ABSTRACT

For decades the educational left has dwelt at length on the iconic theories of critical pedagogy as developed by the radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and those under his influence. The result has been the wide adoption of a set of ideas relating, in part, to the need to articulate a politicized definition of literacy in which one reads both the world and the word, to foment popular education as a form of historical praxis, to understand how educational institutions reproduce the oppressor and oppressed relationship, and to militate for schools as a possible source/site of human emancipation and resistance. However, despite revolutionary concerns for autonomy, love, and hope in Freire’s philosophy of education, Freirian critical pedagogy can only uneasily be linked to an anarchistic political and pedagogical vision as outlined by Ivan Illich.1