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Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education |
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Peter Mayo, (1999). Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education: Possibilities for Transformative Action, (Zed Books, London). Zed Books – www.zedbooks.demon.co.uk
Review by Cormac Behan
Antonio Gramsci was one of the leading Marxist revolutionaries of the twentieth century. Paulo Freire has been a defining influence on adult education discourse since the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1970. Peter Mayo sets out to explore the similarities and differences between these two writers and proposes what he terms a Gramsci-Freirean Synthesis and Beyond in his study of the possibilities for transformative action.
Antonio Gramsci was born in Sardinia to a middle class family in 1891. Despite his disability, suffering from Potts disease, he was forced to interrupt his education at an early age to seek work, because his father was imprisoned for embezzlement. Later he won a scholarship to a prestigious Turin school, but his studies were interrupted once again when he joined the Socialist Party of Italy (PSI) and he devoted himself to full-time revolutionary activity. He engaged in the education of workers both as journalist and adult educator. In 1921, he joined the newly formed Communist Party of Italy (PCI) and was General Secretary from 1921 until 1926. He was in Russia in 1922 when the Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini came to power. He soon returned to his native Italy and despite his parliamentary immunity he was arrested in 1926 and two years later was sentenced to over twenty years imprisonment for his Communist activities. He remained incarcerated until a few weeks before his death on 27 April 1937. The prosecutor at his trial proclaimed: “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning.” This could not have been further from the reality. While in prison he penned some of his most revolutionary writings, published under the title Prison Notebooks. As Mayo notes (p.35):
“Antonio Gramsci sought, in his scattered writings, often written under adverse circumstances, to formulate a revolutionary strategy for social transformation in Western Europe. In terms of affiliation, Gramsci was first a socialist and eventually a communist militant whose ultimate goal was proletarian revolution.”
Paulo Freire was born in Recife, northeast of Brazil in 1921 and is “widely considered to have been one of the greatest thinkers on education this [20th] century”. (p.13) His middle class family fell on hard times after the Great Depression of 1929. He initially trained as a lawyer but in 1947 he entered the Social Services of Industry, eventually becoming Director of the Division of Education. In 1959 he completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Recife and soon began working in the area of adult literacy in remote villages of Brazil. He was invited to replicate this on a national scale but his work was abruptly cut short after the military coup in 1964 when he was branded a subversive. He was soon arrested and forced into exile. He fled to Chile where he engaged in literacy work and spent five years working for UNESCO. He spent time in Mexico and the USA before settling in Switzerland in 1970 to work for the World Council of Churches. After sixteen years in exile he returned to his native Brazil and was a founding member of the Workers Party (PT). In 1989, he was appointed Secretary of Education in the PT Municipal Government of Sao Paulo. He was responsible for 654 schools and over 700,000 students. He wrote widely throughout his exile and his period of retirement. He died on 2nd May 1997, before he could undertake a long awaited visit to Cuba to accept an award form Fidel Castro.
After introducing us to the authors, Mayo outlines the ideas of both Gramsci and Freire on issues such as hegemony, agency, sites of practice, social relations and democratic education.
Gramsci was particularly critical of existing educational establishments, which he believed played an important role in the cementing the existing hegemony. Essentially he saw “in the education and cultural formation of adults the key to the creation of counter-hegemonic action”. (p.53) He criticised the Popular Universities of Italy and institutions such as the Workers Education Association. He believed those who are teaching should be politically committed to those they teach which was not always the case in these professional organisations. Rather, the working class, the “universal class” and agency for change must produce their own organic intellectuals or else assimilate traditional intellectuals. Mayo quotes Edward Said on the organic intellectuals of the capitalist class: “Organic intellectuals are actively involved in society, that is, they constantly struggle to change minds and expand markets”. (p.41). Thus the need for the oppressed class to produce their own organic intellectuals.
For Gramsci hegemony must be challenged in civil society, and not challenged head on. The oppressed must engage in a ‘war of position’ preceding revolutionary change. This was attempted in Turin, northern Italy though the Factory Council movement, which was conceived as a ‘politically educative institution’ where the workplace would be converted into a ‘school of labour’. This movement brought Turin and northern Italy close to revolution in the early 1920s. With the rise of Fascism in Italy and other European countries in the 1920s and 30s, Gramsci was keen to form a broad block of social movements for revolutionary change.
Gramsci believed that the sites of practice for adult education could be very wide, including discussion circles, clubs and associations, trade unions, political parties, newspapers and cultural reviews. He established a correspondence school for the PCI in the early 1920s and while incarcerated in Ustica prison he began a school for detainees.
Gramsci particularly promoted a sprit of equality in these adult education spaces. He believed that the relationship between the educator and student should be ‘active and reciprocal’, whereby ‘every teacher is always a pupil and every pupil always a teacher’. However he defended the conveying of facts over the practice of carrying out dialogue in a vacuum. He rejected facilitation which “without critical analysis keeps the learner locked in the same paradigm of thinking”. (p.48) As regards content, Gramsci believed the working class should engage in ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and especially promoted the study of history for the oppressed classes because it too “needs to be confronted, mastered and transformed”. (p.52)
Paulo Freire wrote that during his time in exile: “I read Gramsci and I discovered that I had been greatly influenced by Gramsci long before I had read him”. (p.7) Freire’s writings are from a more educational background than Gramsci but he continually emphasised the strong relationship between education and politics. His adversaries clearly understood this connection, imprisoning him, exiling him and banning his books.
Paulo Freire is particularly noted for his writings on power and domination in the educational space. He rejected what he described as the banking system where the teacher is the sole dispenser of knowledge and the student is the passive recipient. There must be reciprocal learning, and a dialogue between the educator and the learner. This promotes what Freire termed a liberating rather than a domesticating education. He was particularly keen to stress, as did Gramsci that the educator was not neutral. The educator must side with the oppressed. Neutrality merely means the educator is siding with the oppressor. Educators should promote learning through dialogue and encourage learners to reflect on their world through the process of praxis, i.e. action and reflection. Freire until 1974 used the term, the process of conscientisation but thereafter desisted from using this believing it was being used too widely and had lost its actual significance.
Despite the promotion of dialogue it is important for the educator to remember that they always have authority but this should never degenerate into authoritarianism. He is in agreement with Gramsci that the educator should never be a mere facilitator. However, the educator should always be conscious of the cultural capital they bring to any group, i.e. their own class background, gender, race etc. Educators must learn to read a class and be conscious of their position within the group and avoid using cultural references that do not resonate with the learner group.
Freire argued that unless the educator recognises this cultural capital s/he brings to a group, this can be a powerful force of domestication. He uses a phrase of Amilcar Cabral when he advocates intellectuals and educators should commit ‘class suicide’ to integrate themselves with the masses, “immersing themselves in the culture, history, aspirations, doubts, anxieties and fears of the popular classes’” (p.68) Mayo believes the notion of ‘class suicide’ is problematic because this is:
“very difficult to accomplish because of one’s habitus (values, norms, tastes for culture, ‘master patterns’ of thinking and speaking, relationship to language and culture etc.), one’s educational background, the nature of one’s everyday work (especially cerebral work), possibly even one’s acquired coherent and systematic view of the world (Gramsci’s notion of ‘good sense’), that can distinguish the adult educator from the working-class participants with whom he or she is working”. (p.117/8)
Mayo concludes: “As for habitus, bourgeois-formed educators will probably find it extremely difficult to break away from it”. (p.118)
In contrast to Gramsci, Freire thought that it was possible for adult educators to have one foot in the system and one foot outside it. Freire demonstrated this when he was Education Secretary in Sao Paulo and also aligned himself with those outside the system through social movements. Freire believed in greater avant-garde potential of the peasantry in contrast to the “universal class”, the proletariat advocated by Gramsci. However both stressed the revolutionary potential of social movements.
Gramsci and Freire, notes Mayo had a different emphasis on educational matters such as literacy campaigns, cultural production, banking education and the teaching of a sense of history. Mayo explains these differences, sometimes subtle, as being indicative of the fact that Gramsci wrote from the vantage-point of political analyst-cum strategist while Freire wrote for the most part, from the perspective of pedagogue and educationalist. Both writers had the opportunity (no doubt unwanted) of a long period of profound critical reflection on their educational activities, Gramsci through imprisonment and Freire through exile.
Mayo notes that there has been criticism of both Freire and Gramsci because it is argued they wrote from their own narrow context. Maybe they were not sensitive enough to the cultural capital they brought to their writings. Freire did not adequately engage with issues such as gender, race, gay/lesbian issues, while Gramsci did not address euro-centirsm and regionalism. Mayo laments the fact that bell hooks did not have the opportunity to engage with Freire in a ‘talking book’. Indeed Freire never engaged with a black person or a woman in any of his ‘talking books’. Mayo writes:
“In combining the insights of Gramsci and Freire on this matter, I would argue that, irrespective of whether they focus on single-issue or multiple-issue politics, radical adult education initiatives would be rooted in a commitment to confronting oppression in different forms. Therefore adult education initiatives directed towards the emancipation of a particular social group should be carried out in a manner that does not perpetuate the domestication and subordination of another”. (p.128)
However, Mayo issues a reminder to us all as educators and advocates of social change. He points out the difficulties and the dangers that many of our colleagues faced and continue to face in countries throughout the world. Gramsci's imprisonment no doubt contributed to his untimely death. Freire was imprisoned and exiled for his activities. In El Salvador, Nicaragua and other countries throughout the world those who engaged and are engaging in Freirean educational practice are natural targets for military dictatorships. Following the so-called ‘silent coup’ in Portugal the country witnessed an explosion of popular education activities. However, before long the national director of the Freirean-inspired state-sponsored programme was suspended because of what was termed the programme’s “political implications of action or potential action against the government”. (p.174) In many ways this is a tribute to the activities of those engaged in adult pedagogy; the seriousness by which they are taken by those forces opposed to the liberation of the oppressed.
In this book Peter Mayo provides us with an interesting and thought-provoking introduction to two outstanding advocates for social and political change of the 20th Century. He puts their writings in the context of their lives. He proposes an alternative vision of the world as envisaged by both Gramsci and Freire. He provides the reader with the opportunity to engage with the possibilities for radical pedagogy in transforming the world of inequality and materialism towards a more participative, just and egalitarian society for all.
Peter Mayo, (1999). Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education: Possibilities for Transformative Action, (Zed Books, London).
Zed Books – www.zedbooks.demon.co.uk
Review by Cormac Behan
Antonio Gramsci was one of the leading Marxist revolutionaries of the twentieth century. Paulo Freire has been a defining influence on adult education discourse since the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1970. Peter Mayo sets out to explore the similarities and differences between these two writers and proposes what he terms a Gramsci-Freirean Synthesis and Beyond in his study of the possibilities for transformative action.
Antonio Gramsci was born in Sardinia to a middle class family in 1891. Despite his disability, suffering from Potts disease, he was forced to interrupt his education at an early age to seek work, because his father was imprisoned for embezzlement. Later he won a scholarship to a prestigious Turin school, but his studies were interrupted once again when he joined the Socialist Party of Italy (PSI) and he devoted himself to full-time revolutionary activity. He engaged in the education of workers both as journalist and adult educator. In 1921, he joined the newly formed Communist Party of Italy (PCI) and was General Secretary from 1921 until 1926. He was in Russia in 1922 when the Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini came to power. He soon returned to his native Italy and despite his parliamentary immunity he was arrested in 1926 and two years later was sentenced to over twenty years imprisonment for his Communist activities. He remained incarcerated until a few weeks before his death on 27 April 1937. The prosecutor at his trial proclaimed: “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning.” This could not have been further from the reality. While in prison he penned some of his most revolutionary writings, published under the title Prison Notebooks. As Mayo notes (p.35):
“Antonio Gramsci sought, in his scattered writings, often written under adverse circumstances, to formulate a revolutionary strategy for social transformation in Western Europe. In terms of affiliation, Gramsci was first a socialist and eventually a communist militant whose ultimate goal was proletarian revolution.”
Paulo Freire was born in Recife, northeast of Brazil in 1921 and is “widely considered to have been one of the greatest thinkers on education this [20th] century”. (p.13) His middle class family fell on hard times after the Great Depression of 1929. He initially trained as a lawyer but in 1947 he entered the Social Services of Industry, eventually becoming Director of the Division of Education. In 1959 he completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Recife and soon began working in the area of adult literacy in remote villages of Brazil. He was invited to replicate this on a national scale but his work was abruptly cut short after the military coup in 1964 when he was branded a subversive. He was soon arrested and forced into exile. He fled to Chile where he engaged in literacy work and spent five years working for UNESCO. He spent time in Mexico and the USA before settling in Switzerland in 1970 to work for the World Council of Churches. After sixteen years in exile he returned to his native Brazil and was a founding member of the Workers Party (PT). In 1989, he was appointed Secretary of Education in the PT Municipal Government of Sao Paulo. He was responsible for 654 schools and over 700,000 students. He wrote widely throughout his exile and his period of retirement. He died on 2nd May 1997, before he could undertake a long awaited visit to Cuba to accept an award form Fidel Castro.
After introducing us to the authors, Mayo outlines the ideas of both Gramsci and Freire on issues such as hegemony, agency, sites of practice, social relations and democratic education.
Gramsci was particularly critical of existing educational establishments, which he believed played an important role in the cementing the existing hegemony. Essentially he saw “in the education and cultural formation of adults the key to the creation of counter-hegemonic action”. (p.53) He criticised the Popular Universities of Italy and institutions such as the Workers Education Association. He believed those who are teaching should be politically committed to those they teach which was not always the case in these professional organisations. Rather, the working class, the “universal class” and agency for change must produce their own organic intellectuals or else assimilate traditional intellectuals. Mayo quotes Edward Said on the organic intellectuals of the capitalist class: “Organic intellectuals are actively involved in society, that is, they constantly struggle to change minds and expand markets”. (p.41). Thus the need for the oppressed class to produce their own organic intellectuals.
For Gramsci hegemony must be challenged in civil society, and not challenged head on. The oppressed must engage in a ‘war of position’ preceding revolutionary change. This was attempted in Turin, northern Italy though the Factory Council movement, which was conceived as a ‘politically educative institution’ where the workplace would be converted into a ‘school of labour’. This movement brought Turin and northern Italy close to revolution in the early 1920s. With the rise of Fascism in Italy and other European countries in the 1920s and 30s, Gramsci was keen to form a broad block of social movements for revolutionary change.
Gramsci believed that the sites of practice for adult education could be very wide, including discussion circles, clubs and associations, trade unions, political parties, newspapers and cultural reviews. He established a correspondence school for the PCI in the early 1920s and while incarcerated in Ustica prison he began a school for detainees.
Gramsci particularly promoted a sprit of equality in these adult education spaces. He believed that the relationship between the educator and student should be ‘active and reciprocal’, whereby ‘every teacher is always a pupil and every pupil always a teacher’. However he defended the conveying of facts over the practice of carrying out dialogue in a vacuum. He rejected facilitation which “without critical analysis keeps the learner locked in the same paradigm of thinking”. (p.48) As regards content, Gramsci believed the working class should engage in ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and especially promoted the study of history for the oppressed classes because it too “needs to be confronted, mastered and transformed”. (p.52)
Paulo Freire wrote that during his time in exile: “I read Gramsci and I discovered that I had been greatly influenced by Gramsci long before I had read him”. (p.7) Freire’s writings are from a more educational background than Gramsci but he continually emphasised the strong relationship between education and politics. His adversaries clearly understood this connection, imprisoning him, exiling him and banning his books.
Paulo Freire is particularly noted for his writings on power and domination in the educational space. He rejected what he described as the banking system where the teacher is the sole dispenser of knowledge and the student is the passive recipient. There must be reciprocal learning, and a dialogue between the educator and the learner. This promotes what Freire termed a liberating rather than a domesticating education. He was particularly keen to stress, as did Gramsci that the educator was not neutral. The educator must side with the oppressed. Neutrality merely means the educator is siding with the oppressor. Educators should promote learning through dialogue and encourage learners to reflect on their world through the process of praxis, i.e. action and reflection. Freire until 1974 used the term, the process of conscientisation but thereafter desisted from using this believing it was being used too widely and had lost its actual significance.
Despite the promotion of dialogue it is important for the educator to remember that they always have authority but this should never degenerate into authoritarianism. He is in agreement with Gramsci that the educator should never be a mere facilitator. However, the educator should always be conscious of the cultural capital they bring to any group, i.e. their own class background, gender, race etc. Educators must learn to read a class and be conscious of their position within the group and avoid using cultural references that do not resonate with the learner group.
Freire argued that unless the educator recognises this cultural capital s/he brings to a group, this can be a powerful force of domestication. He uses a phrase of Amilcar Cabral when he advocates intellectuals and educators should commit ‘class suicide’ to integrate themselves with the masses, “immersing themselves in the culture, history, aspirations, doubts, anxieties and fears of the popular classes’” (p.68) Mayo believes the notion of ‘class suicide’ is problematic because this is:
“very difficult to accomplish because of one’s habitus (values, norms, tastes for culture, ‘master patterns’ of thinking and speaking, relationship to language and culture etc.), one’s educational background, the nature of one’s everyday work (especially cerebral work), possibly even one’s acquired coherent and systematic view of the world (Gramsci’s notion of ‘good sense’), that can distinguish the adult educator from the working-class participants with whom he or she is working”. (p.117/8)
Mayo concludes: “As for habitus, bourgeois-formed educators will probably find it extremely difficult to break away from it”. (p.118)
In contrast to Gramsci, Freire thought that it was possible for adult educators to have one foot in the system and one foot outside it. Freire demonstrated this when he was Education Secretary in Sao Paulo and also aligned himself with those outside the system through social movements. Freire believed in greater avant-garde potential of the peasantry in contrast to the “universal class”, the proletariat advocated by Gramsci. However both stressed the revolutionary potential of social movements.
Gramsci and Freire, notes Mayo had a different emphasis on educational matters such as literacy campaigns, cultural production, banking education and the teaching of a sense of history. Mayo explains these differences, sometimes subtle, as being indicative of the fact that Gramsci wrote from the vantage-point of political analyst-cum strategist while Freire wrote for the most part, from the perspective of pedagogue and educationalist. Both writers had the opportunity (no doubt unwanted) of a long period of profound critical reflection on their educational activities, Gramsci through imprisonment and Freire through exile.
Mayo notes that there has been criticism of both Freire and Gramsci because it is argued they wrote from their own narrow context. Maybe they were not sensitive enough to the cultural capital they brought to their writings. Freire did not adequately engage with issues such as gender, race, gay/lesbian issues, while Gramsci did not address euro-centirsm and regionalism. Mayo laments the fact that bell hooks did not have the opportunity to engage with Freire in a ‘talking book’. Indeed Freire never engaged with a black person or a woman in any of his ‘talking books’. Mayo writes:
“In combining the insights of Gramsci and Freire on this matter, I would argue that, irrespective of whether they focus on single-issue or multiple-issue politics, radical adult education initiatives would be rooted in a commitment to confronting oppression in different forms. Therefore adult education initiatives directed towards the emancipation of a particular social group should be carried out in a manner that does not perpetuate the domestication and subordination of another”. (p.128)
However, Mayo issues a reminder to us all as educators and advocates of social change. He points out the difficulties and the dangers that many of our colleagues faced and continue to face in countries throughout the world. Gramsci's imprisonment no doubt contributed to his untimely death. Freire was imprisoned and exiled for his activities. In El Salvador, Nicaragua and other countries throughout the world those who engaged and are engaging in Freirean educational practice are natural targets for military dictatorships. Following the so-called ‘silent coup’ in Portugal the country witnessed an explosion of popular education activities. However, before long the national director of the Freirean-inspired state-sponsored programme was suspended because of what was termed the programme’s “political implications of action or potential action against the government”. (p.174) In many ways this is a tribute to the activities of those engaged in adult pedagogy; the seriousness by which they are taken by those forces opposed to the liberation of the oppressed.
In this book Peter Mayo provides us with an interesting and thought-provoking introduction to two outstanding advocates for social and political change of the 20th Century. He puts their writings in the context of their lives. He proposes an alternative vision of the world as envisaged by both Gramsci and Freire. He provides the reader with the opportunity to engage with the possibilities for radical pedagogy in transforming the world of inequality and materialism towards a more participative, just and egalitarian society for all.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 05 April 2007 )
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