made irrelevant within its framework of pedagogy. Kohan says that Freire was a Marxist (24), but he takes out historical materialism out of his portrayal. He basically pulls the rug from underneath Freire’s teaching, which is founded upon an analysis of oppression. Freire also stipulated that any educational project should start from an analysis of the particular, the ‘here and now,’ that is, the concrete figuration of oppression that is shaping the lives of those involved in that educational setting.

There are few concrete instances where the undermining of the Marxist tradition becomes obvious. As mentioned above, Kohan argues that the revolutionary Freire of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed has been superseded by the Freire of Pedagogy of Hope. He also argues that ‘conscientização,’ a central concept used by Freire that has been translated as ‘critical consciousness’ or ‘consciousness raising,’ has lost its gravity in his later body of work:

In Freire’s later works the idea of conscientization becomes less prominent, since by this point he seems to be more skeptical regarding the explanatory power of a revolutionary theory and more receptive to a conversation that is open to other forms of knowledge. The certainties in Freire’s texts gradually diminish and, by the end of his work, appear closer to a series of relational principles, like equality, and less situated in the explanatory theories of reality he favored earlier. (61-2)

Here, the author is making an argument again about the trajectory of Freire’s career but does not provide any supporting evidence from neither primary nor secondary texts. The author makes this argument in the second chapter of the book titled ‘Equality,’ but doesn’t treat the reader as an equal. On the contrary, he puts himself in the position of authority.

In one of the interviews, Esther Pillar Grossi, the founder of GEEMPA (Group of Studies on Education, Methodology of Research, and Action), contributes to the undermining of the revolutionary roots of Freire by arguing that there is a leftist misinterpretation (214): the idea that the teacher would learn with the students and the students would take the lead is a misinterpretation, and that would not work in the case of literacy work. The author concurs with Grossi. In Freirean pedagogy, the student and teacher relationship (equality) and the political non-neutrality of the teacher are central themes that result from Freire’s analysis of the psychology of oppression and his insistence that the oppressor cannot liberate neither herself nor the oppressed. Ultimately, this interview does not read like a defence: Freire let the students take the wheel, he equated ignorant students with the teachers, he did not develop any method.

In a curious way, the answer to Grossi comes from Freire himself in two quotations that the author includes in his penultimate essay, which refutes and clarifies the allegation of ‘leftist misinterpretation.’ Yet, the author does not address nor recognize this refutation:

I cannot resist repeating: teaching is not the pure mechanical transfer of the contour of a content from the teacher to passive, docile students. Nor can I resist repeating that starting out with the educands’ knowledge does not mean circling around this knowledge ad infinitum. Starting out means setting off down the road, getting going, shifting from one point to another, not sticking, or staying. I have never said, as it is sometimes suggested or said that I have said, that we ought to flutter spellbound around the knowledge of the educands like moths around a lamp bulb. (Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, p. 87) (224)

… we must not bypass … that which educands, be they children coming to school for the first time, or young people and adults at centers of popular education, can bring with them in the way of an understanding of the world, in the most varied dimensions of their own practice in the social practice of which they are a part. (Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, p. 106) (232)

When the author leaves out the Freirean materialist analysis of oppression and the desire for liberation, it is not surprising that indignation (or, anger) is not included as a principle, which was another important theme in Freirean pedagogy. Overall, any reader who is introduced to Freire’s work and pedagogy for the first time with this book will attain a severely distorted and depoliticized picture.

1 March 2022