Stammering as Dada

Series Editors’ Preface – Stammering as Dada: Mike Neary and Critical Education

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, both in society at large, but in the particular manifestations of this within education. 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.

Freire’s original work in literacy education in the 1960s was distinctive for the way it connected processes of teaching – pedagogy – to the experiences of poverty and social inequality Freire saw around him in his homeland. Freire developed distinctive teaching methods in which he found ways to teach groups who were written off as ineducable – impoverished young people and illiterate cane workers – not just how to read, but how to ‘read the world’. Central to Freire’s method was that he never sought to tell people what to think – rather his focus was to on developing people’s capacity for critical thinking, analysis and reflection. Central to his practice was the conception that these were capacities which people already possessed, but that it was social relations of capitalist society which undermined the exercise of these. A military coup took place in 1964 in Brazil and the very effectiveness of Freire’s methods of literacy education led to his detention and torture at the hands of the dictatorship. Freire only escaped death through an international campaign in his support, which led to him being released on condition of accepting permanent exile from Brazil. It was during this period of exile that he wrote his seminal text Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire (1996); one of the unintended offshoots of his exile was that the influence of this work spread to a much wider public internationally. The book recently had its 50^th Anniversary and has now been translated into 18 languages. After his years in exile Freire was able to return to Brazil in 1979 and joined the Workers’ Party in Sao Paulo, working on the Party’s adult literacy project for six years. When the party took control of Sao Paulo municipality following elections in 1988, Paulo Freire was appointed as Sao Paulo’s Secretary of Education. His work continues to stand as a model which is built on the connections between pedagogy, the politics of knowledge and social emancipation.

The political significance of Freire’s work has not in any way concluded with his death in 1997. While his legacy has grown and developed globally, so it has also been viciously attacked. The Worker’s Party was defeated in the Brazilian elections of 2019, and the far-right political leader Jair Bolsonaro took power in 2019 on a platform of wanting to throw ‘a flamethrower at the Ministry of Education to get Paulo Freire out of there’ (O’Malley 2021). Far from being an isolated event, Bolsonaro’s victory in Brazil represented a synthesis of fundamentalist religion and racist nationalism that had taken shape across the world, capitalising on the frustrations and exclusion caused by the global dominance of neoliberalism. Commenting on the growing capacity of ‘ethno-nationalism’ to mobilise people in opposition to both immigration and social liberalism, Goran Therborn recently noted that:

a revival of fundamentalist religion, of every creed, has also provided shock troops for the radical right in a militant backlash against ‘the ideology of gender’, abortion and gay rights, the latter being one of the few areas of 20th-century equalization to have survived neoliberalism more or less intact. The conjunctural background for the emergence of the new radical right was, of course, the triumph of neoliberalism. Its typical social base comes from the ‘losers’ of capitalist globalization, the economically and culturally disadvantaged parts of the national population, often found in regional concentrations – the de-industrialized zones of France, Germany, the US and UK – or along the fault lines of ethnic or ethno-linguistic division, as in Chile, India and Spain. In many countries the left had once represented these people, but by the late 1980s it was becoming demoralized and disoriented, crushed or in the process of self-immolation. (Therborn 2024)

Therborn was not the first to notice that the extreme right’s capacity to mobilise has grown out of the popular demoralisation resulting from the way so many former parties of the social democracy and of the left have supported privatisation initiatives, and facilitated the power of the banks. As corporate power has grown so has there been a hollowing out of democratic institutions. We see these same processes at work within our schools and universities. Not only have these been privatised and marketised, but we now see these institutions led by a new managerial strata which is promoting an aggressively neo-conservative agenda, and which is unashamed in its desire to quash a culture of critical questioning and interrogation which would once have been seen as the raison d’etre of those institutions. The space and places where critical thinking can take place are disappearing – the silencing of those who have sought to speak the truth about the genocidal assault on the Palestinian people by the Israeli military are the latest instance of this.