Paulo Freire’s Philosophy of Education in Contemporary Context

Acknowledgements

Jones would like to acknowledge his colleagues and students in the Institute of Education, Drumcondra, for support and collegiality in the educational journey. My understanding of Freire is still a work-in-progress and much renewed by the fruitful and challenging discussions of the classroom. Thanks to Tony at Peter Lang and Stephen and David for editorial inspiration. This book would never have come to fruition without Letterio’s original invitation to me to speak on Freire in Catania and I send my gratitude for all his hospitality and insights on the Italian context. Jones would also like to thank his family and friends for their strengthening love, especially through the last, challenging year and a half of ‘lockdown’.

Letterio would like to acknowledge the CAHD research group involved in the Departmental project Pia.Ce.Ri.2020–22 of the University of Catania to which this work is related. This book would not have been realised without Jones’ strong determination and highly motivating encouragement. Letterio hopes this book may increase the interest of Italian readers in Freire’s thought and pedagogical outcomes, especially in a historical time often characterised by uncertainty and distrust of the future.

Series Editors’ Preface: Freire and Our Very Contemporary Malaise

This Peter Lang Series New Disciplinary Perspectives on Education was created so as to respond to what we saw as a universal and global contemporary moment of crisis. At the heart of that vision for new perspectives and critique in education was the enabling vision of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and his legacy in the movement of Critical Pedagogy.

Born in Brazil, Freire’s original work in literacy education in the 1960s led to a political critique of acute social injustice in his homeland. As a backlash, and against the growing social movements seeking change in Brazil, a military coup sought to regain control of the means of production for the elite. Freire’s progressive work in education and in politics was singled out as socio-politically ‘dangerous’ (threatening a redress of endemic injustice and illiteracy for the poor), and he was to spend nearly thirty years in exile.

Perhaps one of the unintended offshoots of his exile was that his work and influence spread to a much wider public internationally, and including Europe. In 1968, when he published his seminal Pedagogy of the Oppressed in English, a footnote on the very first page notes the seismic revolutionary events of May ’68 happening outside his window. These events seem to mirror the very conflicts and dilemmas (social and psychological) which he delineates in the book’s very pages. The footnote could be translated as ‘Look, I told you so!’ with a Leninist question ‘What is to be done?’

Italy was no exception to the complex events emerging in Europe at this time. The ‘68’ events went on longer in Italy than anywhere else. As Letterio Todaro notes in this volume, in Italy it was to become the ‘long 68’, not coming to an end until the late 1970s (Murphy & Mustapha, 2005: 2). The Left/Right divide, exacerbated by the ’68 events, is nowhere more evident than in Italy, but also the internal schisms of the Leftist ideology and respective parties. This was to have horrific consequences in Italy of the late 1970s, with the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro by the ‘Brigate Rosse’ (Red Brigades) in the latter’s vehement opposition to the ‘historical ←xiii | xiv→compromise’ which Moro, as he president of the Christian Democrats, was seeking with the Italian Communist Party. As part of the backlash against Moro’s murder, a highly repressive state regime emerged and 12,000 Left-wing activists were jailed for up to twenty years. Many more fled into exile (included amongst those incarcerated were many ‘Autonomist’ theorists and activists, such as Antonio Negri) (Lotringer, 2007: v).

This is a view which epitomises the yearning of bourgeois liberalism for a return to a normality which Trump himself and everything he represents had rendered impossible. If the events on Capitol Hill were shocking, one can hardly say that they were surprising. Rather the overrunning of the Capitol building by pro-Trump supporters, some wearing Nazi symbols, was a perfectly logical continuation of the last four years of the President’s tenure. This was a consummation of a presidency founded on, and fuelling, acute division, of blatant xenophobia, racism and misogyny, driven ←xiv | xv→by conspiracy theories that once would have rendered a person beyond the pale of basic democratic values and norms. Moreover, Trump’s Presidency represents a shift to reactionary nativist nationalism, often in alliance with religious fundamentalism that we are now seeing across the world from Orbán in Hungary, to Erdogan in Turkey, to Modi in India and Duterte in the Philippines. Looking specifically at the Brazilian context, one can see the strong mutual support which Trump and Jair Bolsanaro have engaged in. All the while, Bolsanaro has tried to undo the social justice legacy of the Worker’s Party in Brazil, in politics and in education. Freire’s legacy and influence has most especially been singled out as a target for Bolsanaro’s destructive education policies and curricula.