Paulo Freire’s 1968 book, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, was a seminal work in the evolution of what today is known as Critical Race Theory. Making CRT an integral aspect of every Western student’s education has become a cause celebre among contemporary “intellectuals” and their “progressive” minions. Of course “conservatives” who question the validity of that perspective are generally dismissed as White Supremacist jerks. But what, in fact, is the underlying principle of so-called “critical pedagogy”?
Investigate Freire’s work and you will discover its fundamental assumption is that there are only two types of people, Oppressors and the Oppressed! While hundreds of millions may see themselves as neither, they are merely kidding themselves. Paulo knows best! But is his Marxist perspective not pathologically simplistic? Is not the conviction that success of any kind automatically makes one an Oppressor, unconscionably stupid?
I won’t bore you by reciting historical facts of which you are probably already aware, but the notion that Western Colonialists were preeminently responsible for the failure of various Civilizations to have provided their people with the tools to achieve the kind of freedom and prosperity shared by many in the West, is a brazen violation of the truth. Equally absurd, the notion that those in any society who choose the path of discipline and hard work in the pursuit of a good life, are somehow responsible for the material squalor of those who spent their youth smoking dope and partying! Life is so much more complex than Freire’s ridiculous tunnel vision is able to admit, yet it is the fallacies born of that vision that have come to inform contemporary Political Orthodoxy, a species of religious fanaticism only slightly less obnoxious than that which informed the Catholic Inquisition a thousand years ago.
Yes, I’m not likely to be executed for expressing my views, but I could very well be cancelled for spreading “misinformation”. That those leading the North American assault upon the principle of Free Speech are the conspicuously banal Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau, ought perhaps to suggest the banality if not absolute stupidity of a world-view which insists, with Paulo Freire, that all positive, productive human effort is merely a veiled species of “oppression” while those who have failed to achieve, both historically and in the present, are in no way responsible for that failure.
Ironic, is it not, that it is our “intellectuals” who have led the assault on the notion that it is our Intelligence that is our greatest tool in attempting to define the good life. Suggest that the brilliant philosophers of Ancient Greece made that civilization infinitely more evolved, infinitely more progressive than the civilizations of all sorts of people across the planet who continued to live in the Stone Age up until the recent past, and you are a racist monster. In the world bequeathed us by Freire and company, Socrates’ amazing intellectual curiosity and speculations were mere veiled expressions of his ugly White urge to oppress.