Bibliographic Information
Title: Paulo Freire and the Culture of Justice and Peace: The perspective of Washington vs. the perspective of Angicos
Author: Moacir Gadotti
Year: 2008
Citation
Gadotti, M. (2008). Paulo Freire and the Culture of Justice and Peace: The perspective of Washington vs. the perspective of Angicos. In Torres, C. A., & Noguera, P. (Eds.). (2008). Social Justice Education for Teachers (pp. 147-159). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
Realms of Application
Summary
Gadotti describes and analyzes the current (at the time) global sociopolitical mood and situation, with a particular emphasis on the United States, and recontextualizes Freirean ideas about education within this new world.
Through a contrast of a Freirean perspective of the world (Angicos) and the post-9/11 Washington perspective, Gadotti describes the political mood of the era, the turn towards what he calls the fundamentalism of neoliberalism, and its ripple effects throughout the world in the context of North American imperialism. He constructs a new model to understand how Context affects the Freirean educational mission. Yet he goes one step further, proposing another contextual tool: the Utopia of Freire, to understand how dreaming of a possible future facilitates, encourages, and preordains education. His vision of this Utopia is based on politics of care, on collective adaptation to new challenges, and on education. But the key aspect of this tool is not the particular vision that it presents, but the idea of Utopia as a contextual tool in itself. Gadotti argues that it is not just the present context that influences education, but also the vision that the educator, that the students, have of how the world should be instead. Thus, a liberatory education would flow not only from the particular context in which the students and teacher find themselves, but from the visions they have of how the world could be different.
This, in turn, affects his tools of Theory. Education should be about bringing about this Utopia within the context that has been considered and observed: “To educate for the construction of the dream of a ‘new civilization’ thus becomes a positive response that education can give to the crisis of values generated by neoliberal pedagogy and market society” (p. 155). This idea, that education has the purpose of building a particular utopia, transcends Kincheloe’s tools of Theory, going beyond more vague purposes of education for social justice (abstract) to construct a hybrid concrete/abstract model of purpose. Concrete in that it is based on a specific construct, a fully thought out Utopian dream that also contextualizes the educational activity. Abstract, however, in that the vision of Utopia he advocates for is generalized, not particular to a specific student population in a specific community. Thus, his Theory tool bridges the abstract desire for justice with the particular concerns of a given population, his Utopia being able to connect both to the notions of Theory and to the particular concerns of the community, who can analyze how their vision differs from their current context. Gadotti’s education for Utopia therefore presents itself as both a tool for Context and for Theory, allowing its users to interpret the world around them, to analyze how their circumstances differ from their dreams, and to state the purpose of their education as construction towards them.