REMEMBERING PAULO FREIRE AS A FREEDOM FIGHTER HENRY A. GIROUX The centenary of Paulo Freire’s birthday was on 18 September this year. Freire and I worked together for fifteen years, which I consider one of the most enlightening periods of my life. We co-edited a book series and, along with Donaldo Macedo, got many of Freire’s books translated and published in the English-speaking world. He wrote the preface for my second book, Theory and Resistance in Education (Giroux, 1983), and we collaborated together until he died. There have been and will be many celebrations. Too many of them will treat him as iconic rather than as the revolutionary he actually was. In doing so, they will speak of Freire with a kind of depoliticising reverence that we often associate with the empty praise reserved for dead celebrities. Ivy League schools will put out statements celebrating his work offering themselves as paragons of radical change, which of course is the opposite of what they believe in. This diversion is understandable at a time of manufactured ignorance, the worship of celebrity culture, and an age in which historical memory becomes dangerous and dissent a curse. Freire was a revolutionary whose passion for justice and resistance was matched by his hatred of neoliberal capitalism and loathing for authoritarians of all political stripes. Put simply, he was not merely a public intellectual but also a freedom fighter. The current attacks on him in Brazil by the neo-fascist Bolsonaro make clear how dangerous his work is even today. One of Freire’s most important contributions was his politicisation of culture. He viewed culture as a terrain of struggle that both reflected and deployed power. He rejected the vulgar Marxist notion that culture was simply a reflection of economic forces. Not only did he connect culture with social relations that ranged from producing and legitimating class warfare, ecological destruction, and various forms of privilege, but he also understood that culture was always related to power and was an enormously influential force. This was especially true in the age of social media with its power to define diverse Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review
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