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tl;dr: Do any of you read Portugese?
I am having one of those moments where I feel like I must be losing my mind, because the alternative is that the world is even stupider than I already thought, which is just too depressing to countenance. I was doing some research on education for what are, ultimately, culture war purposes (I think parents are more important than teachers, and I think people to my political Left get this horribly wrong all the time) and I came across a citation that seemed potentially useful. I found it in this document (PDF warning) as both the title and on page one:
Now, any time I see a reference to critical theory from the 1960s, it piques my interest, because it has been my experience that a lot of people work very hard to obfuscate the origins of what is currently being called "Wokism," and used to be called "cultural Marxism" (not to be confused with the conspiracy theory that "Cultural Marxism" is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory--I assume Paulo Freire was not a Jew, but I admit I do not know for sure). Anyway I immediately went looking for a copy of Paulo Freire's seminal work so I check the quote out in context. Fortunately, the author of the paper appears to be a music professor at McGill, so the citation is right there for my use!
I fire up the Internet Archive and find a 1972 edition of the book (the UK printing, apparently) and turn to page 19, which... does not contain the quote. I pull up other editions--there's a 30th anniversary edition, a 50th anniversary edition, someone clearly regards this as an important text--and not only does the quote in question appear nowhere in these pages, but chunks like "education is political" or "neutral act" also return no results. Maybe the text search is wrong? Maybe the scan is bad? Hmm, no, a quick sampling finds the OCR did a bang-up job, actually.
Googling the full quote generates a number of results. The University of Sheffield's "Education Matters" blog gives the citation "Freire (1970: 19)." But no--the 1970 printing also lacks the quote. Dr. Fatima Nicdao (she/her) suggests it's actually (1968), but that's the Portugese date of publication, as near as I can tell. Anti-Racism in Higher Education: An Action Guide for Change is also pretty sure the quote appears on page 19, as does Reframing Assessment to Center Equity: Theories, Models, and Practices and Developing and Evaluating Quality Bilingual Practices in Higher Education, to name only three of the books that agree on this citation. You may notice that all of these books were published in the last two years.
At this point I'm thinking, "I've got to be missing something. Maybe I'm making this too difficult for myself. I haven't even checked Wikipedia!" There I find the following:
(emphasis added)
At this point I am feeling increasingly confident that the quotation is spurious. Now, it seems pretty clear to me that Freire would agree with the quotation! I don't think any of these people are misrepresenting his view (though they might be oversimplifying it). I'm able to date the quote "teaching is never a neutral act" back as far as 1998, in a book entitled (of course) White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America Similarly, "all education is political" goes back at least as far as a textbook from 1996:
As an aside, page 181 of that textbook is also of historic interest, and reads as part of a chapter on "Teaching to Empower Minority Students":
(Here is the list, for the curious, with definitions elided.)
Anywhow, I am terminally crippled with self-doubt, and proving a negative is hard. Part of me is certain that the very first reply to this rant is going to be "oh here's a direct link to the page where he wrote that, you just missed it." But I cannot find any evidence at all that Paolo Freire ever actually wrote the sentence, "all education is political; teaching is never a neutral act." Certainly those words do not seem to appear in any English-language translation of anything he has written. Which, who cares, right? Spurious quotations are totally an Internet thing, Abraham Lincoln said so.
But I care, because now instead of finding an academically useful citation I've spent three hours going down the rabbit hole of a spurious quotation. How can so many people be publishing stuff with this quote in it, and none of them paused long enough to check their source? I mean, I guess this is in the end just a particularly academic example of the old "too good to check." But I'm frustrated in part because none of the foregoing accomplishes what I actually intended to accomplish today, which was to make progress on a scholarly paper. There's no place for me to publish a peer-reviewed essay entitled "Spurious Quotations in Education Theory: Jesus Christ You Critical Theorists Are the Worst Academics Alive, Check Your God Damn Sources For Once, You're a Fucking Embarrassment to the Profession."
So please. Embarrass me, instead. Find evidence that Freire actually wrote the quoted phrase. Somewhere, anywhere, in any language! Because right now I'm feeling extremely uncharitable toward my outgroup on this, and it's such a petty thing, I know, but it just feels emblematic of the entire critical enterprise of focusing on "whatever works" over and above any commitment to truth, facts, history, academic rigor, professionalism, or even taking two seconds to check the damn source.
There are a number of things wrong with the quotation in the PDF. First off, the source material (though not your own quotation!) misspells the author as “Friere.” Second, the cited book is not in the bibliography. Third, the language in the quotation (English) is wrong. It should be Spanish, as this work was first published in Spanish translation in Mexico.* Finally, the statement is too pithily set forth to be the author’s own words (in whatever language).
In other words, it has all the hallmarks of an apocryphal quotation.
Its existence is perpetuated by the academic need to hang every insight with clout in the field, no matter how banal, on a academic theorist. Feire’s writings basically make this point, albeit in a roundabout form that is rather inconvenient to quote properly. More careful academics will not attribute this phrase as a direct quotation (as does the author in the PDF). Interesting, this paraphrase is not original to the PDF author, so it cannot really be unquoted either. Thus, it is not surprising that the paraphrase gets misrepresented as an actual quote and this apocryphal citation gets cribbed from source to source, because it efficiently does the academic work it needs to do.
It’s not “two seconds” to check a source: you’ve already spent more time on it than that. And it still has not been checked. No one has pulled up the 1968 original edition, which doesn’t seem to be online and does not seem to be stocked in North American academic libraries. So how is an academic to handle it? Well, most would check the edition they do have at hand to find a page they can cite and, failing that, they assume that their peer-reviewed source got the cite to the inaccessible edition correct and they simply reproduce that. They might get more skeptical if the quotation seemed wrong, but it does encapsulate what the guy is trying to say.
Plus, the sentiment seems to assume that critical theorists’ writings are found in a single source (“the damn source”). Actually, it’s a confusing mess. Their publication histories are inevitably complex, being reprinted and republished multiple times, in multiple editions, multiple languages, and even multiple (discordant) translations. Most academics just cite the reader or book they have in their personal libraries. In this situation, differences are sure to happen and they are tolerated, because it’s a pain to check whether a quotation in some other edition is correct. And it’s tolerated because these critical thinkers stand for their ideas more than their words. There’s no citational archeology to find the original statement in the original edition and the original language. It’s not the Bible.
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As an average Joe and non-academic, I just assume that a sizeable chunk of papers and citations are just made up and I look on requests for "source?" and quasi-religious appeals to "peer review" with an increasingly jaundiced eye. I think that a lot of this is probably not malicious, since I too have copied quotations from second or third hand sources without checking the original when writing undergrad papers, but that doesn't make this any less of a problem.
The usual retort is along the lines of "it might not be the perfect system, but it's the best one we've got." I'm not sure I agree. A tabloid magazine article claiming something outrageous is easy for people to evaluate and accept, reject, or suspend judgment. In contrast, a published study filled with impressive sounding words and using complicated statistical methods appears cloaked in a mantle of authority, expertise, and erudition has much more power to simply overawe plebs into accepting its conclusion.
This sloppy, lazy, or ideologically motivated science has the potential to be very harmful to a person's project of building a useful and accurate model of their world because when it's wrong, it's wrong in cleverer , deeper, more subtle ways than, say, the tabloid example above. A great analogy is "The Book" from Anathem:
I like that analogy a lot.
To this I would add: discovery of the problem also leads to similar harms. At some point every single one of these authors either (A) thought nothing of cribbing a cite from someone else without verifying it, or (B) wondered if they should check the cite, and then did not, or (C) checked the cite, decided to use the fake one anyway. I think that's an exhaustive list. In the case of (A), they basically are trusting any claim they happen to like, which is bad; in the case of (B), they are lazy scholars at best, and in the case of (C), they're actively deceptive. None of these possibilities rises to a level of "trustworthy professional," and I think that fact raises serious questions about other things they say and do. It impeaches their character as scholars. And rightly so! But this contributes to the ongoing crisis of confidence in our epistemic elites.
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Incorrectly-cited quotations are incredibly common, to the point where they are more common that correctly-cited ones. It's surprising how many people do this who should know better. You've probably repeated a few yourself.
This type of error was likely near universal in the past. In modern times, we at least have the ability to look it up. Wikiquote and Quote Investigator are good resources for this.
A good heuristic for writers is that all quotations are fake unless you can find it in a primary source. Even then, there's no guarantee that the phrase wasn't originally coined by someone else.
I haven't created the impression in you that I'm actually extremely neurotic about quotation authenticity?
...uh, well, good!
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Well, since we're here.
Do you think there's such a thing as a neutral education process?
Yes.
Leaving a child near a hot stove will teach them something, and has nothing to do with a 'present system' or with world transformation.
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It depends on what you think education is intended to accomplish. I think a useful heuristic is to assume that education teaches someone how to think, indoctrination teaches someone what to think. But I think to educate people properly, at times it requires the interplay of both forces. People need a foundation of knowledge that doesn't derive from every individual having to reinvent the wheel, intellectually, but that doesn't come from people's mere curiosity. You need to uncritically build that foundation in people, as an authority figure; from first principles.
How could you teach someone how to think without introducing a frame that also teaches them what to think. How to think is a slightly larger space than what to think. But both are indoctrination.
I agree that you need to do that to create functional people, but it's still indoctrination. The unfortunate truth is that you need to indoctrinate children.
First principles are, by their nature, arbitrary. Actually, that's not fair, they aren't arbitrary, they are selected because of their relative usefulness. But they cannot be more or less true than other first principles exactly because they are first principles.
Biblical Truth: Everything the bible says is true. The bible should used as the decider for any dispute. Is a first principle.
The law of non contradiction: "Not both A and not A" or "¬(p ∧ ¬p)". Is another first principle.
There is no way to show that one is fundamentally more true than the other, because they are first principles. You need to use first principles to evaluate the truth of a statement.
Therefore, all education is indoctrination. In many ways, but at the very least in terms of first principles. Which is already going to account for a lot of indoctrination.
This is wrong on its face. Words have meaning. Teaching a child basic algebra and 1+1=2 and the multiplication table is not "political" nor is it indoctrination. Teaching a child that the brown folx don't need to learn no colonizer math and infact there are indigenous ways of knowing is indoctrination.
Only an ideologue hellbent on using his teaching position as a way to indoctrinate children would say "all education is indoctrination".
Cleary from what I said, I disagree with you. I think all teaching is indoctrination. Do you think I am an "ideologue hellbent on using his teaching position as a way to indoctrinate children". I am not a teacher. I am absolutely not interested in indoctrinating the children of anyone else. I am interested in indoctrinating my own future children.
The indoctrination position you lay out is left wing. I am right wing and still stand by my position.
I don't know about "hellbent" but I am in favor of recognizing that it is normal and healthy to indoctrinate the children of my groups into a worldview. Not just teach the facts, but a coherent moral worldview. I don't think that is possible to avoid. Or if it is possible to avoid you will simply end up with children who are profoundly alienated. More likely, you will end up with children who become indoctrinated into some other groups worldview, one that is hostile to you. That is what happens to many children today, they are not indoctrinated enough by their parents so they're indoctrinated by radical leftists.
Attempts to avoid indoctrinating children into any moral/political worldview whatsoever do those children a disservice. Humans are, as Aristotle says "Political Animals". In general we want to belong to a worldview. Failing to provide that for children just makes them vulnerable to being snapped up by hostile ideologies.
I am not a teacher, and I do not want teachers indoctrinating my children. But I would like to raise them to align with my worldview and I recognize that that is indoctrination. I am not a totalitarian about how to raise children, I am happy to make space for them to question things. I mean, I'm here on the motte, I love a good argument and hope my children will express a healthy level of contrarianism. But I will not attempt to avoid bringing them into my culture and worldview. That would be cruel, so I am comfortable with indoctrinating them.
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I'm curious. So, generally, people indoctrinating can think that the things that they are trying to indoctrinate into are true, right? Like I assume, in the example given, the people tend to think that
So what makes something indoctrination, rather than merely teaching? Is it that it's unsupported (but surely there are all sort of things that are taught without citations, that we think is good and proper—"don't touch the stove" has no proof attached, unless they ignore your education/indoctrination)? Is it that it's not true, and so propagating wrong beliefs in general is indoctrination? I imagine the most likely stance is something like "inclining them towards a faction in an ongoing controversy," but that would seem to involve things we wouldn't want—e.g. people with familiarity with economics are more pro-market than the general population (let's assume the causation runs in that direction, that was my experience upon learning what little economics I have learned), and so teaching someone economics would be indoctrination, regardless of how demonstrable it is? Or is it whether there's ongoing controversy among the experts in particular?
The lines feel blurry.
Honestly it ain't that blurry. There's "facts" about the world as far as the teacher/establishment understands them and there is "what ought to be done about the state of the world" sort of material, that's an entirely different thing. Further the teacher if they are interested in raising an army for culture war reasons understands full well taht certain things are held to be true by broader society and certain things are held to be true only by their own faction.
You're wrong that these things can be easily separated.
I am not a fundamentalist christian. Some fundamentalist christians do not believe in evolution. In fact, evolutionary theory is directly contradictory to what they do believe.
If I was a science teacher for their children, I would want to teach them evolution (assuming I am following your definition of what is and isn't indoctrination). Evolution is a "'fact' about the world as far as the teacher understands it". However, me simply teaching what I believe to be factual, despite not being a moral value to me or a description of what a person ought to do, would be a threat to their worldview.
My simply providing what I see as facts would be hostile to them. Therefore, personally I would not want to do that - as that seems immoral to me. I would be indoctrinating their children into a worldview that was hostile to the worldview of their parents.
Do you see how I think all education is indoctrination, despite the fact that I am not trying to "raise an army for culture war reasons"? I am actively laying out boundaries of how not to do that.
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How would "infact there are indigenous ways of knowing" be indoctrination under this basis? That would not seem to be an ethical statement.
Secondly, are you saying that indoctrination is based upon factions? Does it cease to become indoctrination as the factions become smalle? For example, is saying that the actual nazis were doing bad things and you shouldn't do things like that indoctrination? What about saying that it seems like the global temperature rising was caused by humans?
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I wanted to go with something like "indoctrination is about values, teaching is about facts", but I think it's broader than that. If I had to boil it down to a single thing, I'd call it something like "openness to critical examination". Economics is superficially about facts, but a Marxist is going to be hostile to the idea that capitalism is good, Keynesian-descendant economists are going to be hostile to the idea that government stimulus might be counter productive, and libertarian-descendant economists will be hostile to the idea that a bad outcome could come out of anything other than government intervention.
I'm pretty sure a significant portion of the population ends up being indoctrinated into ideas that are true, rather than taught them. Everybody knows the Earth is round, but the average person would probably make a fool of themselves trying to debate a devoted Flat Earther.
That seems like a fine definition as long as you're okay with some indoctrination being just fine to do, which I think the previous poster would not have liked.
Yeah, when it comes to values I don't think it's possible to do anything other than indoctrination. I suppose you could do "Group X believes in A, B, and C, while group Y believes in D, E, and F", but you do have to teach what is the right thing to do at some point.
For me the issue is that I consider it to be the fundamental right and duty of the parents, not the state, or any private institution not authorized by the parents. The state indoctrinating children kind of makes a mockery of the very idea of democracy.
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I essentially agree with you almost completely. That's actually the case I was making. Maybe the only thing I'd disagree with is the claim that all education is indoctrination.
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That one's pretty uncontroversial, but the more interesting one is the law of excluded middle: "either A or not A". We all learn it, but there's a school of thought (intuitionism) that this shouldn't be a basic law. And indeed there are some weeeeeeeird results in math that go away (or become less weird) if you don't allow proof by contradiction.
Well…
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Nah.
This Friere guy has the right idea—banking vs. libertarian education is a neat phrasing of the problem. You could cut 90% of the critical oppressor/oppressed narrative, though, and nothing of value would be lost.
Maybe he suffered from success in that it seems obvious in hindsight? Rote memorization has gotten a pretty bad reputation over the years. As has top-down educational intervention, to the point of becoming a stock villain.
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I do not!
Not sure what else to say about it, though. Cultural reproduction is a really complicated proposition even in monocultures; in places with values pluralism, you're basically always going to be goring someone's ox. What Freire (and all the crits) tend to get wrong is that they decline to subject their own proposed solutions to the standards of their own critique. At best their position basically boils down to "yes, your way is not neutral, I guess our way is also not technically neutral but noticing that makes us the good guys so it's okay when we do it." Contemporary identity politics is just yeschad.jpg-ing your own views while wojacking your opponent's.
always_has_been.jpg
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Looks like a classic case of citogenesis, hmm? /u/gwern really is a national treasure.
It probably won’t make you feel any better, but this sort of thing is much more likely than we might prefer!
Hold on. From the 30th anniversary ed., p. 34. This is the last page of the foreword, written by one Richard Shaull:
So, uh…who the hell is Jane Thompson? The quote traces back to here. In turn, Jane L. Thompson wrote a book called Adult Education for a Change in 1980. But what’s this? She was just quoting, too! Her citation brings us to
Full circle.
...this is worse than I thought!?
The Wikipedia citation goes to the book
On page 5 of that book, the quote is indeed attributed to Jane Thompson, as the editor of another book. The Gramsci book is on archive.org, the footnote points us to a 1980 text by Thompson, Adult Education for Change at page 26 (but also repeated in a different text by M. Mayo). That book is also on archive.org, and when you turn to page 26, you can see Thompson has block-quoted the block-quoted text, which she attributes to Paulo Freire! But return to the 1972 Freire text and you will see that, no, that quote is definitely part of Shaull's introduction to the book.
Just... astonishing. Multiple misattributions, literally none of the people quoting Shaull had any idea what they were doing. Words fail me.
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I actually deal with it with students all the time, because Plato is up there with Mark Twain and Winston Churchill among the pantheon of the spuriously-quoted. So a student will tell me something is in Republic and build their whole paper around it... and I will ask them where in Republic Plato makes this claim, and they will show me the website where someone claims Plato said that, and it will be wrong. So yeah, you're not wrong. But it sure is annoying to have to deal with it from colleagues rather than from students.
I just want you to know that I’m losing my mind trying to find it, now. See my edits.
And see my other response! Looks like we followed the same breadcrumbs. What a disaster.
EDIT: If you look through the Wikipedia page history, you'll see that at some point Shaull did get correctly credited for the quote, but someone checked the cited source (with the incorrect attribution) and "corrected" the correction.
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When I search on Google Scholar for that quote, I find only the source you link. Ditto when I search for the two phrases, “all education is political” “teaching is never a neutral act”. So, basically no one is publishing that quote. What people ARE doing is paraphrasing Freire as saying that all education is political and that education is never neutral. Which, as you note, is an accurate paraphrase of his claims. (This master's thesis, which might or might not quote accurately, attributes the following quote to Freire's Pedagogy of Freedom)
I directly linked three books from academic presses from the last two years, an academic blog, an academic tweet, and an academic paper, and I only furnished a sampling of what I found because it just seemed silly to keep going after finding so many examples. That's a far, far cry from "basically no one."
The numerous, recent sources I already cited literally directly quote him, often giving a page number (usually, 19) for the quote. Are you... engaged in performance art here? Duplicating the phenomenon about which I am complaining?
So, when instead of searching on Google Scholar I instead search for the exact quote in regular old google, I get 19 hits, one of which is you. When I search for “all education is political" "teaching is never a neutral act” freire, I get 91 hits, including you. That is pretty much "basically no one." As others have noted, you are complaining about lazy quotations, an unfortunately very common phenomenon, but one which in this case at least has the merit of accurately representing the views of the cited author.
I really admire how smoothly you were able to combine the implication "basically no one is doing this, who cares" with the implication "this happens all the time, who cares" in this comment. If that move hasn't got a fancy name like "motte and bailey doctrine" or "apophasia," then it should, and if it does have a name, I would like to learn it.
Well, if you can't understand the difference between an empirical claim about a general phenomenon and and empirical claim about a specific phenomenon, then I can't help you.
But to be more explicit, your post seems to me to be little more than "boo outgroup", and 1) your evidence that your outgroup is doing what you claim is incredibly weak; and 2) you have no evidence that what that handful of outgroup members has done is unique to your outgroup, so, yes, who cares?
And to be completely clear, those who cite Freire seem to me to almost always be full of shit. Especially some former colleagues of mine who literally argued that the fact that "teaching is inevitably political" gave them license to push their political views in class, when of course it actually means that they had a responsibility to present students with views they disagreed with.
You seem to be trolling.
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Exhaustively researched primary sources are "boo outgroup," but warmed-over theschism reposts about boomers being white supremacists is fine? How much of the literature would he have to read before the post was acceptable?
The point is not how exhaustive his research was; I have no doubt that the language is either misquoted or miscited. The problem is the "boo outgroup" inference that he draws therefrom.
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The "more" is really the important part, though. I admit these people are in my "outgroup" but the point was the sloppy scholarship (and my disbelief), not the outgroup per se.
My evidence that the individual scholars I am directly complaining about are doing exactly what I am complaining about seems pretty ironclad to me, to the point where I doubt it could possibly be so straightforward, to the point where I asked a bunch of Internet strangers if they could maybe check the Portugese for me because surely these scholars aren't that stupid but--yes, these scholars are apparently at least that stupid. To the point where @netstack immediately identified a separate case of this same phenomenon happening in other articles referencing Freire.
I care, as I believe I stated in my original comment. It's offensive to me, as a professional, when other professionals do shoddy work, especially when it costs me time. If that's not enough for you, like, okay! You should go talk to someone who counts in your eyes, instead of telling me that I shouldn't care about things that I care about.
This is how I feel about all critical theorists, but surely it helps matters to present the occasional clear case of academic malfeasance. I don't regard them to be full of shit because reasons, I regard them to be full of shit because look here are dozens of examples of easily-identified shitty scholarship on just one quotation.
For what it’s worth, I do think this sort of OP pushes the boundaries of
“Boo outgroup” isn’t a rule. It works as a report category, though, because it requires toeing a number of others. Being a bit uncharitable or a bit general or a bit angry at Those People is normal. Feeling all of those at once is a recipe for less-than-clear thinking. It’s also a good way to get other people to make the same generalizations.
So I sympathize with @Gdanning. Your OP got my hackles raised. I made my response anyway because, well, the object level really was dumb. Not terribly surprising (per the gwern link), but dumb, and therefore a good distraction.
I maintain that, if posting like that were normalized, this community would be much worse-off.
This is all strange internet stuff, you've contradicted your own stance.
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I literally implored y'all to show me I'm wrong. I actually wanted to be wrong about this. I wanted someone to show me the quote, maybe in Portugese, so I could say, "ah, yes, I'm a dumbass, that's much less surprising than all of these doctorate-wielding people being such complete dumbasses." That wasn't rhetoric; I came here to test my shady thinking, I wanted to be talked down, and the second thing you did was find another horrible example right there in the material I was citing.
That suggests to me that I'm not criticizing these people because they're my outgroup and I want to boo them, but in fact because they have earned criticism. Surely that's a valuable thing to learn?
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Except that you don't have any evidence of academic malfeasance nor shitty scholarship; as I noted, a search of google scholar turns up nothing.
And, surely, it is not sloppy quotation practices which make you deem them full of shit, is it? Surely it is stuff like this:
Emphasis in original.
Look, this is not really a fight I'm interested in having, but in my opinion Google Scholar is shit and I never use it for anything because it is shit and I don't know anyone who does use it for anything because it is shit. To my mind, by far the most useful academic tool to appear in the last, I'm going to say 20 years, is just Archive.org's online library. Probably some people love Google Scholar so this is just me having thoughts about a thing, but I haven't got any other response for you here. I've never seen anyone try to prove anything of worth by citing to "Google Scholar says" so I'm just kind of dumbfounded about it. Maybe I am just old, that is often a problem when matters of technology come into play, but there you have it. Google's front page search is orders of magnitude more valuable to my scholarship than Google Scholar has ever been.
But I don't do STEM, so, you know. YMMV.
See, this is where you misread me so completely I have to wonder about my communication skills. It's very much the sloppy quotation practices, for me. It's very much the bad scholarship that I hate. The weird culture war stuff is bad, too, but it might be helpful for me to suggest that when I refer to these scholars as my "outgoup," I am about 60% thinking about the fact that they work in colleges of education, rather than thinking about their political alignment qua outgroup. That is, these are education scholars, often with Ed.Ds, while I'm a philosopher who sometimes writes analytically on education.
It's hard to not launch into a rant about this, honestly. And it feels like a failure of professional courtesy to be like, "oh, those teaching academics are the worst" when I'm sure the engineers or the business professors or someone feels the same about me. But the scholarship that comes out of these colleges of education, like, it's just so bad, basically all the time. And it happens to have kind of played havoc on my day, today, and I thought others might find it interesting to see a specific case, about specific people, making a specific mistake, that is kind of emblematic of the larger criticisms leveled against them.
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