ABSTRACT
One of the challenges in assessing the merits of Paulo Freire’s emancipatory pedagogy is that his ideas are so widely promoted in leading colleges of education that criticism of his ideas will, in effect, be a criticism of these institutions. The challenge is further magnified by subtle changes in his thinking during his last years that suggest his concern with how he was being interpreted by his followers. In Mentoring the Mentor: A Critical Dialogue with Paulo Freire (1997), he titled a subsection of the chapter he wrote in response to his followers “Allowing Me Also to Continue Growing and Changing in My Contexts.” Indeed, his philosophical anthropology, which he articulates so forcefully in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and in Education for Critical Consciousness, would appear at first glance to be fundamentally at odds with the Freire found in Mentoring the Mentor. Witness the essentialist assumption about human nature that he universalizes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1974) when he states that to “exist humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming” (p. 76). Near the end of his life he writes:
What I have been proposing is a profound respect for the cultural identity of students-a cultural identity that implies respect for the language of the other, the color of the other, the gender of the other, the sexual orientation of the other, the intellectual capacity of the other; that implies the ability to stimulate the creativity of the other. But these things take place in a social and historical context and not
in pure air. These things take place in history, and I, Paulo Freire, am not the owner of history. (1997, pp. 307-308)
To state the challenge of assessing the ideas of Freire more directly: Should he be viewed as an essentialist thinker whose philosophical anthropology is based on Western assumptions that were also the basis of the Industrial Revolution, or should he be understood primarily as an advocate of dialogue and a cultural sensitivity that precludes imposing on other cultures a Western understanding of the emancipated individual? I think the answer can be found in how his philosophical anthropology continually reasserts itself even as he writes in Mentoring the Mentor about the need to avoid a paternalistic relation to the oppressed and the need to understand that the meaning of democracy has to take account of specific historical and cultural contexts (pp. 307, 308). For example, his philosophical anthropology underlies his warning that if teachers over-romanticize the students’ language, they “are not engaging with their students in a mutual process of liberation” (p. 307). His philosophical anthropology also frames his understanding of the teacher as a mentor. As he puts it:
The fundamental task of the teacher is a liberatory task. It is not to encourage the mentor’s goals and aspirations and dreams to be reproduced in the mentees, the students, but to give rise to the possibility that the students become the owners of their own history. This is how I understand the need that teachers have to transcend their merely instructive task and assume the ethical posture of a mentor who truly believes in the total autonomy, freedom, and development of those he or she mentors, (p. 324; italics added)
Here he restates his belief that the essence of being human is the ability to continually create anew the conditions of one’s own existence. This view of “total autonomy” is summed up in his statement that “to speak a true word is to transform the world” (1974, p. 75).
