Paulo Freire

And I think that's where we are right now in 2026.

We also talked about Paulo Freire and his role to play in this problem and the banking model and how you can call teacher-led instruction banking.

And once you've done that, you've left the pedagogical debate about how kids learn and you've entered the moral one.

And in a moral debate, evidence doesn't matter.

So basically, Ivan Illich kind of comes on the scene as an education theorist and a kind of radical education theorist.

Somebody who would be read along with Paulo Freire, just sort of thinking about new ways.

You know, there's a critique of the school theory.

that he was very famous and critique of the education and a critique, particularly of the bureaucrat, bureaucratization, alienation of modern education systems.

Each time it has been a radical analysis that changes our perception of what is really going on.

Let me add a little bit more flesh to that boat.

Moving from education to medicine to sex roles, actually, I mentioned about Paulo Freire, but one could also say that Michel Foucault, with his historiographical analysis of the medical clinic and the birth of the clinic, the prison and discipline and punish, history of sexuality, sex roles, and the very idea of sex being the formation or the foundation of identity, medical apparatuses, various essays on biopower.

He kind of invents these categories.

Because I'm going to get really nerdy here for a second, but...

It reminds me of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where you can't just walk up to somebody and start just putting things in their brain.

That's not how it works.

It has to be a dialogue.

sir david sits on the national council of the academic study group asg on israel and the middle east a charity whose main objective is to oppose the boycott divestment and sanction bds movement despite such obvious bias and allegiances making him a questionable candidate for the role sir david's conclusions have received almost no scrutiny by mainstream media or by any official bodies or bourgeois think tanks instead we are being handed down an accepted conclusion that antisemitism belongs at the top tier of the racism hierarchy in britain and has created a red alert situation in our schools conflating anti-zionism with antisemitism the report itself is meant to be about anti-semitism in british schools yet it mentions gaza and israel repeatedly and it explicitly indicates palestinian flags and badges as symbols that make environments more hostile to jewish pupils Just because these flags and badges make Zionists shudder, does that directly mean that they are anti-Semitic? Most people, particularly students, are aware that a genocide is taking place and that it is right to oppose and shun it for the sake of humanity.

The Bell Report, on the other hand, clearly seeks to impose neutrality on genocide, and we recall here the powerful observation of Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire when he wrote in 1985, Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

The Bell Report recommends that schools should hold impartial debates, particularly those relating to the Israel-Palestine conflict and contemporary antisemitism.

It also suggests that schools should be adopting and utilizing the IHRA's working definition of antisemitism, which conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

Led by a Catholic priest, this ideology insisted that God was on the side of the poor, not the powerful, and that faith demanded political struggle and the liberation of the oppressed here on earth.

It inspired popular education icon, Paulo Freire, Fierce advocate of the poor and martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero and ousted Haitian president Jean-Baptiste Aristide.

It fueled popular movements like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the ELN in Colombia.

It organized communities, challenged dictators, and developed leaders who will then seize power.

And that's when the transformation happens.

And I think a lot of people in that context were transformed by that reality.

When you think about the pedagogy of the oppressed and Paulo Freire.

You're talking about someone that was very touched by liberation theology and by the way in which these priests and these church communities were organizing themselves.

The thing that strikes me about the concept of this shift, right, from going from settler versus native to survivor is that it's reflective of the kinds of things that we've read recently, you know, most specifically pedagogy of the oppressed, because that's what ultimately Mahmoud Mandani is saying when he's talking about the Nuremberg process is that what's happening is that we're recreating those old structures, right? We're saying that you know, the perpetrator and the victim, the settler and the native, right? That's still the old dialectical struggle.

It's still the master and the slave, you know? And just like how Paulo Freire was saying we need to change that from this kind of dialectical relationship, one oppressing the other, into something where both parties are working in tandem here, I think is exactly the same thing as this kind of notion of survivorship.

And the question really is just, how do you get to that point? As you mentioned earlier, I think that Mamdani is really in favor of the South African model, although he does critique its missteps.

For sure.

No, no, but that's the thing.

That's exactly what he's saying.

He's saying that you have to, right? That's the problem is that the action of not letting them off the hook or whatever is recreating these same systems, right? Just like how Paulo Freire is saying that just having this kind of...

empty vessel model or whatever.

But it tends to neglect the fact that, in fact, students of whatever social class can actually acquire knowledge that empowers them.

So that in a sense, somebody like Paulo Freire is talking about the emancipatory potential of knowledge, whereas in fact, somebody like Althusser and Bourdieu is talking about dominating power of

knowledge.

So there are two very, very different notions of knowledge.

But for a period of time, up until that, while we were still on the no-work protest, we were allowed on books, but they had to be fiction only.

But what we did was to up with the books that we didn't want and then we got our families outside to buy them to buy trashy novels take the covers off the novels take the covers off the world and put them on you know so you're i think we ended up getting the book that was most influential and it's been the most influential book of my life was pedagogy over the press by paul ferrari i probably had a photograph in the front of a semi-naked woman or something on it you know to get it through the sensor but uh that's a very small book and i had to read it several times but Paulo Freire, he really taught literacy, but he did it in a very revolutionary way, and this whole thing was a bit quiescent.

Why is this case? Why are your children sick? Well, it's because the factories up there lets out stuff into the water.

Why is the factory? Well, it's the owners of it, and it's always quiescent.