"Learning loss" refers to educational attainment we can expect would have happened if it weren’t for something disrupting the educational process and preventing it from occurring. These days, we most often hear about it—when we’re allowed to hear about it—in the context of the disruptions imposed upon our lives and our children in the name of the Covid-19 pandemic. Learning loss is learning that should have occurred but for failures in educational policy and practice.
Substantial and unnecessary as the pandemic response learning loss has proved, there’s a far greater learning loss occurring in America today, which has American schoolchildren achieving grade-level mastery in key subjects roughly one third of the time. This learning loss is done in the name of “equity” and “social justice,” and instead of teaching our children to be competent in mathematics, reading, writing, history, and science, it’s teaching them to view the world through the Woke Marxist lens and to be activists on behalf of its social and political agendas. Somewhat in contrast to learning loss caused by bad policy prescriptions that failed to mitigate the spread and impact of SARS-CoV-2, however, the learning loss that follows from a “critical” education into "social and emotional learning" represents nothing short of an intentional theft of education from our children and our society.
How have the radicals on the Dialectical Left—specifically, Woke Marxists—stolen education from our children? The answer is called “critical pedagogy,” which was developed on the back of the great Marxist religious revivalist Paulo Freire. Critical pedagogy uses Freire’s ideas to solve what mid-century Marxists referred to as “the problem of reproduction,” which is the idea that societies tend to reproduce themselves and especially that education can only be designed within an existing system to reproduce the system that produces it. Marxists through the second half of the twentieth century believed the problem of reproduction might prove fatal to their ambitions.
Two Marxists of the period, Paulo Freire and the Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse, were more hopeful. In fact, they were optimistic about a utopian vision and laid out various programs through which they believed it could be achieved. They offered a partial solution to the problem of reproduction, and this in turn offered a renewal of enthusiasm for the (neo)-Marxist faith. Not only did Freire succeed in creating a utopian revival in the religion of Marxism, though, he also laid down the tools to steal education right out from under our noses. Starting in the mid 1980s, thanks to the tireless efforts of a Marxist educator named Henry Giroux, American colleges of education started taking on Freire’s methods whole-hog and developing them into the radicalizing academic failures installed throughout our schools today. Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), which steals our kids’ education in favor of “social and emotional competencies,” is the latest development in this long trend.
Freire’s toolkit for the theft of education really only contains two simple elements that, when combined, pull a two-step shuffle that robs education of its learning content and replaces it with political radicalization. A true education, you see, for Freire, is a political education, and the academic contents of education are, as he often described them, mere mediators to political knowledge. Of course, by “political knowledge,” Freire means Marxist radicalization. There’s a reason his most famous book was titled Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Its goal is to use the facts of poverty, bigotry, and exclusion to teach people to see the world from the standpoint of the oppressed, which means the way a person with a Marxist consciousness would see the injustices of the world.
The nuts and bolts of Freire’s approach to education are actually few and rather easy to understand, and, like a magic trick that’s been explained to you, once you understand the parts, you can see how the critical magicians are robbing your kids and our future society blind by stealing education and transforming it into a form of radical brainwashing.
The Pregame
Most magic tricks, con jobs, and hustles require a little bit of setting up, often in the form of getting some kind of information from the marks and making them comfortable and familiar with the person who is about to fool or rob them. While this might require preparing a gimmick or stacking a deck, it also involves some amount of connecting with the audience—or the mark. A professional magician wants you to have some rapport with him and to trust him. So do con artists and hustlers. They, especially the latter, usually need to know certain information about you that will make you easier to fool.
Paulo Freire’s approach to education is no different. In fact, it’s designed around a con that steals education, and to make that con work, there’s some connecting to do. In the case of Freire’s approach to education, he recommends a whole new approach to classroom management and educational engagement: the “democratic classroom” that operates on a “dialogical model.” This approach enables the con.
In a democratic classroom, everyone is roughly equal. Teachers and students are replaced by educators and learners who learn together. The educator becomes a facilitator and something like a friend and advisor to the students, who are called “learners.” Older peers further along the journey help facilitate younger and newer learners. Everyone, teachers and students of all levels are learning together, as equals. It sounds good. It is also ideal for engaging in dialogue rather than instruction or lectures, and dialogue between educators and learners “as equals” is considered the backbone of Freire’s dialogical approach.
Just like conversing with a con man, however, the dialogical facilitator doesn’t necessarily tell the learners that he’s actually mining them for useful information he can use to his purposes later. For Freire, the beginning of the educational encounter, done in dialogue, is meant to discover something he called “generative themes,” specifically seventeen of them. (Freire doesn’t explain why 17 generative themes are to be used except to say that they found in Brazil and Chile that it was enough of them to do the job.)
The Setup
Generative themes, to Freire, are concepts sought out by the facilitating educator that are somehow important in the learners’ lives in particular ways. Specifically, they are supposed to be indicative of the “concrete conditions” of the learners’ experiences in life, their so-called “lived experience.” Crucially, generative themes are supposed to be emotionally engaging and politically relevant. In other words, they are “themes” in the learners’ lives that are potentially radicalizing. For what it’s worth, the presence of the drag queen in “drag queen story hour” is supposed to be “generative,” in their own words. It’s supposed to provoke and generate further dialogue about “living queerly” and the conceptual solidity of topics in sex, gender, and sexuality. In general, in the contemporary lingo, we call generative themes “culturally relevant” education.
Once extracted, generative themes are to be packaged up by the educator in a way that makes them appear abstract and academic. The goal is not to trigger the students immediately but to generate further dialogue that can be used to radicalize them. Like a magician preparing a phony card in a deck that lets him do his trick, the educator is supposed to take the generative themes and portray them in some abstract form as part of their lesson planning. When done well, the students and their parents, along with honest administrators, will never be the wiser that the lesson plan was set up to do a radicalizing magic trick on the students that swaps out real learning for “political literacy.”
Paulo Freire referred to these abstract representations of the generative themes as “codifications.” That is, he was literally saying that they were the generative themes being presented to the learners in coded form so that they don’t appear to be anything but an educational program. The goal of the critical educator is to find these generative themes, package them up in “codified form,” and then to begin a “decodification” that decodes them for the students.
The sales pitch for the method is found in their saying that by engaging in the “culturally relevant” themes in the learners’ lives, they will be very engaged in the learning process. They will see the image in the codified theme and be ready to connect it to a reading, math, or history lesson that will interest them, driving them to want to learn more. They will want to decodify not only the theme in front of them but also the academic subject that allows them to learn more about it. Just like in any good magic trick, though, there is something happening that no one notices. There are two decodifications passing as one.
The Heist
The decodification process as Freire called it is where the actual heist of education happens. Finding the generative themes merely sets up the steal, and the decodification does it. In magic, this is where the tricky sleight of hand takes place that switches out the chosen card for the decoy prepared in advance, for example. The way it happens is that while Paulo Freire describes a single decodification as a unified process, there are two of them occurring at once, one academic and one political. The political decodification steals the academic one and prevents it from ever occurring. Whether the academic decodification would have worked to teach the subject or not, or if it would do so better than some other method, is irrelevant because it almost never happens!
The academic decodification is supposed to go like this. First, the codified theme is showed to the students, and they have a dialogue about it. That dialogue, by the way, is the political decodification, which we’ll bracket for now. After the students are led to understand the political content and relevance of the codified image they’re presented with, the word describing that scene is shown. Maybe it’s “gender.” Maybe it’s “racism.” Maybe it’s “poverty” or “death.” Maybe it’s “suicide.” Maybe instead, the lesson is a math lesson, and statistics about race and poverty will be calculated in a highly selective way. Maybe it’s a history lesson, or a science lesson. It doesn’t matter. The academic material is “decodified” in the first step by being connected to the codified “culturally relevant” theme.
This decodification is supposed to excite the learners because they recognize themselves and their “lived realities” in the codification. They’ll want to learn more words to better understand that situation, or deeper statistical analysis tools, or more history, or something about science. The educator as facilitator will then usher them into these deeper lessons, and since they want to learn them, education will be enhanced. Not only will it be more effective; it will also cover more ground. It will cover political topics and academic material. Nothing is done “in place of.” It’s all happening “along with.”
Here’s the thing, though. That idyllic learning situation never occurs. Take this analysis from an experiment that introduced Freirean methodology in Nigeria, published in 2007,
Stage Two: The Selection of Words from The Discovered Vocabulary
From the discussions of the learners, the Generative Words written by the team of facilitators were: resources, money, abundance, crude oil, stealing, pocket, begging, plenty, poverty, suffering, frustration, crying, hunger, crisis, dying, death.
These words were later depicted in pictorial form showing the concrete realities and situations in the lives of the people. The pictorial display provoked an emotional state of pity and anger among the discussants, some of them could not talk, while most of them were moved to tears asking the question: Why! Why! Why! Why!
Stage Three: The Actual Process of Literacy Training
After the completion of stage two, it came as a great surprise to the facilitators, that the discussants were not willing to participate in the literacy teaching/training process. They were in a state of emotional wreck. They were furious, angry, shouting and restless. They were shouting Change! Change! Change! Cursing furiously those who have, in one way or the other, contributed to the suffering of the people. The bottom-line: acquisition of basic literacy skills did not make any meaning to them and in fact was irrelevant, with some of them asking the facilitators:
“What have you people, who are learned, done to change the situation, rather you (have) worsened the situation when you yourself get to the position.’’
It doesn’t work. Why? Because, as you can see, the political decodification actually steals the educational opportunity from the learners by radicalizing them. Radicals aren’t interested in learning. They’re interested in taking action, being “change agents,” transforming the world, and, because misery loves company, creating more radicalized activists.
How It Works
You’re not supposed to explain a magic trick because it takes the magic out of it, but I want the Freirean theft of education demystified. It’s rather obvious how it works. Before the academic decodification of the theme, which is intentionally chosen and framed to be radicalizing, a political decodification takes place that succeeds in radicalizing. As Freire had it, the academic content became a mediator to political “knowledge,” to what he calls “conscientization,” which means having a Marxist critical consciousness. Raising that consciousness is what Freire says is the real point of a true education, not learning disconnected syllables or meaningless sentences, or, one supposes, math, science, history, or any other subject that will lead learners to become successful in the “oppressive” world Freire wants to see rejected and denounced utterly.
It’s pretty clear how political content can be used in this way, but the generative approach isn’t supposed to be too obvious. Freire says that would be propagandizing. It therefore often includes everyday concepts that are transformed into political topics through the Marxist magic trick of “critique.” As an example, in a book Freire published with the title Education for Critical Consciousness, he lists seventeen generative themes for living in a slum. Some of these terms don’t even seem obviously politically relevant, but the codification process frames them that way. Here are a few specific examples of generative themes that don’t seem political and how the “facilitators” should frame them:
RAIN (chuva)
Aspects for discussion: The influence of the environment on human life. The climatic factor in a subsistence economy. Regional climatic imbalances in Brazil.
PLOW (arado)
Aspects for discussion: The value of human labor. Men and techniques: the process of transforming nature. Labor and capital. Agrarian reform.
AFRO-BRAZILIAN DANCING (batuque)
Aspects for discussion: Popular culture. Folklore. Erudite culture. Cultural alienation.
WELL (poço)
Aspects for discussion: Health and endemic diseases. Sanitary education. Water supply.
BICYCLE (bicicleta)
Aspects for discussion: Transportation problems. Mass transportation.
In order to teach people to read the word “bicycle,” a dialogue about mass transportation as a solution to transportation problems is needed, and transport by bicycle, presumably, will be characterized as politically problematic in “structural” terms. To learn to read the word for a particular kind of dancing, a discussion about cultural alienation (and cultural appropriation) must take place. You get the idea.
So, once these themes are found and framed for political radicalization, how does the political decodification—the process of conscientization through miseducation—proceed? It goes in three stages. The codified generative theme is first read (politically), then it is problematized (in a Marxist critique), and then it is concretized, or made personal.
Politically “reading” a codified “culturally relevant” theme is learning to see it as a political circumstance. In fact, it’s learning to see it as a part of a system produced by an unjust society. It’s finding the meaning in the facts of one’s life, where “meaning” means political relevance along axes that are potentially radicalizing. For example, it’s learning to read the fact of bicycles as a feature of living in poverty and of being limited in one’s capacity to get around. It’s learning to see the “racism” hidden in the statistics or society. It’s learning to see how “gender” is “imposed” upon people by a system that “assigns” them a sex at birth and then requires them to “perform” that gender to be considered “normal.” It’s connecting with how people in those situations might feel, so it’s made emotionally relevant. It’s coming to learn that these features of life aren’t just the way it is; they’re political decisions made by people with the power to make those political decisions and force everyone else to abide by them.
“Problematizing” is a Marxist critique done on that “reading.” It is explaining that the circumstances just read aren’t just political, but they’re also harmful and unjust. They’re created and maintained as a system by the people who have the power to set the terms of society, maybe racial, maybe cultural, maybe in terms of what counts as “normal.” They’re portrayed as exclusionary, harmful, unjust, and most of all structural or systemic. They’re part of a great societal whole that is unfair to certain people. It’s not just something that happens; it’s something that is being done by people who benefit from it and thus have no interest in changing it, even if they don’t know they’re doing it. It’s an intrinsic feature of a perpetually unjust system that people are forced to live in and be oppressed by, except if they have the privilege of benefiting from it—though that also harms them by making them perpetrators and defenders of evil.
“Concretizing” is making the problematized image personal. It’s taking all those emotions, all that sense of injustice, and that indignant, self-righteous anger, and pointing it back inward. It’s telling the learners that the people in those codified images are them or those they love (or should love). Then, not just the codified theme, which was drawn from the learners in the first place, but all that Marxist interpretive baggage and emotional upset are made into the “concrete reality” of the learner. It’s like the magician did his trick and flipped over the card, but it was the wrong card. Then he tells you to open your wallet, and there’s your card—in place of all your money, which he’s stolen from you.
As demonstrated by the experiments in Nigeria, this radicalization works. It does not, however, create academic engagement. It creates political engagement. The learners truly are more engaged with the subject matter, but not academically. The learners are “emotional wrecks.” They don’t see the point in learning. They do see the need for immediate political action, though. And there are (at least) sixteen more themes to explore before the facilitator is done.
Wrapping Up
What I’ve just described is the Freirean, or critical, theft of education, and that’s exactly what it is. It is education having been stolen from students and society. What it does is makes it look like education is going to take place by a more engaging and interesting method that involves the students to a greater degree than ever. It promises to be “culturally relevant” to them, or something similar. When it then does is takes advantage of the space opened up by the need for “relevance” to find and present lessons that allow “educators” to “facilitate” political radicalization into a “structural” (Marxist) view of reality, whether the teacher realizes she’s a Marxist or not. In other words, it steals education and replaces it with programming, a kind of thought-reform that leads “learners” to see the world from a particular standpoint, which happens to be Marxist-style critical analysis.
Freirean education has no place in our schools because it is not education. It’s something else. It is conscientization posing as education, and it is able to do what it does—and what it was intended to do—because it steals education from our students and our society by reorganizing its purpose. It is, was, and always will be a con, and we’re all losers so long as it has any marks. It is our right and duty to remove it from our education system at all levels and in every form.
