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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.
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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