Paulo Freire's Bank of Motte and Bailey

There is a type of Motte and Bailey argument where you offer a strawman version of the opposition that no serious person believes. Having presented a problem that does not really exist or at least has been greatly exaggerated, you then offer a solution that sounds innocent, mainly not to do the thing that no one is really doing anyway, but really is quite radical. Then, in true Motte and Bailey fashion, when called out as to what is really being argued for, you then retreat into the claim that you are only opposing the thing that no one actually supports anyway.

Paulo Freire is a good example of this. It is clear to me that the education teachers who had me read his work did not really understand him. In all fairness, Freire is not an easy author to understand. Reading a work like Pedagogy of the Oppressed, most readers are only going to come away grasping his opposition to the banking model of education where the teacher is seen as depositing knowledge into the heads of students who are rendered passive figures in this process.

To be clear, I am not saying that Freire is wrong on this issue. On the contrary, the problem with Freire’s position is that he is saying something that just about anyone who has ever taught has agreed with. While it should be acknowledged that teachers presumably have knowledge about material that students do not and that the job of a teacher is to convey some of that knowledge, no one seriously believes that this is all that goes into teaching. There is still the issue of how you convey that information and also the building of a personal relationship with students combined with incentives to offer the circumstances where students are likely to want to learn. This is all the more so in modern education where information is so readily and cheaply available. Every teacher needs to constantly ask themselves the question: what am I giving students that they cannot easily get through Google and YouTube?

Competent teaching is going to be a combination of giving over information as part of the formal hard education and the creation of systems to offer informal soft education. Reasonable people are going to fall along a spectrum. Different students will benefit from different teachers depending on their personalities and a variety of other factors.  

If all Freire was saying was that teachers should not try to simply stuff facts into their students’ heads, his work could be considered trite but innocuous. The problem is that Freire has a deeper agenda hidden in his rather dense prose. For Freire, the true purpose of a teacher is not to teach people practical skills like reading, enabling them to get jobs and function within a capitalist economy. In truth, teachers are not really supposed to teach anything. As Marxist revolutionaries, the teacher is supposed to go among the people and arouse their innate revolutionary spirit. That being said, what teachers are supposed to discover is that the students already possess the revolutionary spirit in contrast to the teacher who is tainted simply by the fact that they went through the capitalist education system. As such, there is a dialectic/contradiction in Freire’s work in which it would seem that the teacher is not even supposed to be teaching the students Marxism, but rather is supposed to be learning from the students, undermining the dichotomy of teachers and students.  

As I mentioned previously, I do not believe that even most education teachers, let alone teachers in training, understand Freire. I assume that a Straussian model is at work. A handful of activists have pushed Freire into the curriculum precisely because they understand his esoteric agenda. Most education professors agree to teach him because they only understand the exoteric mask. The teachers in training end up being corrupted by Freire but it is not because they understand even much of the exoteric material. This would require that they bother to do the assigned reading. They understand enough to recognize that knowledge of their field is not that important so they do not have to read much beyond the textbook. Thus Freire becomes a license for teachers to do what they were already inclined to do mainly to remain ignorant of what they are supposed to be teaching while imagining that they are somehow teaching higher critical thinking skills that transcend their field. 

What one should take away from this is that if you see someone raising a problem that does not really exist or is greatly exaggerated, pay close attention to their solution. You can count on the fact that they have no intention of solving the problem; why would someone bother to solve a non-existent problem? The solution is not going to really be not to do what no decent person is doing anyway but something fundamentally indefensible in the light of clear language.