I Am a Revolutionary

• In Event: Reading Critical Pedagogies: Reading Paulo Freire

Abstract

I Am a Revolutionary
I began teaching in Cleveland before Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published, and so my greatest influence at the start was Charlie Cobb, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) volunteer and a student at Howard University, who’d written a brief proposal in 1963 to build Freedom Schools in order to to re-energize and re-focus the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. Cobb claimed that while the Black children in the South were denied many things—decent school facilities, honest and forward-looking curriculum, fully qualified teachers—the fundamental injury was “a complete absence of academic freedom, and students are forced to live in an environment that is geared to squashing intellectual curiosity, and different thinking.” For Cobb and others, the busted furnace and the collapsed roof provided a precise metaphor for the broken world white supremacy had engineered and installed. He named the classrooms of Mississippi “intellectual wastelands,” and he challenged himself and others “to fill an intellectual and creative vacuum in the lives of young Negro Mississippi, and to get them to articulate their own desires, demands and questions.” Their own desires, their own demands, their own questions—for African-Americans living in semi-feudal bondage, managed and contained through a system of law and custom as well as outright terror, this was an expansive opening of the radical imagination—and a life-or-death challenge.
When Pedagogy was published in the US and I first encountered Paulo Freire, I felt I was meeting an old friend, or a father I didn’t know I had—the pedagogy of the Black Freedom Movement was, indeed, a pedagogy of the oppressed, and the parallels between Freire’s experiences in Brazil and Cobb’s insights in Mississippi were striking. Both understood that education is never neutral and that it always has a value, a position, a politics; both approached teaching as a political, ethical, and creative act; both knew that the students were the teachers of the teacher and that unlocking the wisdom in the room was the key to a curriculum of illumination and transformation; both acknowledged as foundational the act of experiencing and knowing the world—“reading the world”—as dynamic, generative, and linked to reading the word; both deployed a pedagogy of dialogue, problem-posing and question-asking (what does it mean today to be a free person living in a humane society?) that foregrounded student creativity and agency; both assumed that self-transformation is in a perpetual dance of the dialectic with changing the world.

Author

• William C. Ayers, University of Illinois at Chicago