Praxis in Paulo Freire’s Emancipatory Politics

ABSTRACT

Praxis is the central concept which Paulo Freire adopts to capture the dialectical relationship between consciousness and the world, reflected in the pedagogical approach for which he became famous. It is this concept I seek to clarify in this paper. I focus on Paulo Freire's development of praxis throughout his massive oeuvre. This reflects his social and pedagogical thinking throughout a span of over thirty years. I do this in view of the highly persistent misconceptions in the use of the term praxis in the literature. The term praxis is often bandied about in a loose and contradictory manner separating it from some of its constituent elements. Praxis, it will be argued, finds its place in any organisation or movement striving for the greater democratisation of society. Democracy is seen here not simply in its formal, representative sense, but as an ongoing process for the enfranchisement of different members of society.

KEYWORDS:

• Social
• reflection
• action
• theory
• dialectical

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributor

Peter Mayo is Professor at the University of Malta in Malta. He has published around 22 books, one of which, Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education (Zed Books, 1999), has been translated into seven other languages. He has authored well over a hundred papers published internationally in refereed journals in Education, Sociology, Cultural Studies and Political Studies or as chapters in edited books. He has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Alberta, the University of British Columbia, the Institute of Education of UCL (University College London), Bogazici University Istanbul, University of Cyprus and University of Gdansk. He edits three book series: Postcolonial Studies in Education (Palgrave-Macmillan, coedited), International Issues in Adult Education (Brill-Sense) and Critical Education (Bloomsbury Academic). He is co-editor of Postcolonial Directions in Education (https://www.um.edu.mt/pde/index.php/pde1), in its 9th volume, and his latest book is Higher Education in a Globalising World: Community Engagement and Lifelong Learning (Manchester University Press, 2019).

Notes

1 This paper develops from a short encyclopaedia entry by the author on praxis (Mayo 2017). It is a substantially expanded version.

2 This is not to be confused with Marx's dictum that all social life is practical. Being practical is not equivalent to engaging in Praxis. Practice and Praxis are, alas, constantly confused by many as I shall argue anon.

3 Gramsci's argues that all human beings are intellectuals but not all carry out the function of intellectuals: “All men are intellectuals; one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals” (Gramsci 1971, 9); one can fry an egg or sew a tear in a jacket but this does not mean one is a cook or tailor (9).

4 Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Marx and Engels 1978, 145).

5 Action based on revolutionary praxis should be part of broader political action guided by a vision of a transformation of current structures. In short, praxis should not be confined to an intellectual understanding of how the world functions and how it oppresses people, but should be geared towards exploring ways of transforming the current situation. It should be allied to action with this purpose in mind. Critical education based on praxis is an important component of these processes of understanding and action. This elaboration was called for by a reviewer of this paper.

6 The influence of Gramsci on Freire is captured in a statement by the latter in London where he states that he was influenced by the Sardinian thinker and politician well before he read him for the first time in 1968 (Freire 1995). I am here responding, to a reviewer's demands. It is impossible to do justice to the similarities and contrasts between, and the potential for a synthesis of, the two as a side-issue in a paper such as this. This warrants a full scale comparative study on its own and I have produced several published versions of different such studies as book chapters, journal articles and an entire book in English, subsequently reproduced in translation in Spanish, Catalan, German, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish and Japanese. Two main points of convergence are that they eschew economic determinist approaches to social change and encapsulate their views within an overarching “philosophy of praxis.” Freire follows Gramsci in seeing institutions, associated by orthodox Marxists with the superstructure and viewed as epiphenomena, as having the potential to contribute towards socio-economic change. They can react upon the economic base and change it. Cultural and educational agencies are regarded by both as having key roles to play here.

7 Some who understand “praxis” stop there and use this awareness of the concept to cynically control others when in a position of leadership. I have experienced this in my thirty years as an academic—walking the talk in the opposite direction. What Mark Fisher (2009) calls “capitalist realism” often leads to this, the thinking going along these lines: “we all know that this is exploitation but … ”

8 See the confusion in such titles as that of the journal Administrative Theory & Praxis (https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/madt20) or the title of the following conference: “Praxis: Applying Theory in Practice” (https://www.jc.um.edu.mt/conference).

9 There is nothing idealistic by this statement contrary to what is contended by a reviewer. Consciousness is a key component of praxis. The latter cannot exist without the former and, as Marx underlined, it is rooted in the materiality of one's life, in short the social and economic conditions in which one find oneself. A whole discussion “concerning the production of consciousness” is found in Marx and Engels's The German Ideology (Marx and Engels 1978, 163–175). Rather than being idealistic, this whole discussion centres around the material basis of power in contradistinction to the idealism of the Young Hegelians such as Max Stirner (“St. Max” or “the blessed Max Stirner”) or Bruno Bauer (“St. Bruno”).

10 They argue for not “someone who is interested only in resisting and defeating forms of cultural domination but rather someone from whom the end of all forms of exploitation is the focal point of his or her commitment to transform the world” (Fischman and McLaren 2005, 44). This is derived from the concept of Freirean praxis.

11 Themes inserted as key elements in the discussion to clarify the issue being tackled and proposed by the group (Gadotti 1994, 17).

12 This process is taken up in community theatre, especially Forum Theatre, by Augusto Boal. Critical distancing has quite a presence in 20th century theatre, especially through Bertholt Brecht's “alienation effect” (Willett 1964, 91). In a fictional way, this trend is reflected in such plays as Luigi Pirandello's Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) (Pirandello 1969).

13 Freire's team allowed school communities the choice of whether they would join the project or not. The project entailed a new way of developing a curriculum rooted in the pupils’ existential situation, the basis of their learning (O’Cadiz, Wong, and Torres 1998).

14 “Common sense” is marked by a fragmented reading of the world full of contradictions. “Good sense” entails a more rigorous and coherent one. “Good sense” is the kernel of Gramsci's “philosophy of praxis” which supersedes “common sense” by “renovating and making ‘critical’ an already existing activity,” leading to a “higher conception of life” among not a small intellectual elite but an entire “intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass … ” (Gramsci 1971, 331–333).

15 Unfortunately, Freire's municipal government in São Paulo, in Mayor Erundina's PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores) administration, did not last long for people to witness the transition from popular knowledge to “high order thinking.” If there was such a transition, it has to date not been captured in the literature on the reforms carried out by Freire's Secretariat for Education. This would have shed light on a school curriculum based on praxis.

16 Don Lorenzo Milani is one of Europe's most progressive educators lauded for his work among working and peasant class students who had been cast out of the public school system. He organised a school at Sant’ Andrea in Barbiana which connected with their everyday life and helped them move from that basic existential situation into higher order thinking and critical reflection. This was intended to help them unlock the path to obtain the skills and attitudes to exercise their “right to govern” as sovereign citizens. The students learned collectively in a manner that allowed older students to teach younger ones and not to move to the next stage until everyone had mastered the present one. They were both teachers and students at the same time. The effort involved in teaching what they learned to others (peer tutoring) made them master the concept ever more. They learnt, read (texts and daily newspapers) collectively and wrote collectively. These included collective responses, sent to the editor, to what they read in the daily newspapers. Debate and advocacy were important features of the school, something don Milani had also helped promote among members of the community he served before being “exiled” into Sant’Andrea at Barbiana. The two pedagogical experiences are captured into books, one being the School of Barbiana (1996) and the other Milani (2004). The former is a text written by the Barbiana students under his direction, a collective piece of writing anticipating such works as the Stuart Hall-led Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978) by the learning community at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. It became more than a sociological critique of the schooling system in Italy but, in the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini, a critique of Italian society at large and, according to 1968 movement leader, Sergio Capanna, a manifesto for this movement in Italy (Capanna 2007, CIV [104]); Regarding Pasolini's statement, see: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1008055809395722 (Last Accessed video July 27, 2020).

17 Fischman and McLaren (2005, 441) explain that “only by developing an understanding that is born of a commitment to social justice can such an understanding lead to the type of conscientisation necessary to challenge the hegemonic structures of domination and exploitation.”

18 La Belle referring to Liberation Theology (Boff and Boff 1987), writes of faith as a “liberating praxis” (La Belle 1986, 7) capturing a sense of the dynamism Freire seems to be referring to here.

19 This recalls Don Milani with respect to Barbiana when he argued that the experiment was context bound and cannot be repeated as a blueprint elsewhere.

20 Karl Marx's advocacy of a “polytechnic education” is best explained in the “Geneva Resolution of 1866” or rather “Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council: The Different Questions” (Marx 1866) where the education and formation of the labouring classes were given prominence focusing on Mental Education, Bodily Education and Technological Training.

21 School children had to learn to become self-reliant and therefore combined their basic education (secondary education was a luxury in such an impoverished country) with agricultural work in a school shamba (field). The products were sold and the proceeds provided the school with the wherewithal to function.

22 Circumstances make people but it is also people who make circumstances, writes Marx (Marx and Engels 1978, 165) in The German Ideology, warning us, however, that people do not intervene “as they please … under circumstances chosen by themselves … ” to cite from The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (Marx and Engels 1978, 595). See Jandrić (2018, 145), McLaren (2015) on difficulties of engaging praxis at a concrete level even among teacher-educators.