Cambridge University goes full communist

With their (re)education department leading the way

Have you heard of a guy called Paulo Freire? Probably not. Most people would have no reason to. But Cambridge University certainly has and might even be his biggest fan. They organised a 2 week long festival to celebrate the centenary of his birth.

“The legacy of Paulo Freire – a pivotal, transformative figure in global education whose centenary falls this year – is being celebrated in a series of free events at the University of Cambridge.

Starting on 1 November, the University’s Faculty of Education will be hosting a fortnight of discussions, debates and artistic presentations inspired by Freire’s philosophy and work. The programme features an international cast of eminent scholars from education and the wider social sciences, who together will examine Freire’s ideas about education, economics, politics and social justice, and their continued impact on these fields and beyond.”

- Faculty of Education News, Cambridge University (emphasis mine)

They even put up a statue of him. They must really like him.

The University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education has become the first institution outside Brazil to install one of a series of iconic sculptures of Paulo Freire: a giant of educational thought whose ideas are under attack from the country’s Government.

- Faculty of Education News, Cambridge University (emphasis mine)

Wow. If one of the world’s best univerities loves him this much, he must be an awesome guy. I can’t wait to hear what he has to say. Let’s read some Freire and discover the incredible wisdom he has to share with us.

The lust to possess, a sign of the necrophiliac world view, rejects the deeper meaning of resurrection. Why should I be interested in rebirth if I hold in my hands, as objects to be possessed, the torn body and soul of the oppressed? I can only experience rebirth at the side of the oppressed by being born again, with them, in the process of liberation. I cannot turn such a rebirth into a means of owning the world, since it is essentially a means of transforming the world.

- The Politics of Education (1985), Paulo Freire

Err, what the hell was that? That sounded pretty crazy. Maybe he was just having a bad day. Let’s see what else he’s said in case that was just a one-off.

This new apprenticeship will violently break down the elitist concept of existence they had absorbed while being ideologized. The sine qua non the apprenticeship demands is that, first of all, they really experience their own Easter, that they die as elitists so as to be resurrected on the side of the oppressed, that they be born again with the beings who were not allowed to be. Such a process implies a renunciation of myths that are dear to them: the myth of their superiority, of their purity of soul, of their virtues, their wisdom, the myth that they save the poor, the myth of the neutrality of the church, of theology, education, science, technology, the myth of their own impartiality. From these grow the other myths: of the inferiority of other people, of their spiritual and physical impurity, and of the absolute ignorance of the oppressed.

This Easter, which results in the changing of consciousness, must be existentially experienced. The real Easter is not commemorative rhetoric. It is praxis; it is historical involvement. The old Easter of rhetoric is dead—with no hope of resurrection. It is only in the authenticity of historical praxis that Easter becomes the death that makes life possible. But the bourgeois world view, basically necrophiliac (death-loving) and therefore static, is unable to accept this supremely biophiliac (life-loving) experience of Easter. The bourgeois mentality—which is far more than just a convenient abstraction—kills the profound historical dynamism of Easter and turns it into no more than a date on the calendar.

- The Politics of Education (1985), Paulo Freire (emphasis mine)

Oh. That’s even crazier. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything more insane in my entire life (he’s talking about kids, in case that wasn’t clear). Apparently this is a book about education though you’d be forgiven for not realising that. As it happens, he’s written nearly 30 books (nearly all on education) and they’re basically all like this - totally batshit insane from start to finish. He doesn’t pause even for a second to write something sane.

So Paulo Freire is clearly a total nutjob. We know that much. But I wonder what particular type of nutjob he is? There are all sorts of crazy people out there after all. What exactly are we dealing with here?

The pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and libertarian pedagogy, has two distinct stages. In the first, the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in which the reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation. In both stages, it is always through action in depth that the culture of domination is culturally confronted [10].

[10] This appears to be the fundamental aspect of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

- Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Paulo Freire (emphasis mine)

That’s the same Mao (Zedong) who led the original communist revolution of China, The Great Leap Forward (that killed up to 60 million people, mainly through starvation) and The Cultural Revolution that indoctrinated children and young adults to turn on and murder their parents. Great choice for an education textbook. Let’s see who else he cites.

But human activity consists of action and reflection: it is praxis; it is transformation of the world. And as praxis, it requires theory to illuminate it. Human activity is theory and practice; it is reflection and action. It cannot, as I stressed in chapter 2, be reduced to either verbalism or activism.

Lenin's famous statement: "Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement"[1] means that a revolution is achieved with neither verbalism nor activism, but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed. The revolutionary effort to transform these structures radically cannot designate its leaders as its thinkers and the oppressed as mere doers.

[1] Vladimir Lenin, "What is to be Done," in Essential Works of Lenin, Henry M. Christman, ed (New York, 1966), p. 69.

- Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Paulo Freire (emphasis mine)

That’s the same Vladimir Lenin who was also a communist revolutionary and became the head of the Russian Communist Party and Soviet Russia. A man so evil that he forcibly took food from peasants in order to push them into cannibalism (which he casually described as “accelerating the contradictions”). Another great choice for an education textbook.

Freire also cites and praises Karl Marx, Georgy Lukacs, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro (among others). Are you starting to see a pattern? He’s basically managed to get the whole “Communist Hall of Fame” in there. So I guess we now know the answer to the question…he’s specifically a communist nutjob.

This might all sound pretty bad. But I wonder if Cambridge University are aware of this? Maybe it just slipped through the cracks and they accidentally organised the festival. And the statue. And based their entire education curriculum around his work. I’m sure the head of the Faculty of Education is on it and will get things back on track in no time.

"Around the world, academic communities are facing challenges to their freedom that they never expected to have to defend. Freire offers a way forward for educators striving to resist this."

Professor Susan Robertson, Head of the Faculty of Education

- Faculty of Education News, Cambridge University (emphasis mine)

Oh, she’s onboard with all this too. Well at least this must be limited just to Cambridge University, right? We can probably survive one university going insane, even if it is Cambridge. Hopefully his ideas haven’t taken hold anywhere else and other universities haven’t also gone insane.

Freire, whose centenary is this year, was a Brazilian teacher, educationalist, and one of the most influential social scientists in history. One of his books, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, became a template for international education reforms in the 1970s, and is still one of the world’s most-cited social science texts – referenced more than the major works of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Karl Marx, among others.

- Faculty of Education News, Cambridge University (emphasis mine)

Oh dear. It looks like a lot of other universities have actually also gone insane. This seems more than pretty bad now. (It's several levels worse again but I’ll save that for later posts so that we all have something to look forward to)

Let's recap. Cambridge University and countless other universities in the UK and around the world centre the lunatic ideas of a communist nutjob in their education curriculum. And have done for years or sometimes even decades. It’s probably nothing to worry about though. It’s not like they’re doing anything critically important like educating the next generation of teachers to educate the next generation of children. I’m sure everything will work out just fine.