Paulo Freire’s legacy and the necessity of critical pedagogy in dark times
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world
–Nelson Mandela
Paulo Freire, the radical Brazilian educator, would have turned 103 on September 19, 2024. Freire was not merely an academic; he was a revolutionary, a fierce champion of the oppressed whose lifelong fight for economic, educational, and social justice has left an indelible mark on generations of teachers, students, and cultural workers worldwide. His seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was written under the brutal political repression of 1960s Brazil, yet its message reverberates even louder today in the face of rising authoritarianism and the war on critical thought. Freire knew that education is never neutral—it is always a political act. It either serves to liberate or to domesticate, to empower or to subjugate.
Born in 1921 in Recife, Brazil, Freire experienced poverty and inequality firsthand, shaping his lifelong commitment to the oppressed. A staunch advocate of liberation theology, he pioneered an emancipatory pedagogy rooted in critical literacy—a tool not just for understanding the world but for transforming it. Following the military coup in Brazil in 1964, Freire was imprisoned for 70 days before being exiled for nearly two decades. His return to Brazil in 1980 did not mark the end of his activism; until his death on May 2, 1997, Freire remained a voice for the marginalized and oppressed.
Paulo and I were close friends, working together from 1980 for fifteen years. I witnessed firsthand his unwavering belief that democratizing education is at the very core of political resistance. Today, as education comes under attack by neoliberal and authoritarian regimes worldwide, Freire’s ideas are more vital than ever. We saw this clearly when fascist president Jair Bolsonaro sought to smear Paulo’s name, discredit his legacy, and censor his books in Brazil—a testament to the enduring power of Freire’s vision.
In these perilous times, Freire’s work is not just relevant—it is a radical call to arms. As fascism resurges globally and civic culture crumbles beneath the weight of manufactured ignorance, remembering Freire is not enough. We must reclaim his legacy as a rallying cry to resist and rebel. Freire understood that education and politics are inseparable; teaching critically is an act of defiance, a direct challenge to oppression. His pedagogy is not a sterile method but a living project of freedom, a force against oppression. Freire wasn’t just an intellectual—he was a revolutionary whose work offers both analysis and a pathway to liberation. He understood that people must be informed to act for justice, and that education, inherently political, empowers individuals to reflect, manage their lives, and engage critically in the struggle for power, agency, and a more just future. Freire’s message was clear: an informed and critically engaged populace is the greatest force against tyranny, and education must serve as the foundation for this transformative power.
Paulo was well aware that people had to be informed in order to act in the name of justice. He observed that education in the broadest sense was eminently political because it offered students the conditions for self-reflection, a self-managed life, and particular notions of critical agency. Education was central to politics because it was a struggle over power, agency, identity, contexts, theory, and a vision of the future. Paulo Freire claimed that informed citizens are essential to the pursuit of justice. For him, education was inherently political because it fostered self-reflection, autonomy, and critical agency. Education, as a battleground over power, identity, and the future, stood at the heart of societal struggles. Freire’s contribution to pedagogy is unmatched—he rejected the notion of education as mere training or neutral transmission of knowledge. Instead, he saw pedagogy as a political and moral practice that equips students to become critical citizens, deepening their engagement with democracy. Freire’s vision was radical because he knew that only an informed populace could act in the name of economic and justice.
Paulo fervently argued that the value of education, civic literacy, and critical pedagogy could be measured by how much it improved people’s lives, gave them a sense of hope, and pointed to a future that was more just and free of oppression and domination. He believed that there was no possibility for social change unless there was a change in peoples’ attitudes, consciousness, and how they live their lives. Paulo rightly argued that a critical education could teach young people, the oppressed, and others not to look away, to take risks in the name of a future of hope and possibility. His radical belief in education’s power wasn’t just conviction—it was a commitment to social change, grounded in the idea that identity, power, and values are inseparable from political and educational struggles. Freire understood that theory doesn’t come first—real struggles do. He argued that you start with the concrete problems people face in their everyday lives, and that theory serves as a tool to confront and solve those problems. Theory, for Freire, is not an abstract exercise; it’s a weapon for liberation, drawn from the very ground of lived experience.[1]
At this critical juncture, education is under siege by the forces of fascism. Right-wing politicians and authoritarian regimes are not merely attacking the classroom—they are waging an all-out war on critical education. They seek to ban books, erase history, and crush dissent. These forces understand, as Freire did, that whoever controls education holds the power to shape the future. That’s why the battle for education is inseparable from the larger struggle for democracy and social justice. Education is not simply a path to individual advancement—it is the foundation of collective liberation.
Freire’s pedagogy is a rallying cry against authoritarianism. He exposes the ways in which those in power seek to turn education into a weapon of oppression. In contrast, Freire teaches that education must be a practice of freedom—a dynamic space where students and educators engage in critical dialogue, question power structures, and dare to imagine a world beyond the chains of domination. His work compels us to see education not as passive consumption, but as an active, revolutionary process—one that involves critically reading both the word and the world and taking collective action to dismantle the conditions of oppression.
The rise of fascist politics across the globe has revealed the latest stage of gangster capitalism in all its ugliness, which include the death producing mechanisms of systemic astonishing inequality, deregulation, a culture of cruelty, White Christian nationalism, systemic racism, and an increasingly dangerous assault on the environment. It has also made visible an anti-intellectual culture that derides any notion of critical education, that is, an education that equips individuals to think critically, take risks, think outside of the box, engage in thoughtful dialogue, appropriate the lessons of history, and learn how to hold power accountable. At the same time, the claims of global capitalism have been undermined as a result of its economic failures, the emptiness of its promises of upward social mobility, and the horrors it has let loose upon, especially in the form of endless wars, massive poverty and staggering concentrations of wealth in the financial elite.
It is hard to imagine a more urgent moment for taking seriously Freire’s ongoing attempts to make education central to politics. At stake for Freire was the notion that education was a social concept rooted the goal of emancipation for all people. This is a pedagogy that calls us beyond ourselves, and engages the ethical imperative to care for others, dismantle structures of domination, and to become subjects rather than objects of history, politics, and power.
This was a political project infused with a language of critique and possibility while simultaneously addressing the notion that there is no democracy without knowledgeable and civically literate citizens. Such a language is necessary to enable the conditions to forge a collective international resistance among educators, youth, artists, and other cultural workers in defense of public goods. Such a movement is important to resist and overcome the tyrannical fascist nightmares that have descended upon the United States, Hungary, Turkey, Argentina, and several other countries plagued by the rise of right-wing populist movements. In an age of social isolation, information overflow, a culture of immediacy, consumer glut, and spectacularized violence, it is all the more crucial to take seriously the notion that a democracy cannot exist or be defended without civically literate, informed and critically engaged citizens.
Education both in its symbolic and institutional forms has a central role to play in fighting the resurgence of anti-democratic cultures, mythic historical narratives, and the emerging ideologies of white supremacy and white nationalism. Moreover, as far-right extremists across the globe are disseminating toxic racist and ultra-nationalist images of the past, it is essential to reclaim education and critical pedagogy through the lens of historical consciousness and moral witnessing. This is especially true at a time when historical and social amnesia have become a national pastime matched only by the masculinization of the public sphere and the increasing normalization of a fascist politics that thrives on ignorance, fear, the suppression of dissent, and hate. Education as a form of cultural work extends far beyond the classroom and its pedagogical influence, though often imperceptible, is crucial to challenging and resisting the rise of fascist pedagogical formations and their rehabilitation of fascist principles and ideas.[2]
Cultural politics since the 1970s has turned toxic as ruling elites increasingly gained control of commanding cultural apparatuses turning them into pedagogical disimagination machines that serve the forces of ethical tranquilization by producing and legitimating endless degrading and humiliating images of the poor, immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and others considered excess, dismissed as wasted lives doomed to terminal exclusion. The geographies of moral and political decadence have become the organizing standard of the dream worlds of consumption, privatization, surveillance, and deregulation. Within this increasingly fascist landscape, public spheres are replaced by zones of social abandonment and thrive on the energies of the walking dead who are the embodiment of a culture of manufactured ignorance, cruelty, and misery.
Under a global gangster capitalism, the destruction of the public good is matched by a toxic merging of inequality, greed, and the nativist language of borders, walls, and camps. It is crucial for educators to remember that language is not simply an instrument of fear, violence, and intimidation, it is also a vehicle for critique, civic courage, resistance, and engaged and informed agency. We live at a time when the language of democracy has been pillaged, stripped of its promises and hopes.
Paulo was right in insisting that if right-wing populism and authoritarianism are to be defeated, there is a need to make education an organizing principle of politics and, in part, this can be done with a language, form of critical literacy, and pedagogy that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. Language is a powerful tool in the search for truth and the condemnation of falsehoods and injustices. Moreover, it is through language that the history of fascism can be remembered and the lessons of the conditions that created the plague of genocide can provide the recognition that fascism does not reside solely in the past and that its traces are always dormant, even in the strongest democracies. Paulo was keenly aware of Primo Levi’s warning that “Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will.”
James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning in No Name in the Street that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” Thinking is now viewed as an act of stupidity, and thoughtlessness is considered a virtue. All traces of critical thought appear only at the margins of the culture. Ignorance is not innocent, especially when it labels thinking dangerous while exhibiting a disdain for truth, scientific evidence, and rational judgments. However, there is more at stake here than the production of a toxic form of illiteracy celebrated as commonsense, the normalization of fake news, and the shrinking of political horizons. There is also the closing of the horizons of the political and pedagogical coupled with explicit expressions of cruelty and a “widely sanctioned ruthlessness.”[3]
Under such circumstances, there is a full-scale attack on thoughtful reasoning, empathy, collective resistance, and the compassionate imagination. As Toni Morrison has noted we live at a time when language is censored, reduced to a kind of narcotic narcissism, and cannot tolerate new or critical ideas. As a tool of domination, it becomes a dead language, stripped of its transformative potential. Instead of fostering critical thought, it erases history, promotes menace, subjugation, and is wielded as a practice of violence. Think of how language in support of Palestinian freedom has been censored, disabled, and hollowed out under the claim of being antisemitic.
Given the current crisis of politics engulfed in a tsunami of disimagination machines, educators need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented convergence of resources–financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological–to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control. If educators and others are to counter global capitalism’s increased ability to separate the traditional sphere of politics from the now transnational reach of power, it is crucial to develop educational approaches that reject a collapse of the distinction between market liberties and civil liberties, a market economy and a market society. Resistance does not begin with reforming capitalism but abolishing it. In this instance, critical pedagogy becomes a political and moral practice in the fight to revive civic literacy, civic culture, and a notion of shared citizenship. Politics loses its emancipatory possibilities if it cannot provide the educational conditions for enabling students and others to think critically, realize themselves as informed and engaged citizens willing to fight for social change in the name of democracy. There is no radical politics without a pedagogy capable of awakening consciousness, challenging common sense, and creating modes of analysis in which people discover a moment of recognition that enables them to rethink the conditions that shape their lives.
Freire was clear in arguing that as a rule, educators should do more than create the conditions for critical thinking and nourishing a sense of hope for their students. They also should assume the role of civic educators within broader social contexts and be willing to share their ideas with other educators and the wider public by making use of new media technologies. Communicating to a variety of public audiences suggests using opportunities for writing, public talks, and media interviews offered by the radio, Internet, alternative magazines, and teaching young people and adults in alternative schools to name only a few. Capitalizing on their role as public intellectuals, faculty can speak to more general audiences in a language that is clear, accessible, and rigorous. More importantly, as teachers organize to assert both the importance of their role as citizen-educators and that of education in a democracy, they can forge new alliances and connections to develop social movements that include and expand beyond working with unions.
In the current historical moment, it is all the more crucial to embrace critical pedagogy as a political and moral practice that cannot be removed from issues of power, assigned meanings, and definitions of the future. Education operates as a crucial site of power in the modern world. If teachers are truly concerned about safeguarding education, they will, as Paulo suggested have to take seriously how pedagogy functions on local and global levels. Critical pedagogy has an important role to play in both understanding and challenging how power, knowledge, and values are deployed, affirmed, and resisted within and outside of traditional discourses and cultural spheres. In a local context, critical pedagogy becomes an important theoretical tool for understanding the institutional conditions that place constraints on the production of knowledge, learning, academic labor, social relations, and democracy itself. Critical pedagogy also provides a discourse for engaging and challenging the construction of social hierarchies, identities, and ideologies as they traverse local and national borders. In addition, pedagogy as a form of production and critique offers a discourse of possibility—a way of providing students with the opportunity to link understanding to commitment, and social transformation to seeking the greatest possible justice.
This suggests that one of the most serious challenges facing teachers, artists, journalists, writers, and other cultural workers is the task of developing a language, discourse and pedagogical practices that connect a critical reading of both the word and the world in ways that enhance the creative capacities of young people and provide the conditions for them to become critical agents. In taking up this project, educators and others should attempt to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to acquire the knowledge, values, and civic courage that enables them to struggle in order to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. Hope in this instance is educational, removed from the fantasy of an idealism that is unaware of the constraints facing the struggle for a radical democratic society. Educated hope is not a call to overlook the difficult conditions that shape both schools and the larger social order nor is it a blueprint removed from specific contexts and struggles. On the contrary, it is the precondition for imagining a future that does not replicate the nightmares of the present, for not making the present the future.
As Freire noted, educated hope at best is a form of active social hope that dignifies the labor of teachers, offers up critical knowledge linked to democratic social change, affirms shared responsibilities, and encourages teachers and students to recognize ambivalence and uncertainty as fundamental dimensions of learning. Such hope offers the possibility of thinking beyond the given. Without hope, even in dire times, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent, and struggle. Agency is the condition of struggle, and hope is the condition of agency. Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present.
For Freire, the merging of politics and pedagogy is rooted in the dream of a collective consciousness and imagination fueled by the struggle for new forms of individual and collective identity that affirm the value of the social, economic equality, the social contract, and democratic values and social relations. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting pedagogy to the practice of freedom, learning to ethics, and identity to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good.[4] For Paulo, education was not just a tool for defending democracy, it also enabled it. The fact remains that without hope there is no agency and without collective agents, there is no hope of resistance. In the age of nascent fascism, it is not enough to connect education with the defense of reason, informed judgment, and critical consciousness; it must also be aligned with the power and potential of collective resistance. We live in dangerous times. Consequently, there is an urgent need for more individuals, institutions and social movements to come together in the belief that the current fascist regimes of tyranny can be resisted, that alternative futures are possible and that acting on these beliefs through collective resistance will make radical change happen.
At a time when democracy is under relentless assault, Paulo Freire’s work is not just necessary—it is a revolutionary imperative for survival. We must reclaim education as a radical act of resistance, a space to nurture critical consciousness, collective power, unyielding civic courage, and collective change. . We must confront and dismantle the authoritarian forces that seek to transform education into a weapon of domination, embracing instead Freire’s vision of education as an emancipatory force—one that ignites the oppressed to reshape their world and forge a future anchored in justice, radical equality, and genuine democracy. Moreover, we must call not for reform but for structural change. This is a call not to merely lessen the horrors of capitalism but to replace it with a form of democratic socialism, while recognizing that capitalism and democracy are not synonymous.
In the face of rising fascism, Freire’s pedagogy demands we see education for what it truly is: a fight for freedom. He showed us that education is either an instrument of liberation or a tool of tyranny. Most of all it must be a practice of freedom and a project of collective emancipation. In an age starved of vision, Freire offered a revolutionary pathway, insisting that education, critical pedagogy, and civic literacy must be bound to a fierce responsibility to resist the unspeakable and unthinkable.
Freire inspired educators and cultural workers to act with bold conviction, audacity, and the fierce courage needed to confront the forces that would drag us back into a dark past—a past defined by fear, terror, and submission. He taught us not only to learn from history but to transform it, to stand in defiance of oppression, and to commit ourselves wholly to the struggle for justice, liberation, and radical joy. Now, more than ever, this is the moment for all of us who care about education as a defender and enabler of critical education to embody the spirit Freire invoked. We must rise with the conviction, audacity, and courage that he ignited within us—confronting those who seek to chain us to a history of fear and submission—and instead, fearlessly carve out a future rooted in justice, equality, and collective emancipation.
Freire’s legacy is not just a memory; it is a revolutionary flame burning brightly in the heart of the call for individual and collective resistance. In this age of rising authoritarianism, we must expand our understanding of education beyond traditional boundaries and infantile notions of empiricism and overt repression. We must see education in every space—as an act of defiance, a tool for liberation, and a force for emancipation. If we are to build a truly democratic socialist society, every corner of culture must become a site of critical inquiry and resistance, where citizens are empowered to challenge oppression and reimagine a world built on justice, equity, and freedom. Freire’s fire is ours to keep alive, fuelling the struggle for a future where learning itself becomes an act of revolution.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.
Notes.
[1] Cindy Patton, “Refiguring Social Space,” in Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman, eds. Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 227.
[2] See, for example, Jane Mayer, “The Making of the Fox News White House,” The New Yorker (March 4, 2019). Online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house
[3] Pankaj Mishra, “A Gandhian Stand Against the Culture of Cruelty,” The New York Review of Books, [May 22, 2018]. Online: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/05/22/the-culture-of-cruelty/
[4] I take this up in Henry A. Giroux, Pedagogy of resistance (London: Bloomsbury Books, 2022).