In this revealing portrait, James Lindsay exposes the little-known but powerful influence of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire on the education of American schoolchildren for more than four decades. Lindsay’s exposé completes the picture of what we already know about the major players in the “march through the institutions,” as German Marxist Herbert Marcuse often stated in reference to the Marxist political strategy to influence higher education, which has trickled down through K-12 in the form of comprehensive sex education, socio-emotional learning, and critical race theory.

Researchers who seek the restoration of traditional education, including phonics-based reading instruction, traditional math, the study of Western civilization, and accurate U.S. history and civics, need to recognize the impact of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, and The Marxification of Education is a good start. Freire’s work is no less important than that of Dewey or any of the major figures who have contributed to the decline of American education.

The author points out that if parents want to know why their children are quick to join protest marches yet are failing academically, it’s because “our kids go to Paulo Freire’s schools. Chances are,” he writes, “that unless you’re a Brazilian, an educator, or deep into the front lines of the battles in the culture war, you have never heard of Paulo Freire, and have no idea what this means. But Freire is easily the most influential name in education in a century.”

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian-born educator who fused Marxist thought with Catholic Theology to create an education method called “Critical Pedagogy.” The whole of Lindsay’s book fleshes out the details of this subversive yet predominant method by heavily quoting Freire’s most famous written works, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and The Politics of Education (1985).

Freire’s books repeatedly invoke Marx, Hegel, Lenin, Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, but as Lindsay writes, rarely name or “put into application” any actual theorists of education. “Other educational theories would fail by Freirean standards because, to the degree that they work to educate students, they lead students to learn to reproduce the existing ‘oppressive system.’”

Instead of building upon traditional educational theory then, Friere “steps upon a soapbox, denounces it all, and declares a Marxist Theory of Education — while speaking generously of the most notorious Marxist figures in the broader Communist movements of the 20th century.” And here is where Freire injects his twisted view of religion. The author explains: “Learners in this process are meant, in his own words, ‘to be educated so that they can learn to speak the word in order to proclaim it to the world.’” Lindsay adds: “Christian readers are invited to shudder as this is literally the role uniquely assigned to God in the Bible, and learning to do so as men would be tantamount to acquiring the gnosis that we can be gods. That world is the Critical Marxist Utopia at the End of History.”

The roots of Freire’s Critical Theory began in his childhood, when his comfortably middle-class life was plunged into devastating poverty due to political turmoil in Brazil, which eventually led him to reject “colonialism” and embrace “Marxist liberationism.”

He began his work in education “in the context of adult literacy in Third World colonized nations in the 1950s and ’60s, and became highly aggrieved because agrarian peasants who could neither read nor write but were nonetheless at the center of their communities, became displaced when the need to be literate, on someone else’s terms, came to dominate their society.” In other words, progress and new social machinery came to the Third World, but activists like Freire viewed these developments as threats, as pressure to get educated in order to fill a bourgeois-colonizer job on those terms, thus feeding his Marxist-post colonialist view of colonized and industrialized society.

Lindsay describes in detail how Freire’s Critical Theory plays out in the classroom, such as the real role of the drag queen story hours, for example, which take on an even darker meaning when explained in the Freirean context. Essentially, as Lindsay explains, Freire believed the role of the educator should be as a facilitator, engaging students in the process of “conscientization” or recognition and acceptance of reality as unveiled by the facilitator. It closely resembles thought reform; if the student does not learn to become a dutiful Marxist revolutionary, he or she cannot be “truly human.”

The author further writes: “For Freire, a ‘banking model’ education — meaning any approach to education that isn’t ‘dialogical’ on Freirean terms — robs people of what makes them truly human, which is recognizing themselves as ‘knowers’ who can use their [political] knowledge to transform the world.” The “banking model” is the term Freire coined to distort traditional education, including even the collectivist Prussian education model. He thus successfully maligned any form of education “that might actually teach students anything.”

While reading through The Marxification of Education, it’s easy to see how schools have come to disregard basic skills for an emphasis on ideology-based ideas, feelings, and attitudes. In Freire’s world, writes Lindsay, “learning to read and write in the literal sense isn’t what he is interested in or talking about. Maybe people can ‘occasionally’ read or write because they were ‘taught’ in the wrong kinds of literacy campaigns, which do not focus upon ‘political literacy’ and condition them to accept allegedly dehumanizing conditions.... What we see Freire constructing here is a Marxist Theory of knowing, literacy, and education. Literally.”

At the end of the book, the author provides a short appendix, which is actually an executive summary of the entire work. Lindsay added it as an acknowledgement that “parts of this book are admittedly complex,” and “twice as long” as he originally intended. This reviewer believes his concise and informative summary is worth copying as a reference for use in speaking with others and spreading the word about Paulo Freire and his destructive pedagogy, which continues to wreak havoc on American students and families.

To read the entire book, go to Amazon.com to order!

The Education Reporter Book Review is a project of America’s Future, Inc. To find out more about America’s Future, visit AmericasFuture.net.

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