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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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