Paulo Freire, the father of woke
And he's after your children's minds
If you read my first post (link below) then you would have seen that Paulo Freire is a communist nutjob who is somehow adored by faculties of Education around the world (especially at Cambridge University, where I am now embarrassed to have gone). If you’re rolling your eyes at the use of the word communist then read the post for yourself. I wish I was being hyperbolic but it’s all set out clearly in his own words.
But what the hell does this lunatic even want?
Communists aren't really known for their care of children and providing a good quality education. They’re better known for fomenting violent revolutions, murdering millions of people and starving to death hundreds-of-millions more. They were however known for re-education - normally implemented in the form of camps. And if by “camp” you're thinking “summer camp” or “band camp” then guess again.
However, those kind of atrocities clearly aren't happening at Cambridge University. Or anywhere else in the West. There are still versions of it in modern China if you're unlucky enough to be a Uyghur muslim but we digress. If you read my first post, you also would have seen that Freire was a fan of Lenin, a well-known Russian communist. To get us warmed up, let’s read some delightful quotes from Lenin about the education of children in case this helps to shed some light on the matter.
Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted. Give me a child for the first 5 years of his life and he will be mine forever.
- Vladimir Lenin
Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.
- Vladimir Lenin
Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.
- Vladimir Lenin
Very inspirational - we should put these on a tee-shirt. So why are these insane communist ideas taking over faculties of education? And what does it even mean to be a communist educator at a modern, Western university? Let's read some more Freire and try to figure out what this guy wants.
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)
Cultural action, as historical action, is an instrument for superseding the dominant alienated and alienating culture. In this sense, every authentic revolution is a cultural revolution.
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Paulo Freire (emphasis mine)
So that’s pretty clear. Freire wants another communist revolution. And not just any old communist revolution but an authentic one where the entire culture is transformed so that everyone believes in it (the Kool Aid only works if everyone drinks it). It’s hard to believe this is in an education textbook (and the most cited worldwide) but it is.
He’s specifically modelling his revolution in the style of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. For those of you not familiar with this exciting part of history, Mao regained power in China in the 1960s by brainwashing children and university students using cult indoctrination techniques. He leveraged a combination of social pressure, class antagonism, identity politics and punishment to push them into socialist consiousness. This was so effective that they turned on and murdered their parents and destroyed artefacts of their own history and civilisation.
Our educational policy must enable everyone who receives an education to develop morally, intellectually and physically and become a worker with both socialist consciousness and culture.
- On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People (1959), Mao Zedong (emphasis mine)
Mao stressed the role of consciousness in promoting change. Not all aspects of ideology were adequately dealt with: the Chinese revolution made inadequate progress in assessing the significance of racism on a world scale, for example. But Mao did accurately appraise the importance of revolutionary culture.
- The Theory and Practice of Mao, Revolutionary Communist League of Britain (emphasis mine)
So Freire wants a Maoist Cultural Revolution in the West. But how does he plan to go about this? This seems like a tall order. Most people in the West lead relatively comfortable lives and are accustomed to liberal sensibilities and culture. They certainly don’t want to live through a communist revolution let alone participate in one. And they’re not at all interested in these nutjob ideas. Not to be dissuaded, the incorrigible Freire has a simple answer for this - by going after the kids of course! Just like Mao did. And all the communists before him, to a certain extent. Children and university students are more impressionable and easier to indoctrinate after all. I guess that’s why Freire got into education in the first place.
The awakening of critical consciousness leads the way to the expression of social discontents precisely because these discontents are real components of an oppressive situation.[3]
[3]. Francisco Weffort, in the preface to Paulo Freire, Educagdo como Prdtica da Liberdade (Rio de Janeiro, 1967).
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Paulo Freire (emphasis mine)
It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Paulo Freire (emphasis mine)
You can trace the roots of critical consciousness further back than Mao in the form of class consciousness. Here’s another communist Georg Lukacs (quoted by Freire) discussing critical consciousness and relating it to class consiousness and the consiousness of being oppressed.
consciousness of being an oppressed class must be preceded (or at least accompanied) by achieving consciousness of being oppressed individuals.[49]
49. For someone to achieve critical consciousness of his status as an oppressed man requires recognition of his reality as an oppressive reality. For this very reason, it requires reaching the "comprehension de Xessence de la society," which is for Lukacs "un facteur de puissance de tout premier ordre, pouquoi cest meme sans doute Varme purement et simplement divisive . . . " Georg Lukacs, Histoire et Con- science de Classe (Paris, 1960), p. 93.
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Paulo Freire (emphasis mine)
First of all, how are we to understand class consciousness (in theory)? Second, what is the (practical) function of class consciousness, so understood, in the context of the class struggle? This leads to the further question: is the problem of class consciousness a ‘general’ sociological problem or does it mean one thing for the proletariat and another for every other class to have emerged hitherto? And lastly, is class consciousness homogeneous in nature and function or can we discern different gradations and levels in it?
- History & Class Consciousness (1920), Georg Lukacs (emphasis mine)
Class consciousness can even be traced all the way back to Karl Marx (although he didn’t use that phrasing himself).
This rise in consciousness represents more than simply the awareness of a particular situation. For Marx, proletarian [working class] consciousness is simultaneously the discovery by the laborers of their extreme alienation and of their need to overcome such alienation through a form of action aimed at destroying the capitalist mode of production. Class consciousness is considered to be the sine qua non [essential condition] of social revolution.
- A Key Concept of Marxist Theory, P. Ansart (Science Direct) (emphasis and translations mine)
To summarise, critical consciousness is an extension of Mao’s socialist consciousness which is, in turn, an extension of Marx’s class consciousness. It’s a thread that runs through all communist thought and is obviously a euphemism for being indoctrinated to think like a communist. In other words, when you have critical consciousness you won’t treat people as individuals with their own humanity, life experiences, hopes and dreams. But will treat them as part of a collective struggle and as disposable pawns or enemies for the advancement of the communist ideology (“for the greater good, comrade”). Just look at what these nut-jobs actually did. Bloodthirsty and merciless revolutions with eye-watering body counts. The worst famines in human history. The most insane and cruel torture. And they described all this using benign phrases like “consciousness” or “resolving contradictions”. It’s absolutely psychotic. Communist literature is chock full of the worst atrocities being described in this highly euphemistic manner. It’s all justified for the greater good. And that’s how you think when you have critical consciousness. Like a complete psychopath.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, there’s a popular, colloquial phrase for critical consciousness. It’s something that many people are tacitly and vaguely aware of but can’t really define or put their finger on it. I’ll give you a clue - conscious is a synonym for awake. That’s right, critical consciousness means woke. In other words, woke is a synonym for communist indoctrination.
critical consciousness means woke
In other words, Freire has figured out how to mainline woke into childrens’ minds by getting it into childhood education. And if you get it into children’s minds then you get it into everything as children grow into adults and take their (woke) critical consciousness with them. To the classroom as teachers, to the courts as judges, to parliament as politicians, to the civil service as bureaucrats, to the police force, libraries, law firms, regulators, professional bodies, you name it. And since this has been happening for years (or decades in some places), this has already happened to a great extent. In a later post, I’ll document just how widespread this woke cult indoctrination has become. It will make your blood run cold. In the meantime, try Googling “critical consciousness” - I dare you.