by Bruce Bawer
One of the leading critics of postmodern humanities education is Alan Charles Kors, a veteran professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intellectual history and is the editor of the monumental four-volume History of the Enlightenment. Kors is also the cofounder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an organization whose declared mission is “to defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities.” When, over lunch in Philadelphia in the spring of 2010, I asked him which books, in his view, had most influenced the way in which the humanities are taught today, he answered readily, saying that three specific works were responsible “nearly in toto” for the political mentality that undergirds the humanities today: Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks; Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed; and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. In order to get a clearer picture of the way today’s humanities students are being taught to think, it will be useful to take a brief look at each of these works.
Born in 1891, Antonio Gramsci was a Sardinian Marxist who cofounded the Italian Communist Party in 1921 and was imprisoned by Mussolini from 1926 to 1934. (He died in 1937.) The thirty-three notebooks he kept during his years behind bars are his principal legacy. He is especially celebrated for his introduction of the concept of hegemony, which occupies a central place in the humanities today. Hegemony is an extremely useful notion for critics of democratic capitalism, because it enables them to make that system sound worse than totalitarian dictatorship.
The premise is this. In a country such as those run by Stalin and Hitler during Gramsci’s own lifetime, government power is palpable, explicit, naked. It is clear that the people living under such a system are not free. In a country like today’s United States, by contrast, people think they are free. But according to Gramsci, that freedom is an illusion. They, too, are oppressed. The difference is that the power that keeps them in line is invisible. Indeed, to a large extent the people themselves are the unconscious instruments of their own oppression—for they have unwittingly internalized, and unwittingly obey, the unwritten rules by which their supposedly free society operates. This unseen structure of power, in Gramsci’s view, is even more potent than the structures of power in a totalitarian dictatorship, precisely because its invisibility makes it harder to recognize and therefore harder to resist. Thus people living in America today are even less free than were the people who lived in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
The inanity of all this is obvious. America has no death camps, no secret police arresting enemies of the people in the middle of the night and spiriting them away to places where they are tortured, held clandestinely for years, and/or executed without trial. But the patent absurdity of Gramsci’s concept did not prevent post-sixties humanities professors from making it a centerpiece of their political philosophies. The idea of hegemony provided American professors with a language in which to denounce the democratic West, and especially America, as the very essence of evil—this at a time when the gulags were still in business and Mao was murdering millions.
On to Paulo Freire, who was born in 1921 in Recife, Brazil, studied law and philosophy, and then worked, in turn, as a teacher of underprivileged children, a government official, and a university administrator. In the latter capacity, he organized a program to teach illiterate laborers to read and write, an act for which he was imprisoned. After his release, he lived in Bolivia and Chile and worked for the United Nations. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1968, brought him international renown. In 1980, after stints at Harvard and with the World Council of Churches, he returned to his homeland, where he became active in the Workers’ Party and ended up as secretary of education for the city of São Paolo. He died in 1997 but remains a major influence on pedagogy throughout the Western world.
In an incisive 2009 essay for City Journal, education expert Sol Stern sums up Freire’s doleful impact on American education, noting that since the 1970 appearance of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in English, the book “has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs.” It is “one of the most frequently assigned texts” in “Philosophy of Education” courses at top education schools; when Stern met recently with participants in the New York Teaching Fellows program, he found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was “the one book that the fellows had to read in full.”
To read this alleged classic of education is a stunning experience—for it turns out to be nothing but one long stretch of Marxist agitprop that has nothing useful whatsoever to say about actual teaching. As Stern observes, it
mentions none of the issues that troubled education reformers throughout the twentieth century: testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students. This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies. Teachers who adopt its pernicious ideas risk harming their students—and ironically, their most disadvantaged students will suffer the most.
Indeed, Freire rejects conventional education as, in his own words, a process of “narration” and a “practice of domination” in which students are obliged to “memorize mechanically the narrated content” and are encouraged to think of themselves in an “individualistic” way and not “as members of an oppressed class.” Freire’s world is one populated solely by the “oppressors” and the “oppressed,” and in his book he does little more than insist repeatedly that the “oppressed” should not actually be taught, in the old-fashioned sense, but should rather be helped to recognize their own “oppression” and encouraged to resist it.
In short, they should be subjected to what in the 1960s went by the name of consciousness-raising. Freire also insists repeatedly that “the pedagogy of the oppressed . . . must be forged with, not for, the oppressed . . . in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity”; that both teachers and students must be “simultaneously teachers and students”; and that a “revolutionary leader” (for at some point in the book, he ceases, for the most part, to label the figures he is talking about “teachers” and “students” and instead begins talking about revolutionary leaders and the revolution’s foot soldiers) should be not a “master” but a “comrade.” Needless to say, what Freire is talking about here is not pedagogy but propagandizing—intellectuals “teaching” the masses about the latter’s own lives and “liberating” them from their “false perception,” thereby turning the students into “Subjects [which Freire capitalizes] of the transformation.”
What Freire has to offer, then, is a program not of education, or of liberal reform, but of indoctrination in the name of revolutionary “liberation.” He defends violence and terror by redefining them: oppression itself, he argues, is violence and terror; for the oppressed to resist it actively, in however bloody a manner, does not constitute violence or terror, for “[v]iolence is initiated by those who oppress” and “[i]t is not the helpless . . . who initiate terror” but their oppressors. His book is packed with words that have become familiar slogans in the humanities today: dialogue, communication, solidarity. He is an open admirer of Lenin, whom he approvingly cites to the effect that “[w]ithout a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”
He is also a fan of Mao: it is no coincidence that his book—published in the midst of China’s Cultural Revolution, during which countless practitioners of traditional pedagogy were murdered—emphasizes the importance of “cultural revolution.” (Indeed, Freire explicitly hails Mao’s actions, which, he makes clear, are consistent with his own “educational” program.) Freire likewise celebrates Fidel Castro, calling “Castro and his comrades . . . an eminently dialogical leadership group” who “identified with the people who endured the brutal violence of the Batista dictatorship.” The Cuban Revo
lution, Freire writes,
required bravery on the part of the leaders to love the people sufficiently to be willing to sacrifice themselves for them. It required courageous witness by the leaders to recommence after each disaster, moved by undying hope in a future victory which (because forged together with the people) would belong not to the leaders alone, but to the leaders and the people.
And let’s not forget Che Guevara, whom Freire quotes at reverential length, eulogizing the bloodthirsty Argentinean for his “communion with the people,” his “almost evangelical language,” and his “deep capacity for love and communication.” Freire does note that Guevara’s own experience showed that some oppressed people’s “natural fear of freedom may lead them to denounce the revolutionary leaders” and even to desert or “betray . . . the cause,” and that Guevara “recogniz[ed] the necessity of punishing the deserter in order to preserve the cohesion and discipline of the group.” This would seem to be Freire’s euphemistic way of acknowledging Guevara’s mass execution of those whom he considered insufficiently attentive “students” of his “pedagogy.”
As Stern points out, Freire’s “declaration in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that there ‘was no such thing as a neutral education’ became a mantra for leftist professors” of the 1970s and thereafter “who could use it to justify proselytizing for America-hating causes in the college classroom.” Even the literary critic Gerald Graff, a star of the PC academy and certainly no conservative, has deplored Freire’s influence, asking: “What right do we have to be the self-appointed political conscience of our students?” Stern underscores one irony: that Freire’s approach to education hasn’t been taken up at all by his “favorite revolutionary regimes, like China and Cuba,” where “the brightest students are controlled, disciplined, and stuffed with content knowledge for the sake of national goals—and the production of more industrial managers, engineers, and scientists.” No; only in the West have students been led down Freire’s primrose path.
Then there’s Frantz Fanon. Born in Martinique in 1925, Fanon became a psychiatrist, worked in Algeria during the rebellion against the French, and died of leukemia in 1961 in a Washington, D.C., hospital. The Wretched of the Earth was published that same year with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, who sums up the book’s basic dichotomy: over here the people of the West, who are by definition colonizers and therefore evil, and over there the non-Western “natives,” who are by definition exploited colonists and are therefore virtuous.
This tidy world picture ignores the fact that many Western nations have never been colonial powers and that many non-Western nations have. Fanon’s worldview leaves no room for, say, non-Western powers that have sold people into slavery or oppressed women. Indeed his ideas about European imperialism and non-Western colonial subjects, and of the relationship between the two, are based entirely on his experiences in Algeria, which are not necessarily representative of anything. Yet he serves up a book full of generalizations that are plainly meant to apply to every colonial or postcolonial situation. In his world, Western “settlers” are always aggressors, non-Western “natives” always victims.
He makes ludicrous blanket statements about revolution, idealistically predicting that non-Western “natives” who carry out wars of “liberation” from Western colonial powers will then proceed to establish harmonious governments in which they will not allow themselves to be oppressed by their own, for they will have learned better: “When the people have taken violent part in the national liberation they will allow no one to set themselves up as ‘liberators.’ They [will] take good care not to place their future, their destinies or the fate of their country in the hands of a living god.” He further assures us that “[t]he African people and indeed all under-developed peoples, contrary to common belief, very quickly build up a social and political consciousness.” Indeed, after a revolution by the non-Western colonial subjects of Western powers, “the people [will] join in the new rhythm of the nation, in their mud huts and in their dreams. Under their breath and from their hearts’ core they [will] sing endless songs of praise to the glorious fighters.” They will, furthermore, “proceed in an atmosphere of solemnity to cleanse and purify the face of the nation. . . . In a veritable collective ecstasy, families which have always been traditional enemies [will] decide to rub out old scores and to forgive and forget. There [will be] numerous reconciliations. Long-buried but unforgettable hatreds [will be] brought to life once more, so that they may more surely be rooted out.” It is curious that while the history of postcolonial Africa has proved Fanon’s predictions spectacularly wrong, he continues to be regarded in the West as an oracle.
Like Freire, moreover, Fanon writes sympathetically about the violence of “natives,” arguing that it
constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upwards in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning. . . . At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.
Fanon also shares Freire’s high regard for Castro, who, he writes, “took over power in Cuba, and gave it to the people.” America, he laments, “has decided to strangle the Cuban people mercilessly. But this will be difficult. The people will suffer, but they will conquer.” Such empty sloganeering is ubiquitous in The Wretched of the Earth.
Far from encouraging the creation of wealth and stability by building up a middle class in former colonies, Fanon insists that “it is absolutely necessary to oppose vigorously and definitively the birth of a national bourgeoisie and a privileged caste.” Indeed, he calls for the stamping out of whatever bourgeoisie does exist “because, literally, it is good for nothing”—it “express[es] its mediocrity in its profits, its achievements and in its thought” and “tries to hide this mediocrity . . . by chromium plating on big American cars, by holidays on the Riviera and week-ends in neon-lit night-clubs.” That’s right—Fanon calls not for expanding the bourgeoisie but for destroying it, because “the bourgeois phase in the history of under-developed countries is a completely useless phase,” and “[r]ich people . . . are nothing more than flesh-eating animals, jackals and vultures which wallow in the people’s blood.”
Fanon’s prescription for postcolonial society echoes Freire’s: “We ought to uplift the people; we must develop their brains, fill them with ideas, change them and make them into human beings. . . . [P]olitical education means opening their minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence; as [leftist Martinican writer Aimé] Césaire said, it is ‘to invent souls.’” In short, non-Westerners are not “human beings” and do not have “souls” until “we”—the good Westerners—fill their heads with political philosophy. Fanon does not hide the fact that he is talking here about indoctrination in left-wing collectivist ideology: “the leaders of the ring realize that the various groups must be enlightened; that they must be educated and indoctrinated; and that an army and a central authority must be created.”
The fantasy-spinning continues: “The masses should know that the government and the party are at their service. . . . Nobody, neither leader nor rank-and-file, can hold back the truth. The search for truth in local attitudes is a collective affair.” And: “The nation does not exist except in a programme which has been worked out by revolutionary leaders and taken up with full understanding and enthusiasm by the masses.” It is striking to read this dangerous drivel—so thoroughly disconnected from reality—alongside somebody like Orwell, who was a genuine student of human nature and who recognized the catastrophic foolishness of such delusions.
Gramsci, Freire, Fanon: these three men’s influence on the teaching of the humanities today has been nothing less than a disaster. They’
ve infected it with contempt for the West, which is identified not with freedom and prosperity but with capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism—all of which are seen as unmitigated evils. Meanwhile left-wing collectivist systems, however horrendous their track records, are presented as worthy of admiration. (It is common in the humanities today to refer, as Fanon does, not to “democracy” and “Communism” but to “capitalism” and “socialism.”) Whereas American humanities education once focused on introducing students to the great achievements of Western civilization and to the universal values that make it unique in human history, the goal now is to discredit the West’s legacy. In humanities departments today, it is an article of faith that all civilizations are equal—except for Western civilization, which, students learn, is unique only in the degree of its greed, brutality, and lust for power.
There are, of course, dozens of other figures—most of them European, many of them French, and nearly all of them, curiously, members of that otherwise discredited species, the Dead White Male—who have exercised a major influence upon the humanities today. We can begin with the fathers of social science, Karl Marx and Max Weber (author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) in Germany and Émile Durkheim in France, the latter two being the founders of sociology; and with the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács. A group of several German Marxists who thrived between the world wars and who are called the “Frankfurt School” because of their association with the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research—among them Max Horkheimer; Theodor Adorno; Walter Benjamin, author of the influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; and Herbert Marcuse (“father of the New Left”), an idol of both Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis who lived to support the Viet Cong—had an immense impact on postmodern literary criticism.