Paulo Freire, Class Relations, and the Tasks of the Critical Scholar/Activist in Education

• In Event: Paulo Freire as a Global Public Intellectual: Dialectics of the Global and the Local

Abstract

What does it mean to take our responsibilities seriously? How do we ground ourselves in opposition to the oppressive realities that affect so many people in our societies? How do we learn from each other about varied economic, political, and cultural struggles that are crucial for social transformation--and about viewing the world in which we live and the place of educational movements in it differently? What perspectives do we need to do this and to whom should we turn to get and build these resources? These questions are intimately related to the issue of the politics of knowledge and the politics of who can legitimately count as knowers. I employ the example of Paulo Freire to do three things: 1) raise issues about the ways in which upwardly mobile class fractions within the academy may unfortunately depoliticize his efforts and also may employ his work as a class conversion strategy; 2) connect his work to the emerging literature on postcolonialism, globalization, and critical pedagogy that provides answers to these questions and 3) connect his work to a detailing of a number of crucial tasks in which critical educators need to engage to counter these depoliticizing tendencies and to take account of new critical perspectives.

Author

• Michael W. Apple, University of Wisconsin - Madison