Revolutionary education, late 1960s, Brazilian author. Let’s go!

Basically, Freire argued that:
✨ some methods of education are inherently oppressive; some inherently liberating
✨ these oppressive education methods are central to Western and colonial education cultures
✨ revolutionary movements must educate people such that they join the movement as Subjects (rather than objects)
✨ too many revolutionary leaders have reinstated oppression in their “liberation” movements by using oppressive education methods for their people

It was great. It felt super relevant. We’re trying to educate each other about politics and marginalized communities—but maybe sometimes we’re giving Oppressor Energy™️ as we do it? 😅

My favourite part of this book was maybe a bit niche: I loved the Hegel scholarship in here. And the philosophy commentary just generally was 🔥 I think it would be a great place to start if you wanted to engage more with philosophy, particularly people like Marx, Fanon, and Hegel.

We had the best use of Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic (that now infamous part of Selbständigkeit und Unselbständigkeit des Selbstbewusstsein in The Phenomenology of Spirit). Most interpretations try to understand it in terms of irl slavery and run into problems because Hegel was using slavery as an analogy for a type of epistemology… But post-colonial pedagogy? I can f*ck with that! Freire was onto something there.

I did have two minor philosophy criticisms, though. First, if I never see another Scholastic-Aristotelian division of humans and animals, that would be great. And second, concluding that education culture must be “for-itself” (a Hegel reference)? I wish Freire had concluded that education needed to be “in-and-for-itself” (a different Hegel reference).