Tribute to Paulo Freire

A Review of:

Freirean Pedagogy, Praxis And Possibblities:

Projects for the New Millenium

Edited by Stanely F. Steiner, H. Mark Krank, Peter McLaren and Robert E. Bahruth

by

Michael Joseph Francisconi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Anthropology

Western Montana College of the University of Montana

710 S. Atlantic

WMC-UM box 2

Dillon, MT 59725

Tribute to Paulo Freire

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways;

the point, however, is to change it..

     --- Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

The revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide a class in order to be reborn as revolutionary workers, completely identified with the deepest aspiration of the people to which they belong.

--Amilcar Cabral, The Weapon of Theory

            The collection of essays in this book was dedicated to the memory of Paulo Freire and his visions of a radical pedagogy that would help the poor, oppressed and exploited find the collective strength within themselves to transform the world to meet the utopian dreams that only the reckless would dare dream.  To ask themselves why not and to move beyond the dreams to real collective actions.  Each essay takes on the problem of what we can take from these dreams Paulo Freire and others lived and see if we are up to the challenge of working toward their reality.

            Unity between theory and practice is necessary.  Education as a means for social and collective empowerment of the poor is the foundation of true education (McLaren:1-4).  For the poor to act as their own revolutionary agents, they must become aware.  To transform their existence from one of powerlessness and to gain control over their own lives, the poor must gain an awareness of the social causes of exploitation and oppression.  This awareness is based upon their lived everyday experiences.  The poor create their own solutions based upon their lived insights.  The poor, to create a truly just and democratic society, must discover within themselves their own tools to act collectively.  Paulo Freire claimed that a pedagogy of “Critical Literacy” is the revolutionary beginning of empowerment of the poor.  It is through the poor that the revolutionary transformation of society becomes possible.  The poor, by way of gaining control of the political possibilities of a collective and democratic society, means all people gain control over their own lives (McLaren:6-7).  By interacting with students, a dialogue of co-operative examination of the lived lives of the students is set up.  In the larger social setting this becomes the core of a mutual symbiotic learning curriculum (McLaren:7).

            Freire assembled a pedagogy that was produced to rethink the basic classifications of educational integrity through involving the powerless actively in their own education.  Education is to be a larger political process of changing the basic condition the poor work and live in, in part by integrating both the sentiments and intellect of the poor working class actively in the process of learning.  “Critical Pedagogy” redefines the basic social structure of the classroom to reflect the desire for liberation by the oppressed and exploited in a stratified despotism of economic and social classes, in the hopes of creating a more egalitarian, democratic and just society(McLaren:10).

            The cultural world can be known objectively, and in an education born out in the lived experiences of the students, objectivity becomes more understandable.  The cultural world is a joint creation of the people of a society.  Because of these two facts this cultural world is transformable by the joint actions of the people; the hope is that this transformation is done consciously.  Through “Critical Pedagogy” students learn the connections between their personal lives, national politics and the world economy.  Every contemporary element in the larger social structure of society has a limited range of potential options for the transformation of that structure from one of oppression to one of liberation.  Through “Cultural Literacy” people come to understand and communicate existing relationships between the determinism of an already established social structure and voluntarism of a self aware agent in the transformation of society(McLaren:12).

            The neo-liberal revival, on a global scale, has gutted the social infrastructure of the US.  This same neo-liberalism increased the global bleeding of the wealth from the rest of the world to meet the expanded corporate greed of the center.  As past gains won by the workers through class struggle are lost, with increased viciousness the laboring poor feed the greed of the rich.  This crime becomes hidden, as class struggle, class consciousness, and economic class in general are considered out of date in most Sociology Departments of the Universities everywhere.  Public schools and higher education, remaining the property of the corporate culture, the exploitation of capitalism is justified by liberal culture which becomes an anti-historical redefinition of human nature and presented as universally true.  Freedom is only the right to survive at the lowest tolerable level.  This oppression is what Freire was fighting against.

            Freire offered the courage to dream utopian dreams and to integrate these utopian dreams into a practical political struggle for freedom.  For Freire this began with a radical education that is part of the struggle to transform the world of the poor into a world with freedom for all and without poverty anywhere.  This revolution for Freire was always founded on love, for love is the highest  “Critical Pedagogy”.   Each student brings to the learning experience their personal biographies.  Non-mainstream biographies of the students from oppressed groups are going to be different in essential ways than the differences found between more customary students.  Most education curriculum has been designed around the needs and experiences of conventional student populations.  Thus the student outside of this more narrow population will gain different results from the same education and often suffer because of it.  Educators become, in a poetic sense, a proletarian cog in the reproduction of the hegemony of the centers of power, or we can become subversives who openly undermine the status quo, by helping the poor to discover the tools to struggle for truly democratic changes.  This is a vision of student-teacher cooperatives in the creation of a community of democratic activists through empowering learning experiences (Bahruth and Steiner: 122).

            In most schools in which the student population are non-white, poor, immigrant or any non-mainstream, often first language and cultural diversity is disregarded.  With too few minority teachers, in an uncomfortable learning environment, students often develop low expectations of education.  They develop serious resistance to education, questioning its importance in their lives.  The dominant culture’s challenges lead to dis-engagement of minority students.  When they discover their voice at last often they respond with anger that has been pent-up their whole lives (Bahruth and Steiner: 125).

            Dialogues around themes of power that benefit some and victimize others, help students discover the sources of power, inequality, and the extent of collaboration of parties in this injustice (Bahruth and Steiner :126).

            We must try to develop a sympathetic understanding of where students come from while challenging them to expand.  We must, with our coworkers, always be openly questioning our teaching styles, and the ethics behind them.  We must always be honest about our political agenda.  Yes, it would be a lie to say that I or any teacher doesn’t have a political agenda, or to claim it would be possible to eliminate it or place it outside of our interaction with our students.  It is also important to understand that our own biographical, cultural, and class background is a source of richness, and not a barrier to allowing others, i.e. students, in sharing in the learning process of this community of learners.  All have views of the world that can be expanded by this learning process (Burns-McCoy:221).                

            If education is democratic, and if education is part of a revolution to undermine structural inequality of class, race, gender, or sexual orientation, then learning often becomes a very rowdy occupation.  All students must be free to find their own voice; yet homophobic expression, xenophobic national chauvinism, racism, class bigotry against the working poor, or support of patriarchal dominance cannot remain unchallenged.  If we, along with students,  because even teachers are also students themselves, are to counter these relations of dominance and oppression, we must counter these attitudes that support inequality.  Racism, classism, sexism, are not passive opinions, but active forms of dynamic negation that harm people (Gunter:188).

            Racism is a substantive and structural actuality with deep historical roots.  It is sensible for people of color in the US to be angry at its injustice.  Anglo culture of individualism psychologically undermines the lived significance of racial reality, and the importance of cultural differences.  What seems as common sense or natural in Anglo or dominant culture is of course historically and culturally specific that fits the needs of a capitalist economy.  Individuals who accept the tenants of Anglo culture have little sympathy for the collective struggles for self-esteem in the face of institutional racism (Dicker: 181).

            Racial discrimination is rooted upon an arrogant lack of human sensibility.  The racist will use distorted forms of science to justify their racism.  It has been proven over and over that it is absurd to claim scientific basis for racial inferiority.  Yet in subtle and not so subtle ways social scientists continue to disregard the historical and sociological setting for the relationship between the races and the dominant culture that defines intelligence.  This is done in spite of the fact that dominant culture of a European market driven society has historically been founded upon slavery, genocide, exploitation, economic dependency, and grinding poverty.  History is continually rewritten to hide the horrendous crime done in the name of civilization.  Sociology and psychology also continue to down play the structure of racism in our everyday life.

            The creation of a humane democracy means transforming the very structure and core of an oppressive and immoral society.  Racism, like any philosophy of hate, has deep structural roots that dehumanize all of society, making democracy impossible (Freire and Macedo: 33-40).

            The educator must own the responsibility of authority.  Equality in the classroom is understanding that real oppression is always supported by cultural attitudes of hate.  Only through dialogue can attitudes of bigoted subjugation be brought out into the open and de-mystified to expose the underlying reality.  Only by challenging the expressions of hate that support a system of oppression, can we create a safe place for the victim of hate to discuss openly their social marginalization and how those structures of oppression hurt them personally.  From this the entire group can begin to explore how discrimination, exploitation, poverty and oppression of even some, strips the entire nation or community of nations of its humanity (Gunter: 192).  The teacher needs to seek real dialogue that includes cultural and personal biographies of students, teachers, along with the larger cultural and historical setting in which these discussions are set (Flores: 194).

            Contact zones of dialogue are set up in the class room.  History becomes not only a study of intense conflicting relations between differing classes, races, genders, ethnic groups and religions, but experience of lived, impassioned, vital fluid of life real people.  Any history, social science or humanities is social stratification.  Social stratification is not the study of separate categories of opposing groups, but as mutually interacting threads that support domination and subordination.  The dominant culture comes off as looking like a mono-culture with all the artificial inputs necessary, if not like the artificial inputs used for a mono-culture farm to be successful they are ultimately harmful to the larger environmental setting; at least a well organized garden in which Anglo, male success in a capitalist system is the dominant display.  All other expression of being human simply accents the center piece (Flores: 197).

            Personal and cultural history includes injustices that become cultural memories.  Official history, however, often masks these memories as if to make lies of reality.  Either the memories of oppression are not told in the authorized narrative or they are presented as moments out of time and not, as in fact they are, essential to the very core dynamic of that society.  The living relevance of lived oppression today is often concealed in our schools (Flores: 200).     

            Through the education of a common set of values in a multi-racial classroom, added to the liberal avoidance of racial distinctions by treating all students the same, this annihilates any sensitivity to real lived experiences of the victims of racism.  These experiences cannot be demolished; to try to ignore them cheapens education for everyone, especially the victim of racial hurts. Denying the history of racism reinforces the institutionalization of racism.  There are complex sets of social relations that maintain inequality.  By exposing these institutional relations the victims become even more crippled and made to feel responsible, individually, for the failure of liberal anti-racist programs.  

            We each of us have racial, class, gender and sexual identities.  Weberian Sociologists would explain to us that any individual may have some positions of relative privilege while being oppressed in an other position.  For example, white male working class; white female professional; Black male heterosexual.  The white male worker who is anti-feminist and feels people of color get all the breaks supports sexist and racist lies that harm others.  The Marxists point out, however, all these forms of oppression share a common origin that maintain a common hegemony that helps preserve political and economic power.  Racism ideologically separated from its historical roots divides the victims of a market economy.  From either a Marxist or Weberian view, racism hurts and it is justifiable to actively mobilize against the institutions and individuals that support or benefit from racism (Dickar: 182). 

            There are many groups within the US society that are oppressed, and ultimately they share a common source of oppression.  Even though they are oppressed under a capitalist power of divide and rule, they remain separate in their resistance.  This separation strengthens the centers of power.  Catch phrases like “welfare” are used to mobilize support from an employed white working class against Black women, working at a wage job or not.  Jingoistic phrases like “welfare queen” present the poor as if they were all robbing the hard working white “Middle Class”.  The white working class’s (“Middle Class”) attention is diverted from the fact that centers of oppression are real, the corporate core of our economy which pursues profits over the welfare of these same hard working white “Middle Class” folk.  It is safe to hate the powerless poor, it is dangerous to fight back against the real source of frustration.

            Other oppressed groups also fight against each other.  African-American, Asian-American, Native American, Chicano-Mexicano for example often have individuals who see themselves as unconnected as they struggle against the dominant culture.  This fear and distrust of each other leaves the centers of power secure.  When Blacks and Koreans fought each other in the LA riots of 1991, both groups bought into an orchestrated intolerance of each other by the dominant culture of corporate America.  The dominant culture itself was a creation of the corporate culture, and divide and rule not only divided the white and non-white working class, it divided two minorities who were victims of not only classism, but also racism.  This makes it difficult for these groups to come to terms with their mutual exploitation and oppression.  This weakened both groups (Miller and Eleveld: 88).

            It is only through education we can open a dialog between all exploited groups.  Treating everyone the same is not an end to racism, but is an expansion of racism.  The historical and sociological reality of the relationship between oppressor and the oppressed must be faced honestly before oppression can be transcended.  This includes the fact that equality of opportunity is a mathematical impossibility when positions of success are few, and the contestants are many.  Any advantage becomes magnified to the point where the disadvantaged majority have never really stood a chance (Miller and Eleveld: 89).

            Differences can lead to a sense of solidarity.  For this to be the case each group must recognize their difference, but find common ground through the origin of their oppression.  When these differences are explored, goals of liberation must include both the differences and the similarities.  This can either entrench the frontiers of being different, or strengthen the struggle for freedom through mutual aid and solidarity.  Differences then become a source of strength or weakness (Miller and Eleveld: 91).

            Oppressors hope for a series of fortified boundaries between the exploited groups.  For the powerful, differences are enjoyable and interesting, because they are maintained in way that offers no threat to corporate headquarters.  Anthropology became the study of “exotic” people.  “Exotic” people are intellectually interesting and even cute, if we forget they too are part of the oppressed.  Thus, like other oppressed they are educated to accept painfully their inferiority.  Civilization stands in marked contrast to that of the primitives, savages and barbarians.  Peasants and the working class lack the depth of “High Culture” according to the elite (Miller and Eleveld: 92).

            To fight against the inferiority imposed upon the oppressed by the oppressors requires embracing a self-identity free of self-hate.  This comes by fully acknowledging that all the oppressed have a unique identity of dignity independent of that of the oppressor.  By refusing to be a part of the oppressors definition of what is proper, then can the oppressed define in themselves what is worth saving.  Alliances recognize differences and celebrate these differences; this is healthy and the source of strength that is necessary to become free (Miller and Eleveld: 100).

            In these essays power is defined as the ability to achieve goals in opposition to the interests of others; this includes coercion and unfair rules designed to support the powerful.  Much of the power used by powerful interests remains hidden, however, through the education of the dominant culture’s ideology, the victims of an unjust system express the views of elites as if they were the views that best represent the interests of the victims, as if they were their own.  This makes exploitation more efficient (Heaney: 104).

            The endowment and preservation of power is most successfully achieved by a group who holds the control over the production of knowledge.  This control is shaped by education, and further modeled by the popular, news and scholarly media of  the dominant ideology.  This in turn is controlled by the same classes who control the centers of power.  This control over knowledge is the control that redefines the lived experiences of reality that shape our consciousness in a way that reinforces the dominant ideology.  Logic itself becomes controlled by the powerful in support of domination (Heaney: 105).

            Knowledge is controlled by the privileged elite.  The production of knowledge is composed in a way that legitimates their power.  It is through the claim of neutrality of scholarly research that the bias for the status quo is masked in a way that makes the dominant culture seem true.  This control defines truth in such a way that authority is maintained.  Deviant discourse is seen and understood as either wrong, irrelevant or incompetent.  The political positioning of any writing is firmly established in the neutrality of the discourse (Heaney: 107).

            Researchers are at most salaried employees often at a university or research institution.  Its very common for a research to strongly identify with those who control the research opportunities; i.e. the university or the foundation funding the research.  Research on the way research is conducted exposes the separation between fields of study.   The political and economic assumptions that remain hidden in the studies and live experiences of people that are never exposed because the research methods and assumptions target specific experiences and not others and are designed to fit the expectations of the study. Deviant discourses would appear out of place and are easily ignored (Heaney: 113).

            The national identity in the U.S. has a mythic quality of continual democratic and economic progress within the borders of the United States, while defending these same attributes around the world.  This is the dominant ideology of “America”,  ignoring the xenophobia and totalitarianism of a reality in which the dominant ideology remains largely unchecked by most sources of information that the general public has access to.  This identity cannot thrive to the extent it does, except with the permanent destruction of the democratic ideals of equality of members of society, especially the poor.  This narrow view of humanity serves the purpose of an elite who now manipulate the right-wing dogmas that would restrict national membership of a narrowly defined nativism.  Like anti-immigrant intolerance of the past, an Anglo working class is deradicalized, and is no longer a threat to the centers of corporate wealth and power.  “America” so defined becomes narrowly self-serving for the elite, while rendering powerless the working class because of its racist elements weaken the entire class’s ability to confront its real source of oppression.  Racism, nationalism, and political censorship are at the core of the right-wing political agenda (Giroux: 73).

            A siege mentality is fostered, in the name of patriotism, against the poor, unions, non-Anglo citizens, non-white people, and anything not defined as “American” culture.  Race is simplified with a cultural identity.  “White” is now the middle class that pays for every thing, “Black” is correlated with crime, “Mexicano” with illegal aliens.  This anti-poor, anti-immigrant, anti-people-of-color is a mainstay of profitable popular media.  In an us vs. them view that is manufactured not only on the nightly news, but also in an avalanche of books and movies cashing in on the us vs. them mania.  “America” is under attack by any language not dominant English, in fact anything not part of a mass produced popular “White” culture.  Contentious national chauvinism targets anything different from the redefined post-1980 heterosexual, white, Christian, pro-capitalist, English speaking “American” (Giroux: 74).

            Racism is supplemented by a call for cultural uniformity.  National identity is founded upon the false need to embrace the common similarity.  This shared identity is not only one of forced assimilation, but where that fails, of trivializing the deep cultural differences between diverse groups within any larger nation state like the US.  This is done with multi-cultural studies that do not deal with economic, social or political inequality between these different groups. By not taking into account these economic, social or political issues, the historical, language, and cultural traditions of difference is trivialized through attempts to neutralize experiences of colonialism, exploitation and oppression while the groups that fight back are vilified (Giroux: 76).

            Public education is government regulated and makes the assumption that education is necessary for finding a job.  The facts are, simply, that good paying jobs have been declining over the past few decades.  Most jobs created since the mid-1970’s have been unskilled jobs requiring little or no education.  Education has taken on the role of helping us “cool out”.  Education now helps us adjust to the powerlessness the working class faces in a market economy that sees workers, educated or not, as labor costs to be lowered by either eliminating jobs, or lowering the wage costs as much as possible (Gabbard: 150).

            Marcuse expressed concisely an educational perspective established upon critical theory in opposition to a shattered consciousness that deadens our senses to the oppressive conditions we endure leading to a profound alienation (Reitz: 41).  Our technological mindlessness and social fragmentation first has to be healed.  This healing is in part the result of a holistic  and aesthetic education that places our humanism at the center of our struggle for liberation.  Art becomes part of our emancipation against the total alienation of a bureaucratic control and the mechanization of the one-dimensional life we live in a capitalist society.  Social interaction becomes routanized.  Values like freedom, our feelings, our need for fulfillment and dignity become abstractions separated from the human condition (Reitz: 45).

            Alienation deadens us to our self-awareness, making us susceptible to the manipulation of a power elite increasing exploitation and oppression thorough repression.  If this alienation becomes controlled by the rebel artist, alienation can become the discipline to fight back against the origins of repression.  This dialectical interaction between slavery and liberation is the expression of humanity in a repressive society; this is the struggle for the social transformation form unfreedom to freedom (Reitz: 46).

            Under capitalism, exchange value corrupts all of social life.  The most sacred becomes profane as the intimate is brought down to the level of subsistence and life, labor, nature and love are exchanged for a price.  Social relations and exchange relations become blurred.  Human relations are confused for money relations between objects, or what money can buy.  Marx called this commodity fetishism, and this alienation from our humanity leaves all of us crippled intellectually, morally, spiritually and socially (Reitz: 48).

            Through the total distancing of living people from the celebration of life there is a complete negation of imagination and splintered and irrational affinity for the superficial.  Totality becomes needed for a revolutionary consciousness (Reitz: 50).  Without this totality, life history distorts lived reality, leading to a consciousness of alienation that appears to us beyond history.  This must be countered with gaining meaning from becoming free.  The struggle to be free leads to an awareness of ourselves as being human.  Education becomes part of the conscious creation of a revolutionary culture of self-awareness.  This in part is an artistic expression of our subjective awareness of the reality of an objective world all around us (Reitz: 62).

            Public education is now a battle field, and always has been; with a national xenophobic intolerance openly attacking the children of immigrants.  Affirmative action is attacked not for its limits in helping the poor, but  for assumptions that take on a subtle and not so subtle white supremacist complexion.  Anyone who openly disagrees with “America”,  is painted as not patriotic and is seen as a threat to a very way of life that is not to be tolerated.   

            “American” of course being an emotional myth, cannot easily be countered by intelligent reason.  In reality this right-wing agenda is founded upon a new fundamentalism.  Fundamentalism of any kind openly crushes all dissent, and as such it is the new right wing, which is the threat to the overall security of a democratic community that acknowledges differences have deep historical roots.  With this agenda coming from dominant culture, a totalitarian identity is presented as  a free expression of a democratic citizenry.  This extreme simplification turns history into a lie.  The complex reality of the US is that of a multicultural, class struggle fighting for a truly democratic expression of an openly diverse citizenry against authoritarian sameness and repression by a corporate created dominant culture.  Democracy is buried under the jingoism of a “democratic America” (Giroux: 78).

            This attack on legitimate differences can be seen as a celebration of the hierarchy of power that supports domination, exploitation and oppression.  Inequality is redefined as the moral foundation of democracy when in fact inequality is neither democratic nor moral.  The forced assimilation of American Indians and Hawaiians; as well as the conquest of Chicano and Puerto Rican people is not discussed for the horror it was.  Neither is the fact that these societies had their economic base, language, and cultures attacked without mercy not discussed.  National culture is the dominant culture, and is dominant only because of power that is authoritarian and intolerant (Giroux: 80).

            Education as a part of the dominant Anglo and capitalist culture is but part of the legitimization of inequalities.  Education along with the other parts of the information and cultural media sanctions the reality of oppression by making it seem tolerable.

            Multi-cultural education has found a home in the “slums” of the richer university.  This would also be true of Feminist Studies and Marxist class analysis.  Though its presence has become quite visible, it has become tamed.  Alternative programs are the dessert of education while “White Studies” remains the core of scholarship.  The big names in the major disciplines are White European or American, mostly males.  Artist and intellectuals of color, or from the colonial or neo-colonial parts the world are appreciated adjuncts to the essential core of education of a literate person.  The most militant forms of radical alternatives to mainstream liberal arts or professional education remain outside of most people’s basic education (Shepard: 225).

            Education stands powerless in challenging the dominant ideology that is capitalist, Anglo, or patriarchically centered.  Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, Literature courses study big names that are mostly White males.  There may be some women writers, and a Black or two.  To really get in depth into Chicano History, Black Literature, Women Studies, or even, rudimentary to teachers in Montana, Oral traditions of American Indians, a student would have to find them in multi-cultural programs removed from the core courses in each of the major departments in even the larger Universities in the US.  Those professors who teach such courses in the core departments must tone down their militancy or be exiled to the multi-cultural studies programs or other alternative programs (Shepard: 226).

            Hegemony is a social condition in which all parts and aspects of a social reality of a people are dominated and supportive of the power of the dominant class. (Mayo: 253).  This includes education.  However, the struggle for liberation must precede the actual revolution.  Thus, no type of education is neutral.  Education either supports or opposes the institutions of domination.  Knowledge, culture and power are so closely intertwined as not to be separated even for analysis.  Education for liberation must consciously undermine the power of hegemony.  Education of liberation is a choice that must proceed the revolution for liberation.  Radical education confronts oppression in order to overturn it.  This is done by empowering the poor to see beyond the education of consent in the mainstream programs to discover the underlying structures of their exploitation and oppression (Mayo: 270).

            Education must be a part of a larger social movement of empowering the powerless.  Education is just one part of a revolution to replace the institutions of oppression with an open multi-dimensional democratic society. Political, economic, industrial, social, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual democracy must all be present or there is no democracy (Mayo: 271).

            The media is part of a larger dominant culture that justifies domination of one class over everyone else. This is true whether it is mass media, or elite media.  The first is geared toward mass audiences and is not to be taken seriously; it is entertainment.  

            The elite media sets our political agenda, and the framework of our views of the issues of the day.  This media is geared to a wealthy and educated elite, who are most often the ones who are politically active.  They are not only the capitalist, but part of the influential wing of the professional managerial class.  Those who work with this media tell the rest of us what is and is not the news.  The operation of the elite media is through profitable corporations, which in turn thrive on commercials from other profitable corporations.  All of these are most likely connected through investments to even larger profitable corporations, in which there is a certain pre-selected pro-capitalist world view.  In turn most corporations are highly authoritarian bureaucracies that do not allow much dissent (Chomsky: 24 - 25).

            The Universities and professional journals are a specialized part of the elite media.  Universities depend upon corporate and government support.  Professors must adjust to this fact.  As in the rest of the elite media, there is a tendency to naturally discredit those who think differently.  The survivors in the professions come to accept the correct ideology as their own.  It begins to appear that the correct ideology is sound and rational, and everything else is seen as irrational, dogmatic, or fringe.  In this way a type of natural selection takes place where the survivors naturally agree with the dominant view (Chomsky: 26).

            Within the entire elite media the common folk are seen as not educated enough to be a part of the dialog on the elite media or the professions and their research.  Only responsible critics are to be taken seriously.  The entire media: public relations, news, entertainment, propaganda, and professional research tend to share a common thread.  This is the limitation of acceptable dialog that is critical of the dominant culture and the corresponding social inequality.  Consent is fabricated through built in mechanisms and dissent is defined as irrational.  Even in academic Sociology we find patterns of conformity.  Weakening the power to transform society through education (Chomsky: 32).

            Racism and classism extend beyond our borders.  National chauvinism is made to seem as natural as the air we breath.  Imperialism is the domination of one nation by another for the economic and political benefit of the more powerful nation.  This is true for at least its ruling elite. Imperialism is an issue education often ignores in development plans for third world nations within the US or abroad.  The advantages of a market economy, industrial technology and “modern” education are seen as strong benefits.  Development could just as easily be seen as an open war against traditional subsistence based societies.  The violence against workers and peasants in these “less developed” areas can also be seen as imperialism, colonialism or neo-colonialism instead of progress.  Entire cultures have disappeared in the wake of development control by a world economy.

            Scarcity became the essential quality to the logic of capitalism.  This necessary  essential quality is independent of the objective circumstances.  While poverty is greater today than ever before, objective poverty has little to do with the fear of poverty.  Unlimited wants and limited means to satisfy those wants make the fear of poverty the driving force even for the wealthy within a market economy.  With prices set by market concerns, profits require competition between wants. Everyone must sell something; wages for labor power, rent for land, interest for money, profits for selling finished products.  Selling something in a market is the only way people can get the money they need to buy what they want or need.  What we sell determines what we can afford.  What we buy determines what we cannot afford.  There will always be more than what we can afford.  With the freedom of choice for the consumer, once the choice is made further freedom is eliminated.  To be able to gain one commodity the possibility of owning another commodity, also desired, must be given up.

            For most subsistence societies, such as those of the American Indian Tribes, there was no separate institution of economics; the economy was embedded into the total social whole.  The economy and the land were beyond the narrow world-view of the conquering Anglo American.  Land, labor and other economic resources were closely interwoven with kinship, spiritual world view, ritual and custom.  Only through this holistic connection does life have revered meaning for the traditional American Indian.  The non-economic completely submerges what to the whole would be considered economic.  Land belongs to no one, yet certain communities have a sacred responsibility for the maintenance of certain sections of the land for the mutual benefit of the whole community.  Land wasn’t something an individual controled, but what one shared as a relationship to the land with other members of the community. Before the land could be the foundation of the Jeffersonian democracy, the land would have to be freed from the moral constraints of the “savage race”, for “civilized men” would know the proper use of the land (Dickar: 161).

            The essays in this book are a use map of contested terrain.  We radical teachers are setting up two mutually interacting programs.  This first is to create learning cooperatives in which students actively take part in their own education by discovering their voice and feeling free to express it.  The other is for the teacher to take charge of their own authority to challenge any type of dominance that filters it way into the class room from the outside culture of oppression.       What is still a difficult question is how does one teach meaningful Multi-Culturalism in a predominantly, if not totally, Anglo dominated classroom. 

            Each essay in this collection then is but one brick in the wall of a radical vision of what education should become.  Each writer can be seen as offering a unique vision of her or his own, but taken together is part of a world wide movement of radical love for all of humanity.