The Abuses of Literacy: Paulo Freire’s Marxist Redefinition of Knowledge as Ignorance

The Left says critical theory is not being taught in schools. They are right. It's just being used to form teachers to brainwash our children.

From The European Conservative

By Steven Tucker

His methods of learning, known as 'critical pedagogy,' are now ubiquitous in teachers’ training, making Freire one of the most influential men you’ve never heard of.

September is here, and aerated concrete permitting, the kids are heading back to school, college, and university for the new academic year. But what will they actually be learning there? 

For an alarming answer, look no further than a book released at the end of 2022, The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education by James Lindsay, which really should be on the pre-term reading lists for students and parents alike. Lindsay’s exposé tells the disturbing story of Paulo Freire (1921-1997), a Brazilian Marxist and pedagogical theorist whose works, most notably 1968’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, have permeated Western teacher-training colleges so completely that, as of 2016, he is now the third most-cited academic author of all time in the field of the social (pseudo-)sciences. 

As his methods of learning, known as critical pedagogy, are inculcated into most new teachers’ minds during their training, this makes Freire one of the most influential men you’ve never heard of.

Intellectual Property Is Theft

According to Lindsay’s basic analysis, Freire’s aim was to create a Maoist-style ‘Perpetual Revolution’ across society by indoctrinating its captive youth with the utopian desire of “transforming the world.” This was to be done by abandoning the old “banking model” of learning—leftists never did like banks—in which students were instructed in facts, figures, and dates by an adult authority-figure who stood at the front of the class. It would be replaced with a process of child-centred learning, in which pupils would take responsibility for their own education. 

In actual fact, however, this was all just a front for teacher-led ideological grooming. Freire’s new pedagogical model uses (or abuses) an idea called ‘generative themes,’ the ruse of treating every single aspect of an academic subject’s traditional knowledge-base as a mere jumping-off point to introduce students to convenient leftist talking-points. 

In an old-time maths lesson, a teacher may set the following problem: “Jenny has five sweets. James has fifteen sweets. How many sweets do Jenny and James have in total?” With generative theme methods, the problem instead becomes as follows: “Jenny has five sweets. James has fifteen sweets. How does this demonstrate the pressing need to redistribute all wealth and dismantle the oppressive, sweet-hoarding patriarchy immediately?” 

Of course, it won’t openly be phrased like this. Instead, teachers of the new, politicised maths will invite pupils to consider how Jenny may feel about having fewer sweets than James does (suicidal), why this seems unfair (sexist), what may have led this appalling situation to develop (capitalism), and what can be done about it (revolution). 

By eliciting their naïve but strongly held infant feelings about unfair contemporary modes of sweet distribution, the teacher-indoctrinator will make it appear as if the session is child-led, when in fact the true puppeteer is the ‘lead learner’ (as teachers are now dubbed within Freirean Newspeak). At the end of the lesson, as an added bonus, the class may even have learned that 5 + 15 = 20, too, although—and Freire specifically says this—such a learning outcome is to be considered of purely secondary importance. 

Capital Letters

For Freire, true literacy and numeracy are political literacy and numeracy, not actual literacy and numeracy. Knowledge is a kind of capital, hoarded by the rich and powerful, and must therefore be redistributed amongst the poor. In a reversal of Francis Bacon’s famous motto “knowledge is power,” knowledge is actually oppression, from whose chains kids must be set free. 

Paulo Freire himself generally taught illiterate adults, not schoolchildren, and, to be fair, he did actually teach them to read—in the same sense the serpent in Eden taught Eve how to vary her diet. Freire was an originator of the now-familiar desire to ‘decolonise the curriculum,’ seeing literacy itself as simply one more tool the plutocratic European-heritage boss-class had misused to impose their alien system of capitalism upon the exploited native workers of Latin America. 

After all, it is only in a literate and numerate society that literacy and numeracy have any innate value; they get you a good job, as the boss-class need accountants and clerks to make the money go round. Therefore, literacy and numeracy were capitalism’s ultimate ‘means of production’ as, without their continued existence, the entire system would collapse—which, to Freire, would be a good thing. 

Employers and headmasters were unlikely to allow lunatic activist teachers to churn out entire classes who couldn’t read or write, however, so a more subtle option was to redefine literacy as something other than literacy: as epistemic, moral, emotional, or political literacy, for example. So, today, the average kid does still come out of school knowing how to read texts on their phone or perform basic sums (at least whilst using a calculator), but actual literature or higher mathematics remain a mystery to increasing numbers of them.   

Freire preached that the traditional local forms of indigenous knowledge unjustly “decentred” by capitalist invasion from Europe should be placed back at the centre of education instead—like “other ways of knowing,” not logic or deductive reasoning. Education thereby becomes a kind of anti-education, as a matter of pure principle. The only jobs the unfortunate children churned out by these methods will be suitable to fill are intrinsically worthless ones like diversity officers, full-time street protestors, or even more activist teachers. For Freireans this would be a good outcome, because that’s precisely the kind of society they wish to see created. As Lindsay argues: 

Unlike other Marxist states, which need engineers, doctors, scientists, lots of bureaucrats, and other professionals to make them work until they achieve success and global dominance, Freire’s program has no use for such things. It only needs educators and guerillas because its objective is not to build or establish a functioning society but instead to free men from any such thing. 

In practice, this all just leads to ever-collapsing educational standards, which are then covered up by rigging the exam system, and the introduction of more and more useless pieces of paper like GNVQs (Generally Not Very Qualified) in place of actual meaningful exam certificates like A-levels and O-levels. 

So, if your kids finish their decade-plus at school or university so historically ignorant they have never heard of Napoleon Bonaparte or Julius Caesar, yet excessively hyper-aware of the existence of comparatively insignificant but racially emotive specks like Rosa Parks and Mary Seacole, then this is why. If they emerge from science lessons completely unfamiliar with the processes of osmosis or covalent bonding, yet hysterically well-versed in the theories underlying the current alleged ‘climate emergency,’ for which they predictably then become doomsday cult activists, then likewise. It is because, as James Lindsay repeatedly says in his book, “our kids go to Paulo Freire’s schools.”

A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing

Unlike traditional Marxist revolutions, this one is being driven right from the very top. On his website, Lindsay implies that the World Economic Forum (WEF) is helping push Freire’s agenda. Their website formerly had several essays promoting his methods to educators; essays which, Lindsay says, are “now removed!” Not all of them, though.

“What’s the Best Way To Teach Children To Read?” is one 2015 WEF essay by an Australian literacy lecturer named Stewart Riddle which the memory hole somehow missed. Here, Riddle dismisses the traditional, tried-and-tested phonics method of literacy-teaching as overrated. Instead, “It is important to evaluate children’s reading competence in many ways” not just in terms of, erm, whether or not they are actually able to read. Instead, the word ‘reading’ should now be labelled ‘problematic’ and redefined anew to mean something else much more politically useful:

Being literate requires a much broader repertoire of skills than simply reading and writing as the decoding and encoding of printed words. The ability to make meaning from texts, ask questions and read between the lines is, in many ways, much more important. Paulo Freire, the much-respected Brazilian educator, called this Reading the World and Reading the Word. To teach our students to do any less would be the real failure.

In a sense, this is true. It is obviously no use children being able to mechanically sound out words if they then don’t actually understand what they mean. I can successfully sound out long passages of Russian, Japanese or Finno-Ugric, but my comprehension of their content is approximately nil. 

Yet what the Freireans mean is something rather different: to Freire, it is much more desirable a child should be able to ‘read’ society than to ‘read’ a book, to be able to ‘decode’ injustice than to ‘decode’ letters on a page. Consider the recent furore over Grandad’s Pride by non-binary author/ess Harry Woodgate, a queer propaganda picture book now found in British nursery schools, which features degenerate cartoon images of old men in bondage-gear kissing and groping one another during gay parades. Learning that G-A-Y spells gay may indeed constitute basic literacy, but the true ‘literacy’ to be inculcated here is the alleged ‘emotional and ethical literacy’ that cisheteronormative Western society’s historical oppression of elderly pederasts is morally wrong (but that exposing toddlers to soft-core gay porn disguised as literature is somehow not). 

The true irony here, of course, that if students really are taught to “read between the lines” as expertly as people like Riddle might desire, they would immediately begin to perceive that they are being mass-indoctrinated by a malign cabal of ideologues posing as dispassionate educators and reject their false groomings wholesale. 

A Conspiracy of Silence

Naturally, for revealing all this to the world, James Lindsay has been vilified. Wikipedia, for example, opens Lindsay’s entry by describing him as “an American author, cultural critic, mathematician, and conspiracy theorist.” Compare this to their entry on Paulo Freire, which opens by calling him simply “a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy.” It doesn’t even mention he’s a Marxist. Why not? Maybe it’s a conspiracy. You have to get halfway through the 2,000-plus words of text (which most people won’t) to find a single sentence even featuring the word Marxism. 

Right from the start, Lindsay is inaccurately flagged up by Wikipedia as an implied extremist: yet the primary ‘conspiracy’ he promotes is that Marxists have infiltrated many of the West’s institutions and then set about undermining them from within, which they clearly have. This perfectly accurate observation, Wikipedia says, is “far-right,” has been “wholly rejected by mainstream scholars” and “has been characterized as antisemitic by the Southern Poverty Law Center and others.” 

Well, maybe it has been “characterized as antisemitic” by the SPLC (an oft-criticised U.S.-based ‘anti-hate’ organisation), but as Lindsay nowhere blames Jews for this takeover, this characterisation of him as an anti-Jewish extremist is wholly inaccurate.

Lindsay does reveal a sort of conspiracy, of course. In an August 2023 interview, he spoke of how “Parents need to know that they are being deceived by schools’ ‘normal’ appearance … [as] the outside has been purposely kept intact, so that when parents look in, what they see is a normal lesson taking place” when what is actually occurring is “ideological grooming” or “cult initiation.” Lindsay names some of the specific conspirators responsible, in particular “Henry Giroux, a Canadian-American scholar and social critic, who is an outright communist.” After reading Freire’s work, Lindsay explained that Giroux converted to his way of thinking:

He went to colleges of education around North America, and got at least one hundred professors tenured … with these ‘agents’ in place throughout the school system, when Paulo Freire’s next book came out in 1984, there were colleges of education with moles, literally inside, eagerly championing the book … and it just kind of metastasises until it became a curriculum.

But this is all a matter of actual public record, not simply a paranoid rant about nameless and imaginary Elders of Zion hiding in a big undersea volcano plotting to turn your kids commie. All you have to do is head towards a whistle blowing Twitter account like Libs of TikTok (also “far-right” according to Wikipedia) and you can see hours of footage of successfully indoctrinated teachers of an unconsciously Freirean mindset openly boasting of their desire to decolonise/queer/revolutionise your captive children’s minds and make them grow up to be just like them (i.e. socially maladjusted ‘woke’-cultists). 

So, Lindsay does indeed reveal the existence of a conspiracy of sorts, but a real one, which has actually occurred. Reading between the lines, as Freire taught, one realises that labelling Lindsay a conspiracy theorist is just a loaded way of discrediting him by association with actual Far-Right nutcases. In reality, he identifies more as a disappointed liberal, as even Wikipedia admits.

By the way, this recent interview of Lindsay’s cited above was with The Times of Israel. Curious bedfellows for such a noted Jew-hater.

This Spells Trouble

If Lindsay really is an antisemite (which he isn’t) then one particularly counterintuitive way he manifests this is by accusing Freire of pursuing his revolutionary programme on bizarre pseudo-Christian grounds, not nefarious Jewish ones. Freire was a committed Catholic, an adherent of that mid-20th century Latin American false mutation of the faith known as Liberation Theology, which, as Lindsay accurately says, “is Marxism posing as Catholicism.”

According to Freire, teachers literally have to undergo their own form of pedagogical ‘Easter,’ a full-blown educational conversion-experience in which they die to the old world (the exploitative capitalist one), and then rise anew as born-again educational Marxists, ready to usher in the new world of Christ and Mao combined. Lindsay evaluates this as each teacher becoming “his own Marxist Christ,” a divine status he then seeks to pass onto his students. Lindsay points out that because public schools in the United States are meant to be wholly secular, those built on a Freirean model should technically be illegal. 

Ultimately, men (and little boys and girls) are to become as gods, able to conjure whole new worlds into being simply by “learning to speak the word to proclaim the world,” as God did in the Bible; Jehovah simply said “Let there be light” and then light magically appeared. According to Freire, “the literacy process must relate speaking the word to transforming reality.” True literacy means adolescent activists learning to abuse language in order to manipulate the public’s sense of reality itself. 

Although Freire never specifically mentioned transgenderism, we can see this process in action most clearly today when our successfully indoctrinated youth chant such blatantly untrue mantras as “Trans women are women!” and “Men can menstruate too!” and just expect these biologically incorrect assertions to come magically true, like a sorcerer’s spells. Fake neo-pronouns may, technically, be ungrammatical (“They is non-binary”), but, as they help conjure a whole new state of socially enforced being, such illiterate utterances actually operate upon a much higher plane of literacy than mere grammar, at least in Freire’s ridiculous pseudo-religious view. 

Viewed purely on educational terms, rather than explicit political or theological ones, however, how well does Freire’s technique of critical pedagogy actually work? Well, in 2012, a Paolo Freire charter high school opened in Newark, New Jersey, devoted to instructing unlucky local kids via his methods. Unfortunately, children’s test scores were so poor, even the local authorities felt the need to step in and close the place down in 2017, citing its lack of “instructional rigor.” Once this news broke, the school’s students took to the streets to protest, bearing stereotypical leftist placards: in Freirean terms, this actually represented a complete educational success.

In early 2022, meanwhile, an authentically Freirean job advert (reproduced below) was put out by Berkshire’s Bracknell Forest Council, seeking a “Learning Support Assistant, specialising in Emotuional Literacy.” Well, these days, ‘emotuional literacy’ is all that really matters, isn’t it? At least it is now that our kids all go to Paolo Freire’s skools.