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RETHINKING FREIRE
Globalization and the
Environmental Crisis
 Sociocultural, Political, and Historical
Studies in Education
Joel Spring, Editor
Spring • The Cultural Transformation of a Native American Family
and Its Tribe 1763–1995
Peshkin • Places of Memory: Whiteman’s Schools and Native
American Communities
Nespor • Tangled Up in School: Politics, Space, Bodies, and Signs
in the Educational Process
Weinberg • Asian-American Education: Historical Background and
Current Realities
Lipka/Mohatt/The Ciulistet Group • Transforming the Culture of
Schools: Yu’pik Eskimo Examples
Benham/Heck • Culture and Educational Policy in Hawai’i: The
Silencing of Native Voices
Spring • Education and the Rise of the Global Economy
Pugach • On the Border of Opportunity: Education, Community,
and Language at the U.S.-Mexico Line
Hones/Cha • Educating New Americans: Immigrant Lives and
Learning
Gabbard, Ed. • Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy:
Politics and the Rhetoric of School Reform
Glander • Origins of Mass Communications Research During the
American Cold War: Educational Effects and Contemporary
Implications
Nieto, Ed. • Puerto Rican Students in U.S. Schools
Benham/Cooper, Eds. • Indigenous Educational Models for
Contemporary Practice: In Our Mother’s Voice
Spring • The Universal Right to Education: Justification,
Definition, and Guidelines
Peshkin • Permissible Advantage?: The Moral Consequences of
Elite Schooling
DeCarvalho • Rethinking Family-School Relations: A Critique of
Parental Involvement in Schooling
Borman/Stringfield/Slavin, Eds. • Title I: Compensatory
Education at the Crossroads
Roberts • Remaining and Becoming: Cultural Crosscurrents in an
Hispano School
Meyer/Boyd, Eds. • Education Between State, Markets, and Civil
Society: Comparative Perspectives
Luke • Globalization and Women in Academics: North/West—
South/East
Grant/Lei, Eds. • Global Constructions of Multicultural Education:
Theories and Realities
Spring • Globalization and Educational Rights: An
Intercivilizational Analysis
Spring • Political Agendas for Education: From the Religious Right
to the Green Party, Second Edition
McCarty • A Place to Be Navajo: Rough Rock and the Struggle for
Self-Determination in Indigenous Schooling
Hones, Ed. • American Dreams, Global Visions: Dialogic Teacher
Research With Refugee and Immigrant Families
Benham/Stein, Eds. • The Renaissance of American Indian Higher
Education: Capturing the Dream
Ogbu • Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study
of Academic Disengagment
Books, Eds. • Invisible Children in the Society and Its Schools,
Second Edition
Spring • Educating the Consumer-Citizen: A History of the
Marriage of Schools, Advertising, and Media
Hemmings • Coming of Age in U.S. High Schools: Economic,
Kinship, Religious, and Political Crosscurrents
Heck • Studying Educational and Social Policy Making:
Theoretical Concepts and Research Methods
Lakes/Carter, Eds. • Globalizing Education for Work:
Comparative Perspectives on Gender and the New Economy
Spring • How Educational Ideologies are Shaping Global Society:
Intergovernmental Organizations, NGOs, and the Decline of the
Nation-State
Shapiro/Pupel, Eds. • Critical Social Issues in American
Education: Democracy and Meaning in a Globalizing World,
Third Edition
Books • Poverty and Schooling in the U.S.: Contexts and
Consequences
Reagan • Non-Western Educatioal Traditions: Alternative
Approaches to Educational Thought and Practice, Third Edition
Bowers, Ed. • Rethinking Freire: Globalization and the
Environmental Crisis
RETHINKING FREIRE
Globalization and the
Environmental Crisis

Edited by

C.A.Bowers
University of Oregon

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
Smith College

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS

Mahwah, New Jersy London
 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or
Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to
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Copyright © 2005 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other
means, without prior written permission of the publisher.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
10 Industrial Avenue
Mahwah, New Jersey 07430

Cover photos by Naomi Silverman.

Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Re-thinking Freire: globalization and the environmental crisis/

edited by C.A.Bowers, Frédérique Apffel-Marglin
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8058-5114-3 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Developing countries—Economic conditions. 2. Globalization
—Economic aspects—Developing countries. 3. Environmental
degradation—Developing countries. 4. Globalization—Social
aspects—Developing countries. 5. Human ecology—Social aspects—
Developing countries. 6. Environmental education—Developing
countries. 7. Freire, Paulo, 1921– I. Bowers, C.A. II. Apffel-Marglin,
Frédérique.
HC59.72.E5418 2004
337′.09172′4–dc22 2004040936

ISBN 1-4106-1174-4 Master e-book ISBN

 Contents

Preface viii
About the Editors and Contributors xvi

Introduction 1
C.A.Bowers
1 From a Pedagogy for Liberation to Liberation From 13
Pedagogy
Gustavo Esteva, Dana L.Stuchul, and Madhu Suri
Prakash

2 Nurturance in the Andes 31

Grimaldo Rengifo Vasquez

3 Who Are the Oppressed? 48

Barbara Loyda Sanchez Bejarano

4 Vernacular Education for Cultural Regeneration: An 68

Alternative to Paulo Freire’s Vision of Emancipation
Gustavo Terán
5 From Conscientization to Interbeing: A Personal 82
Journey
Siddhartha

6 Whose Oppression Is This? The Cultivation of 99

Compassionate Action in Dissolving the Dualistic
Barrier
Phyllis Robinson

7 Cease to Do Evil, Then Learn to Do Good (A 113

Pedagogy for the Oppressor)
Derek Rasmussen
 Contents vii

8 How the Ideas of Paulo Freire Contribute to the 131

Cultural Roots of the Ecological Crisis
C.A.Bowers

Afterword 149
C.A.Bowers

Author Index 190

Subject Index 193
 Preface

The title of this collection of essays by Third World activists,

Rethinking Freire: Globalization and the Environmental Crisis,
highlights two major world changes overlooked by Freire and his
many followers: the Third World grassroots cultural resistance to
economic globalization and the ecological crisis. The essays by
Third World activists are important for a number of reasons. First,
their criticisms of Freire’s pedagogy are based on their attempts to
combine consciousness raising with literacy programs in such
diverse cultural settings as Bolivia, Peru, India, southern Mexico,
and Cambodia. They discovered that Freire’s pedagogy is based on
Western assumptions that undermine indigenous knowledge
systems. The field testing of Freire’s pedagogy, which was carried
out by local activists who were both personal friends of Freire and
spoke the local languages, stands in sharp contrast to how Freire’s
ideas are presented in English-speaking universities and by
professors in Third World universities who have received advanced
degrees in Western universities. That is, the Third World activists
recognized the colonizing nature of the cultural assumptions
underlying his pedagogy, whereas the Western professors with only
a reading knowledge of his writings continue to think of them as
universally valid.
A second major limitation with Freire’s ideas, reproduced in the
writings of his followers, is that he ignored until just before his
death the cultural implications of the ecological crisis. Recently,
Moacir Gadotti, the Director of the Instituo Paulo Freire in Brazil,
urged educational reformers to understand that the chapter Freire
wrote on the educational implications of the environmental crisis
(for a book he was unable to finish because of his untimely death)
establishes him as a leading theorist of an ecopedagogy. This
pedagogy of the Earth, according to Gadotti (2000), must work for
the creation of a new planetary citizenship—one that is based on a
“unifying vision of the planet and a world society” (p. 8). Achieving
this new planetary consciousness will require, as Gadotti
extrapolates from previous Freire writings, eliminating “the
 Contents ix

transmission of culture from one generation to the next.” That is,

each generation is to create its own history by being critical of
every aspect of daily life. Thus, the development of planetary
citizenship will instead require educators to promote “the grand
journey of each individual into the interior of his universe and in the
universe that surrounds him.” Although Freire’s late
acknowledgment of the ecological crisis is significant, it is even
more important to understand that he did not recognize that the
Western cultural assumptions that are the basis of his classic,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, cannot be reconciled with addressing
the cultural roots of the ecological crisis. Unfortunately, Gadotti
fails to recognize the imperialistic nature of the Freirean canon in
his elaboration of a Freirean-based ecopedagogy. Thus, Freire’s
influence continues, with an educational reform agenda that is
dedicated to the elimination of the cultural/linguistic diversity that
is the basis of the world’s biodiversity and that undermines the
forms of intergenerational knowledge that are the basis of the
diverse approaches to sustaining the local commons as sites of
resistance to economic and technological globalization. The essays
by the Third World activists represented in this book highlight
Freire’s failure to understand that his emancipatory vision is based
on the same assumptions that underlie the planetary citizenship
envisioned by the neoliberals promoting the Western model of
global development. More importantly, the essays provide a
glimpse into the diversity of cultural ways of knowing and their
approaches to nurturing the commons that have been systematically
excluded from the writings of Freire and his followers. And it is
their descriptions that need to be considered in determining whether
the efforts of Western educational reformers are contributing to the
revitalization of the commons or to undermining them in ways that
further limit the prospects of current and future generations.

OVERVIEW

Introduction
C.A.Bowers

This provides the background for bringing together the Third World
activists to share their experiences in using Freirean ideas in their
x Contents

respective literacy programs, and to present papers that were later

expanded for the purposes of publishing a book that situates his
ideas within the larger context of global warming and Third World
resistance to the Western model of development.

From a Pedagogy for Liberation to Liberation

From Pedagogy
Gustauo Esteva, Dana L.Stuchul,
Madhu Suri Prokash

This essay examines Freire’s approach to liberating people from

oppression that represented an alternative to the armed struggle
advocated by Marxist theorists. Drawing on Esteva’s long years of
working with indigenous cultures in southern Mexico, the authors
point out that Freire failed to understand the connections between
critical reflection as the only approach to knowledge and the
promotion of a modern Western form of consciousness. Their essay
also questions the role Freire assigns to educators as
interventionists—particularly when they lack a deep knowledge of
the culture where they are intervening. The authors contrast Freire’s
approach to empowerment with the more community-centered and
intergenerational approaches found in indigenous cultures. Another
strength of the chapter is the ability of the authors to place Freire’s
ideas in the context of the revolutionary thinking that was sweeping
through Third World countries.

Nurturance in the Andes

Grimaldo Rengifo Vasquez

Rengifo, founder of PRATEC (the Andean Project for Peasant

Technologies), describes his early experiences in using Freire’s
literacy program with the indigenous people of northern Peru. He
provides a detailed description of how the peasants responded to the
different steps in clarifying the difference between culture and
nature, as well as the peasants’ response to the introduction of
abstract thinking—which is part of a literacy-based form of
consciousness. Rengifo then contrasts the form of individualism
fostered by Freire’s literacy program, with its emphasis on an
individualized perspective and its separation of humans from
 Contents xi

nature, with the Quechua worldview. Rengifo gives particular

emphasis to how the Quechua understand the connections between
the deities, nature, and humans—and how all relationships are
nurturing relationships. This comparison brings out the fundamental
differences between the Western cultural assumptions of Freire’s
model of thinking and the Quechua worldview that has produced
one of the world’s most diverse and productive traditions of
agriculture.

Who Are the Oppressed?

Barbara Loyda Sanchez Bejarano

Before and following her exile for her revolutionary activities,

Loyda Sanchez was involved in the Popular Education programs
that were based on Freire’s pedagogical methods. In addition to
describing how foreign the process of dialectical thinking (which is
the basis of Freire’s idea of critical reflection) was to the peasants’
way of thinking, she explains how Freirean ideas continue the
tradition of Marxist thinking that represents the peasants as unable
to understand the nature of their own oppressed condition. Her
experience led to the recognition that she was in fact engaged in a
colonizing process, and that she was the source of a new form of
oppression. Her ability to speak the local language led to the
awareness that the peasant sense of community did not involve the
forms of hierarchy implicit in the Freirean model of literacy, where
the educator’s role is to raise the consciousness of the peasants.
Rather, she found that their sense of community involved reciprocal
responsibilities, and that they were not oppressed. Her chapter
concludes with a discussion of the rural Bolivian peasant’s
approach to community, and the acknowledgment that her
indoctrination into Western assumptions was the source of her own
oppression.
xii Contents

Vernacular Education for Cultural

Regeneration: An Alternative to Paulo Freire’s
Vision of Emancipation
Gustavo Terán

Terán describes how his early years as a Chicano activist were

influenced by the ideas of Freire, and how his experience in
working in the vernacular education programs in communities in
the Oaxaca region of Mexico led him to recognize that community
renewal and the basis of self-sufficiency could not be achieved
through the strategy of teaching each generation to rename the
world—as Freire advocated. Terán argues that the intergenerational
renewal and sharing of knowledge, rather than the emancipation of
the individual through critical reflection, is now more representative
of social reform movements in southern Mexico. And unlike
Freire’s vision of uplifting all cultures through the adoption of
critical reflection as the primary approach to knowledge, Terán
argues that the renewal of vernacular knowledge as narrative
traditions is essential to maintaining cultural diversity.

From Conscientization to Interbeing

Siddhartho

Siddhartha gives an account of the influence that Freire’s ideas had

on his thinking over a period of 25 years, and how his attempts to
use them as the basis for emancipating tribal groups in southern
India led him to the recognition that even though Freire was still a
source of inspiration, his ideas were based on faulty assumptions.
Siddhartha’s chief criticism of Freirean thinking is that it is
ethnocentric in that it does not recognize the practical and spiritual
wisdom of cultural groups—even those at the bottom of India’s
class system. Siddhartha gives a poignant account of how the
thinking of social activists in India has changed in recent years, as
exemplified by the fact that he could no longer locate a copy of
Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed among his colleagues or find it
among his own books. The Western model of emancipation from
oppressed conditions, he claims, has now been replaced by a
renewed interest in Gandhi’s approach to local traditions of
community renewal. He concludes by noting the irony of the special
 Contents xiii

status still accorded to Freire’s ideas in colleges of education in

English-speaking countries.

Whose Oppression is This? The Cultivation of

Compassionate Action
Phyllis Robinson

Robinson’s study of Buddhism, as well as her years of working

with Buddhist nuns and other women in Cambodia, are the basis of
her reflections on the contradictions in Freire’s pedagogy. She
describes how her own graduate studies were based on an uncritical
and sustained encounter with Freire’s ideas, which is followed by
her discussion of how the application of these ideas in the Buddhist
context of Cambodia led to her realization that Freire was a deeply
Western thinker. The main contribution of her chapter is the
account she gives of how her role in carrying out Freire’s
pedagogical model put her in conflict with the basic beliefs of the
Buddhist women she was attempting to liberate—who understood
liberation in an entirely different way. She concludes, like the other
contributors who attempted to utilize Freirean ideas in non-Western
settings, that she was the oppressor—and that an outsider cannot be
the source of liberation.

Cease to Do Evil, Then Learn to Do Good (A

Pedagogy for the Oppressor)
Derek Rasmussen

Rasmussen contrasts Freire’s argument that indigenous cultures are

incapable by themselves of recognizing their oppressed condition
(Freire identifies them as in a state of “intransitive consciousness”)
with the depth of knowledge of the Inuit people he has lived with
for the last 12 years. In addition to providing a description of Inuit
wisdom and practical knowledge, he discusses the differences
between oral and literacy-based cultures. He points out that Freire’s
ideas need to be understood as an expression of a literacy-based
form of consciousness, and that Freire and his followers ignore the
fundamental differences. Freire’s failure to understand these
differences, as well as his narrow view of how knowledge is
attained and renewed, led him (according to Rasmussen) to adopt a
xiv Contents

“rescuer” mentality. Rasmussen makes a strong case that the

“rescuers” are the problem in terms of undermining the self-
sustaining capabilities of the Inuit.

How the Ideas of Paulo Freire Contribute to the

Cultural Roots of the Ecological Crisis
C.A.Bowers

Bowers argues that Freire and his followers share a number of the
same deep cultural assumptions that gave conceptual and moral
legitimacy to the Industrial Revolution and, now, to globalizing its
digital phase. These assumptions include the idea that change is
inherently progressive and linear in nature, that the individual is the
basic social unit and source of critical judgment, that this is an
anthropocentric world, and that all cultures should adopt a literacy-
based form of critical intelligence. The chapter points out that
although Freire was critical of capitalism as a source of
exploitation, his emphasis on critical reflection as the only source of
knowledge and on the need to overturn all traditions not only
undermines the possibility of cultural diversity, which is necessary
to sustaining biodiversity, it also leads to undermining the
intergenerational knowledge that represents, in many cases,
alternatives to a consumer-dependent society. Freire, in effect,
argues for the emancipated individual without realizing that the
emancipated individual (that is, one free of the network of mutual
aid and moral reciprocity, as well as the knowledge and skills
learned in mentoring relationships) is exactly the kind of individual
that will be more dependent on consumerism to meet daily needs.

Afterword
C.A.Bowers

The “Afterword” presents a more balanced and culturally informed

understanding of the education reforms that must be undertaken if
we are to live within the sustaining capacity of natural systems. In
addition to presenting a critique of economic globalization and the
dangers of a world monoculture based on Western assumptions, the
point is made that valuing critical reflection goes back to the time of
Socrates and thus should not be associated with Freire as though he
 Contents xv

came up with the idea. The Afterword is also used to explain how
intelligence is cultural rather than individualistic in nature, and how
language carries forward deep cultural assumptions—causing
people to think in many of the same patterns of earlier generations.
Thinking of change as inherently progressive is one of these
patterns that now needs to be challenged if we are to address one of
the root causes of the ecological crisis. The argument is made that
we must now ask what needs to be conserved that strengthens
community and reduces our dependence on consumerism to meet
daily needs—a process that is accelerating the decline in the
viability of natural systems. It also points out that understanding
that not all traditions are oppressive provides the basis for
beginning the process of democratizing technology, as this process
requires an understanding of what traditions will be lost through the
introduction of new technologies. The “Afterword” also explains
the nature of ecojustice and why it should be the focus of
educational reform.

REFERENCE

Gadotti, M. (2000). Pedagogy of the earth and culture of sustainability.

São Paulo, Brazil: Instituo Paulo Freire.
 About the Editors and
Contributors

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin is Professor of Anthropology and

Smith College, where she also directs the Center for Mutual
Learning. She has been collaborating with the Peruvian
organization PRATEC and its satellite grassroots organizations for
the past 8 years. Prior to that she did ethnographic fieldwork in
eastern India, focusing on gender, religion, and critiques of
development. She has published seven books. The most recent are:
Dominating Knowledge: Developmerit, Culture, and Resistance,
edited with S.A.Marglin (1990), and Colonizing Knowledge: From
Development to Dialogue, with S.A.Marglin (1996). With
PRATEC, she published The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean
Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development (1998).

C.A.Bowers has been on the faculty of Portland State University

and the University of Oregon, and is now Adjunct Professor of
Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. In addition to
lecturing widely in the United States and foreign countries, he has
published 15 books that address the cultural roots of the ecological
crisis, with particular emphasis on how public schools and
universities reproduce the mind-set that is now being globalized.
His most recent books include Educating for an Ecologically
Sustainable Culture (1995), The Culture of Denial (1997), Let Them
Eat Data (2000), Educating for Eco-Justice and Community (2001),
Detras de la Apariencia (2002), and Mindful Conservatism (2003).

Gustavo Esteva has served as a public servant, university

professor, and, for the past 20 years, grassroots activist working
with Indian groups, peasants, and the urban marginalized. The
many posts he has held include President of the Fifth World
Congress on Rural Sociology, Interim Chairman of the United
National Research Institute for Social Development Board, and
President of the Mexican Society for Planning. In addition to
 About the Editors and Contributors xvii

authoring over 200 articles and a dozen books, he has coauthored

(with Madhu Suri Prakash) Grassroots Modernism: Remaking the
Soil of Culture (1998), and Escaping Education: Living and
Learning Among Grassroots Cultures (1998).

Madhu Suri Prakash is Professor of Education at Pennsylvania

State University and the recipient of the Eisenhower Award for
Distinguished Teaching. She received her PhD in Philosophy of
Education from Syracuse University. In addition to publishing
numerous articles, she has coauthored two books with Gustavo
Esteva.

Grimaldo Rengifo Vasquez holds a Bachelor of Education degree

from the Universidad Nacional del Centro, and went on to study
anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru. He is
currently codirector of PRATEC, which he founded in 1987. Prior
to that he held various posts in government and international
organizations. He also worked as a trainer at the Centro Nacional de
Investigacion y Capacitacion para la Reforma Agraria at the
Peruvian Ministry of Agriculture, and it was in this capacity that he
attempted to use Freire’s method of popular education. This was
followed by serving as the Executive Director of an international
rural development project funded by the Dutch government. He is
the author of numerous books and essays in Spanish.

Derek Rasmussen is a Buddhist teacher and has lived in Iqaluit,

Nunavut, since 1991. He recently served as a social and educational
policy advisor to Nunavut Tunngavik, Inc. (NTI), the organization
that represents the interests of the Inuit of Nunavut within the con-
text of the Canadian political system. He has published a number of
articles that address environmental and peace issues and differences
in cultural ways of knowing. He also has lectured on these issues at
several Canadian and American universities, and has been active in
the peace movement in Canada.

Phyllis Robinson is the Director of Courageous Crossing, an

organization based in Amherst, Massachusetts, that provides
meditation retreats for international development workers. She
spent 10 years working with women in Cambodia and, prior to that,
in the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border. Her training in
xviii About the Editors and Contributors

Freirean approaches to education came from her doctoral work at

the Center for International Education at the University of
Massachusetts.

Loyda Sanchez studied economics at the Universidad Mayor de

San Andres in La Paz, Bolivia, and later studied pedagogy in
Cochabamba. In the early 1970s, she was a militant in the ELN, the
army founded by Che Guevara. This resulted in incarceration and
exile successively to Chile, Argentina, and Peru. On her return to
Bolivia, she worked from 1980 until 1990 with indigenous peasant
communities in the Cochabamba region using Freire’s methodology
of Popular Education. She is currently coordinator of CAIPACHA,
an NGO (non-governmental organization) dedicated to
Andean/Amazonian cultural affirmation and decolonization.

Siddartha studied law in India and anthropology at the Sorbonne in

Paris. From 1978 to 1984, he was the Asian and then international
coordinator of Freirean pedagogical methods in Third World
countries. He founded several organizations in India and in Europe,
including the South-North Network of Cultures and Development.
He also founded, in India, the Institute for Cultural Research (a
training institute for social activists using Freirean methods of
consciousness raising), and Fedina (a field organization working in
15 tribal and peasant villages in South India). He is currently the
Asia-Pacific coordinator of the Alliance for a Responsible and
United World. His writings have appeared in the international press
and in books.

Dana L.Stuchul is Assistant Professor in the Department of

Educational Studies at Berea College, Berea, Kentucky. She
received her PhD in Educational Theory and Policy from
Pennsylvania State University in 1999. She is currently working on
a book that examines the relevance of Ivan Illich’s social critique.
Her other research interests include the connections between
modernity and technology.

Gustavo A.Terán recently earned his doctoral degree in

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies from the University of
Vermont and is now a Rockefeller Fellow at the University Center
for International Studies at the University of North Carolina in
 About the Editors and Contributors xix

Chapel Hill. While at the University of Vermont, he taught field-

based courses on education, culture, and community development
in Oaxaca, Mexico. His current research explores the relationship
between the politics of cultural identity and the growing influence
of the Western model of development.
 Introduction
C.A.Bowers

The conference titled “Freire and Beyond” was held at Smith

College and the University of Massachusetts (Amherst campus) in
the fall of 2000, the same year the scientific community reached
consensus that human behavior was a major contributor to global
warming. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, an anthropologist at Smith
College, invited activists who had attempted to utilize Freire’s
pedagogy in Third World cultures, along with several others whose
experience with non-Western cultures enabled them to recognize
the Western assumptions that are the basis of Freire’s ideas. The
conference was organized partly in support of Third World efforts
to resist further Western colonization in this era of ecological
decline, and partly out of a concern with the way colleges of
education in North America promote the different genres of liberal
thinking that underlie current efforts to globalize a consumer-
dependent lifestyle that is ecologically unsustainable. That Freire’s
followers represent him as a critic of these traditions of educational
liberalism, whereas more thoughtful observers consider his ideas as
supportive of core liberal assumptions, makes it especially
important at this time to examine the assumptions that his followers
have taken for granted.
The conference was remarkable for several reasons. First, it
brought together a group of Third World activists who had spent
many years working in popular literacy programs and in other
consciousnessraising reform efforts. These activists initially were
inspired social reformers with backgrounds very different from
Western educational theorists who continue to promote Freire’s
ideas in colleges of education. They spoke the local languages and,
in many cases, were members of the cultural group they initially set
out to transform through Freire’s literacy and consciousness-raising
program. They were also careful observers of the local traditions of
knowledge and patterns of mutual support. The papers presented at
the conference, as well as several others that were subsequently
2 Rethinking Freire

invited, are thus based on years of experience in attempting to apply

Freire’s ideas in a diverse range of cultures, Because of the
profound differences between how Third World social activists
view Freire’s ideas and how he is represented by educational
theorists who promote his ideas based only on their personal
relationship with him and on reading his books, it was decided that
the conference papers should be presented to a larger audience in
the form of a book.
Second, the conference papers document the transformation in
the thinking of these Third World activists. They were at first
deeply motivated by Freire’s vision of empowerment, which they
initially interpreted as a noncolonizing pedagogy. But as they
learned from indigenous cultures, they became aware that Freire’s
ideas are based on Western assumptions and that the Freirean
approach to empowerment was really a disguised form of
colonization. The reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of
Freire’s pedagogy presented at the conference, and now available
here, are thus the outgrowth of grounded experience profoundly
different from the purely theoretically based interpretations that
students encounter in colleges of education. The importance of this
difference cannot be overemphasized. Reading Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, as well as reading and listening to professors of
education who have been personally close to Freire but have not
tried to apply his ideas in different non-Western settings, can turn
graduate students and other professors into what the late Eric Hoffer
called the “true believer.” Unfortunately, the messianic motivation
to empower the oppressed and illiterate, as the chapters in this
volume point out, is based on a lack of understanding and
appreciation of the knowledge of the indigenous cultures.
Freire’s emphasis on identifying the generative themes of a
cultural group as the starting point in a literacy/consciousness-
raising program appears, on the surface, to guarantee that his
approach to empowerment avoids any form of outside cultural
imposition. The problem is that Freire and his interpreters did not
recognize the Western assumptions implicit in his understanding of
what it means to be human, to be emancipated from the knowledge
of previous generations, and to exist in ways that do not take
account of the fate of the environment. Nor did Freire and his
followers understand the complexity of orally based cultures and
the differences in their way of knowing and encoding knowledge of
 Introduction 3

community-supportive relationships. Indeed, Freire once referred to

orality as “regressive illiteracy” and the oral cultures living in the
interior of Brazil as the “backward regions of Brazil.” Literacy for
Freire and his followers was essential to becoming a critically
reflective thinker and thus fully human. By ignoring a significant
body of scholarly writings on the differences between orality and
literacy, Freirean thinkers failed to understand that literacy itself is a
colonizing process that reinforces a modern sense of individualism,
privileges sight over the other senses, and fosters abstract thinking
that is integral to critical reflection.
The timing of the conference was also important. Unlike
previous scientific reports on changes in the chemistry of the
oceans, the world-wide loss of topsoil, and the shortage of potable
water, many segments of the public and even some politicians are
now taking seriously the growing evidence of global warming. The
changes in people’s lives, as well as ecosystems that are being
affected by global warming, have even led some heads of
corporations to realize that the old paradigm that made profits the
major concern must now change, As the contributors to this volume
point out, although Freire shared many of Marx’s criticisms of
capitalism, he was unable to think in ways not dependent on the
same assumptions that underlie the Western approach to economic
development. Freire’s assumptions about the linear and progressive
nature of change, his understanding of critical reflection as the only
valid approach to knowledge and as the basis of individual freedom,
and his way of universalizing his revolutionary prescriptions in a
way that ignores that there are over 5,000 languages still spoken in
the world are echoed in current arguments for a global culture based
on Western science, technology, and a consumer-dependent
lifestyle. Freire’s silence about the nature of the ecological crisis is
also shared by the advocates of globalizing the Western mind-set
and lifestyle. The American promoters of Freire’s ideas—Henry
Giroux, Peter McLaren, Donaldo Macedo, Ira Shor, and Svi Shapiro
among others—reproduce in their writings the same silence.
Although their writings are viewed as the radical canon within
colleges of education, they now represent, in light of the ecological
crisis, a reactionary way of thinking. Their criticisms of capitalism
and the social roots of racism, class, and gender discrimination do
not invalidate this criticism. Today, reactionary thinkers continue to
embrace ideas and values that perpetuate the double bind implicit in
4 Rethinking Freire

an approach to progress that undermines the viability of the Earth’s

natural systems. To put this another way, the cultural assumptions
that Freire and his followers continue to uphold as the basis of
future change are the same core assumptions that undelie several
hundred years of Western colonization and environmental
devastation. They are, in effect, asking us to embrace the Western
myths now being rejected in Third World cultures and by the more
thoughtful environmentalists.
Our tradition of misusing our political categories makes it
necessary to clarify further what now constitutes reactionary
thinking. Academics and the general public often equate
suggestions that indigenous cultures have developed sophisticated
knowledge of local ecosystems and patterns of community
interdependence with reactionary or romantic thinking. For them
(and for Freire and John Dewey), cultures have evolved from a
prerational state of existence (i.e., indigenous) to the higher state of
complexity marked by literacy, critical reflection, and
individualism. This evolutionary framework of thinking was a key
part of the ideology that justified the last hundred-plus years of
Western colonization. If we are to break with this tradition, it will
be necessary to avoid judging the Third World activists represented
in this book as either reactionary or romantic. Like many other
Third World writers, they understand the importance of maintaining
linguistic diversity as a basis for resisting globalization, which has
not been part of an evolutionary interpretation of cultural
development. They also understand the vital connections between
linguistic diversity and biodiversity. The different indigenous ways
of knowing, which are adapted in ways that take account of the
characteristics of the local bioregions, are also the basis of mutual
aid and intergenerational knowledge that contributes to self-
sufficiency.
Modern thinkers in the Freire and Dewey tradition will claim
that the efforts of these activists to revitalize local cultural traditions
of self-sufficiency are the real expression of reactionary thinking.
But this is not the case. They are not attempting to revive traditions
that are environmentally disruptive. More importantly, they are not
attempting to reestablish traditions that have disappeared. Rather, as
Vandana Shiva points out, community and more ecologically
centered cultures represent the majority of the world’s population.
Because they are not oriented toward creating new technologies and
 Introduction 5

monetizing their knowledge and relationships, they are less visible

than the promoters of Western development highlighted by the
media and Western educational institutions. Thus, the efforts of
Freire’s critics are directed toward strengthening local traditions of
knowledge that are being threatened by the spread of the Western-
based monoculture. The promotion of universals, whether in the
form of representing critical reflection as the only valid approach to
knowledge, the Western ideal of the autonomous individual, or the
economic assumptions underlying the World Trade Organization,
represents an effort to sustain a tradition of exploitation that current
changes in the Earth’s ecosystems are forcing us to abandon. The
environment will also force us to recognize that the future lies with
the revitalization of local knowledge and cultures that are as diverse
as ecosystems. And it will force us to acknowledge that the
industrial model of progress and the deep cultural assumptions that
it is based on (and which Freirean thinkers share) is the reactionary
position today.
The personal background of the conference participants, as well
as the other contributors to this volume, reflects another change as
basic as the emerging scientific consensus on global warming. The
experience of living in the cultures they were originally attempting
to transform through a Freirean approach to combining literacy with
a critical and thus more politicized consciousness made them aware
that the regeneration of vernacular traditions, which had been
refined over generations of learning about the limits and
possibilities of their bioregions, should be the primary basis for
resisting colonization. Resistance, in effect, was in continuing the
traditions of local knowledge and mutual aid that contributed to the
selfsufficiency of the community. As the title of several of the
chapters in this volume suggest, the real question becomes: Who are
the oppressed—the Freirean agents of emancipation or the people
who were to be emancipated from the intergenerational knowledge
that is the basis of their identity and culture? This self-reflection
involved a complexity of thinking that recognized that beneath the
surface of oppressive conditions (often the result of earlier
colonizing policies) that needed to be addressed was a reservoir of
community-sustaining local knowledge. In effect, the papers
presented at the Freire and Beyond Conference represent an effort
to bring the assessment of Freire’s ideas into the broader discourse
of anticolonial thinking found in such books as Wolfgang Sachs’
6 Rethinking Freire

The Development Dictionary (1992) and Global Ecology (1993),

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin and Stephen Marglin’s Dominating
Knowledges (1990), Vandana Shiva’s Monocultures of the Mind
(1993), Gustovo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash’s Grassroots Post-
Modernism (1998), and Frédérique ApffelMarglin’s (edited with
PRATEC) The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Against
Western Notions of Development (1998).
The growing resistance within Third World cultures to the
Western model of development is being expressed in a number of
ways that highlight the growing convergence between Third World
activists and environmentalists. Both groups recognize that
traditions of economic self-sufficiency (which include cooperative
associations, local markets, and local systems of exchange) have a
smaller impact on local ecosystems. They also recognize that the
revitalization of intergenerational knowledge is important to
limiting the monetization of the commons, which are coming under
increasing pressure from multinational corporations to open up new
markets and to gain further access to natural resources. Both Third
World activists and environmentalists also recognize the importance
of maintaining linguistic and thus epistemic diversity. As languages
encode a culture’s way of understanding relationships and the
attributes of the participants in both the human and natural
communities, maintaining the diversity of languages is essential to
preserving the renewable characteristics of local ecosystems. It is
noteworthy that the conference participants were especially clear
about the inability of Freire and his current interpreters to recognize
that critical reflection, although appropriate in certain contexts, is
only one of many valid approaches to knowledge. They understood
that critical reflection, depending on context, could undermine
forms of knowledge and systems of moral reciprocity essential to
living within the limits of natural systems. To make the point more
directly, the conference participants were able to clarify the double
bind inherent in promoting a universal vision of human nature and
mode of inquiry in the current context where linguistic and species
extinctions are increasingly intertwined.
Missing at the conference, and in the chapters in this book, was a
genuine dialogue with the leading educational theorists who are
promoting Freire’s ideas in the nation’s colleges of education. At
first glance it would appear that the proponents of indigenous
selfdetermination could be challenged by the Enlightenment-
 Introduction 7

oriented thinking of Freire’s current promoters. To Western

thinkers, the Freirean vocabulary, which includes such terms as
oppression, critical consciousness, democracy, dialogue, and
revolutionary praxis, appears as especially suited to analyzing the
linkages between the many forms of injustice being perpetuated by
social elites and by economic and political systems that remain
unresponsive to the impoverishment that can be laid at their
doorsteps.
The irony is that the colonizing natures of Christianity and the
Industrial Revolution (which is now in its digital phase of
development) were also based on the idea that the individual needs
to be emancipated from the backwardness of non-Western
traditions. Christian missionaries viewed emancipation as necessary
if individuals were to recognize the connections between their
present moral agency and future salvation. The Industrial
Revolution also required that individuals be emancipated from the
web of intergenerational responsibilities and support systems—
otherwise they would be less reliable as consumers and factory
workers. These emancipatory efforts were justified in a vocabulary
strikingly similar to that used by Freire and his followers. For
example, “progress,” “freedom,” and “individualism” were key
metaphors in the thinking of classical liberals who provided the
conceptual foundations for the Industrial Revolution, in the thinking
of Christian missionaries who promoted literacy as the key to
unlocking the chains of oppressed thinking, and in the thinking of
Freire and his present interpreters. The dialogue between those who
are now questioning Freire’s Western assumptions and the
educational theorists who are turning critical reflection into a
mantra in colleges of education also could have focused on how
scientific and technological elites rely on critical reflection as their
primary mode of inquiry—and the role these groups play in the
current rush to globalize Western technological dependencies.
Freire is often represented by his followers as originating the
idea that the primary task of the teacher should be to foster critical
reflection. However, the reality is that critical reflection has been
promoted by Western philosophers since the time of Socrates.
Critical reflection has been used for varied purposes—from
deconstructing the systemic roots of oppression to advancing
technologies that have had the unanticipated consequence of
undermining community and contaminating the environment. What
8 Rethinking Freire

seems to be common to everyone who promotes critical reflection is

that they repeat the mistake made by earlier Western philosophers.
That is, they fail to recognize the profound difference in cultural
ways of knowing. In arguing that critical reflection is the only
means of acquiring empowering knowledge, they turn a mode of
knowing that is highly useful (indeed, indispensable) in certain
contexts into a source of disempowerment—and even cultural
domination. The contributors to this volume have made this
limitation in Freire’s thinking a primary focus of their analyses.
Although recognizing the good intentions of Freire, and that the
use of his pedagogy might be useful in contexts where people
already share his Western assumptions, the consensus among the
postcolonial thinkers in this book is that the ecological crisis and the
growing refusal of indigenous cultures to view themselves as
subjects require a new conceptual and moral basis for educational
reform. Reforms based on Western assumptions perpetuate the
double bind of using the same mind-set to solve problems that it
created in the first place.
This double bind can only be avoided by ensuring that
decolonizing educational reforms must be grounded in a knowledge
of and a respect for local cultural traditions. In light of the growing
ecological crisis, the intergenerational traditions that strengthen
community patterns of mutual support and reduce reliance on
consumerism must be given special attention. The diversity of
languages spoken today suggests the diversity of cultural ways of
knowing and thus the diversity of approaches to educational reform
that must be taken. Asking the following questions will help avoid
framing educational reforms in ways that continue the process of
subjugating indigenous cultures to the requirements of a Western-
style (and environmentally destructive) global economy: What are
the ways in which different cultures pass on and renew their
understanding of moral reciprocity within their communities and
between humans and the other forms of life in their bioregion?
What traditions enable communities to keep market-oriented
activities in balance with other aspects of community life and not,
as is the current situation in Western cultures, in a state of continual
expansion? What are the ways in which a collective awareness of
the sacred is renewed over generations? What aspects of Western
ways of knowing can be adapted to local use without fostering new
dependencies? What understandings are needed in order to
 Introduction 9

democratize, within the context of the indigenous culture, the

impact of Western science, technology, and deep cultural
assumptions? The answers to these questions, and the way they are
translated into educational reforms, must come from within the
local culture. They cannot be imposed by educational theorists
located in elite Western colleges of education, or by educational
theorists who appear to be members of the indigenous culture but
are, by virtue of their Western education, agents of Westernization.
The problem of reforming colleges of education in Western
countries, especially in North America, is daunting in other ways.
As pointed out elsewhere in this volume, Freire’s pedagogy is based
on cultural assumptions that are the basis of a wide range of
progressive educational reforms—from cons true tivist theories of
how students create their own ideas to the increasingly widespread
use of computers in the classroom. Marginalized cultural groups in
North America still possess distinctive though increasingly
attenuated traditions that provide vital reference points for guiding
educational reforms in ways that renew their patterns of community
and intergenerational connectedness. The special challenge facing
these groups is determining how to renew their own traditions while
at the same time providing for the realization of individual needs
and aspirations within the dominant culture.
As members of minority cultures are poorly represented in
faculties of education, the problem of conceptualizing alternatives
to the wide range of “progressive” (i.e., read hegemonic and
ecologically indifferent) educational reforms is even more complex.
This is partly because these culturally mainstream professors of
education are not grounded in alternative cultural ways of knowing
and community traditions. A major reason radical reforms that
address the cultural roots of the ecological crisis will be difficult to
achieve is that this group, along with the classroom teachers and
educational bureaucrats that have passed through their classrooms,
control the direction of educational reform. Articulating an
alternative to the dominant paradigm, which Freire and his
followers share with other progressive educators, will require
extended clarifications of how an ecojustice-oriented curriculum
addresses the ecological crisis while at the same time contributing
to cultural diversity.
The chapters by the Third World activists should be viewed as a
source of constructive criticisms of Freire and his followers—a
10 Rethinking Freire

constructive criticism that Freire himself called for during the last
years of his life. That is, the essays by the Third World activists
identify the silences and double binds that cannot be ignored in the
same way that Western critics of critical pedagogy have been
dismissed as reactionary thinkers. The silences and double binds
include the failure to acknowledge other ways of knowing beyond
that of critical reflection—and thus the diversity of knowledge
systems of the world’s cultures, the failure to recognize the
intergenerational nature of the commons that represents the deep
cultural basis for resisting turning daily life into market
relationships, and the failure to recognize that generalizing their
own taken-for-granted culturally specific assumptions is
imperialistic (even when done in the name of emancipation). These
criticisms are constructive if the followers of Freire interpret them
as challenges to rethink what now separates their universal vision of
social justice from the practice and theory of ecojustice that is being
pursued in many Third World and Western cultures.
Freire warned against turning his ideas into a new dogma (which
I refer to in my chapter), and he urged that a dialogue be undertaken
with others who have a different basis for understanding the issues
that need to be addressed. For a dialogue to become something
more than the exchange of ideas with others who share the same
deep cultural assumptions, it will be necessary for Freire’s
followers to address the issues raised by the women and men who
attempted to utilize his ideas in different non-Western cultural
contexts. These issues include:

1. The need for a more balanced understanding of the role that

intergenerational knowledge plays in sustaining the nonmonetized
relationships and activities of community life. This better sense of
balance as well as deeper understanding of the complexity of
intergenerational knowledge become, in different cultural contexts,
the basis of community dialogue about what needs to be
intergenerationally renewed and what needs to be reformed.
2. The need for a more complex and supportive understanding of
different cultural approaches to development—and of the deep
cultural assumptions they are based on (which does not always
mean acceptance of how they treat their marginalized groups).
Many Third World cultures, as well as minority cultures in the
West, represent alternatives to the mainstream neoliberal model of
 Introduction 11

development, with its emphasis on creating greater dependence on

Western technology and consumerism. Many of these cultures
represent the daily practice of resistance, as opposed to seemingly
endless reiterations of abstract theories of resistance.
3. The need for an understanding of the teacher as a mediator
between local culture and the culture now being globalized. As
pointed out in the chapters in this volume, the teacher-as-
emancipator too often alienates students from the intergenerational
knowledge of their own culture while at the same time converting
them (to use a good missionary term) to the Western patterns of
thinking that will leave them with the romanticized idea that they
are self-directing individuals— an idea that fails to protect them
from the impoverishment that too often accompanies a monetized
economy. As a cultural mediator, the teacher needs to cooperate
with the local community in valorizing its different ways of
encoding and renewing knowledge that contribute to moral
reciprocity and mutual support while at the same time helping
students to understand the gains and too-often-hidden losses
connected with Western systems of knowledge and technology.
4.The need for a more critical understanding of the liberal
assumptions that underlie various constructivist approaches to
education (including critical pedagogy), and how these assumptions
are also shared by current advocates of globalization. As I point
out in the Afterword, assumptions about the progressive nature of
change, a human-centered universe, individualism as the source of
intelligence and moral judgments, and the use of evolution to
explain the developments of culture (which both Dewey and Freire
rely on) are basic to both the thinking of so-called “conservative”
and emancipatory educational theorists—and to the thinking of
politicians and CEOs who are promoting economic globalization.

It is only as the followers of Freire address these issues that they

will be able to avoid the double bind that the Third World
contributors to this book have brought into focus. Emancipating
students and adults from their own cultural traditions of multiple
community sources of knowledge and systems of interdependence,
while at the same time colonizing them to adopt the overly
simplistic view of critical reflection as the only true source of
knowledge, brings out how Western godwords obfuscate one of the
more problematic double binds promoted in Western universities. It
12 Rethinking Freire

is hoped that the deep sense of social justice that motivates Freire’s
many followers will lead them to recognize that the women and
men who attempted to utilize Freire’s ideas in non-Western cultural
settings have identified the need for a more culturally grounded and
ecologically informed approach to educational reform.
 1
From a Pedagogy for
Liberation to Liberation From
Pedagogy
Gustavo Esteva
Dana L.Stuchul
Madhu Suri Prakash

Given the well-established image of Freire as a progressive, radical,

or even revolutionary educator, it may seem preposterous,
outrageous, or even ridiculous to present him—as we do in this
chapter—as a conservative thinker and practitioner. Even more, on
both theoretical and political grounds, we present him as a
colonizer. This chapter explores how and why Freire’s pedagogy
for liberation is counterproductive, creating unintended corruption.
We believe that Freire was a man of integrity and profound
social commitments. He was particularly committed to deep social
transformation for liberating the “oppressed,” as he called them.
Yet, in spite of his intentions, we observe that he adopted
assumptions or presuppositions that served the system he wanted to
change. Instead of its transformation, his ideas nourished its
conservation and reproduction.

THE CORRUPTION OF AWARENESS

During the 1960s, a new awareness emerged among sections of the

educated elite across the world. Recognizing the very serious
wrongs of their social, political, and environmental landscapes, they
wanted change. Some, attempting to escape from the established
world and its set of institutions and rules, marginalized themselves
from this world. Others attempted to make, with their lives and
14 Rethinking Freire

livelihood, the changes they wanted for the world. Still others bore
on their shoulders the responsibility to change the world. Freire was
one of them. During these years, progressive intellectuals and
activists also proffered in Latin America a radical critique of
capitalism, to define the direction of the change they wanted and the
desirable outcome for everyone. Many of them also shared the path
defined by the guerrilleros, who reformulated the European
tradition of the “enlightened vanguard.” Instead of a party to
develop the conscience/organization necessary for leading the
people to their emancipation, they created the guerrilla.
Although inspired by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Freire
searched for an alternative to guerrilla warfare and to the
authoritarian state that he considered its usual outcome. Freire
wanted the change to start with the people themselves, with their
conscientization. Convinced that both oppressors and oppressed
were dehumanized by oppression, he assumed that a new
consciousness born of enlightened literacy would enable both to be
fully human again and to eradicate the horrors of modern
oppression. According to Freire, “The oppressors, who oppress,
exploit and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power
the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only
power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be
sufficiently strong to free both” (Freire, 1971, p. 32). But he also
assumed that the oppressed cannot liberate themselves by
themselves. They are submerged within oppression, in the world of
the oppressor; they are dehumanized, divided, inauthentic beings.
They need an outside critical intervention.
In theorizing this critical intervention, Freire’s pedagogy grew.
According to Freire, a pedagogy was needed to conceive and
implement such intervention: a pedagogy of the oppressed. A group
of liberated pedagogues, fully conscienticized in such pedagogy,
would conceive and carry out educational projects with the
oppressed in the process of organizing them. At first a pedagogy of
the oppressed, this pedagogy would then become a pedagogy of all
people in the process of permanent liberation, a pedagogy of
humankind (Freire, 1971, p. 39). Freire’s pedagogy is thus best
understood as a pedagogy for mediators qua liberators. He did not
address himself to the oppressed, who had lost their humanity.
Freire wrote for critical educators, revolutionary leaders, social
workers, organic intellectuals—a motley crowd of characters who
 From a Pedagogy for Liberation to Liberation From Pedagogy 15

in his view could and would dedicate themselves to the liberation of

the oppressed. He attempted to teach them the moral and political
virtues, as well as the technical tools, that would enable them,
through their own liberation, to perform the function he ascribed to
them. Substitutes for a revolutionary party or for guerrilla activities,
the new enlightened vanguard could make possible the desirable
change.
Freire believed, with Marx, that people are products of
circumstances and upbringing, but also that people can change their
circumstances. He thus departs from any mechanical, materialist
determinism. But he does not explain why the only people who can
change circumstances—and thus change other people and the
world—are his privileged agents of change, the educators educated
by him. And this is the point. There is no need to assume, like
Berger (1974), that Freire’s consciousness raising implies the
arrogance of higher class individuals with respect to the lower class
population. However, there is no doubt that Freire located himself
in a tradition that implicitly or explicitly dismisses, suppresses, or
disqualifies the abundant historical evidence of how people have
rebelled by themselves against all sorts of oppressors. Freire’s
construction of mediators expresses a corruption of his awareness of
oppression. His “conscience” operates as a veil, hiding from
“liberated” agents of change their own oppression, the fact that their
conscience is still embedded in an oppressive system and thus
becomes counterproductive. Furthermore, it veils that such
“conscience” adds oppression to the oppressed, disabling them
while dismissing, denying, or disqualifying the fullness of their
initiatives. This operation not only implies a specific, untenable
arrogance—the hubris of possessing the true, universal
conscience—it also serves the purpose of legitimizing the right of
intervention in the lives of others.
In historical perspective, the operation, which transforms
awareness into “conscience” and conscience into conscientization,
is but another name for colonization, for the very process of
establishing the oppression. As Illich (1982) observed,
“Conscientization consists of the colonization and standardization
of vernacular probity and honor through some ‘catholic’ (that is,
universally human) set of institutional rules.” It constitutes, for
Illich, “a perversion of the original Christian idea of reform:”
16 Rethinking Freire

What has been called the “process of civilization”

builds on a process that could be called
“conscientization.” The term has been coined in
Brazil to label a kind of political self-help adult
education organized mostly by clergymen
popularizing Marxist categories to help the poor
discover that they are “humans.” I would call
conscientization all professionally planned and
administered rituals that have as their purpose the
internalization of a religious or secular ideology,
(pp. 158–159)

Conscientization is, in fact, new wine for old bottles—the bottles of

colonization. During the last several centuries, all kinds of agents
have pretended to “liberate” pagans, savages, natives, the
oppressed, the underdeveloped, the uneducated, undereducated, and
the illiterate in the name of the Cross, civilization (i.e.,
Westernization), capitalism or socialism, human rights, democracy,
a universal ethic, progress, or any other banner of development.
Every time the mediator conceptualizes the category or class of the
oppressed in his or her own terms, with his or her own ideology, he
or she is morally obligated to evangelize: to promote among them,
for their own good, the kind of transformation he or she defines as
liberation. Yet, a specific blindness seems to be the common
denominator among these mediators: They seem to be unaware of
their own oppression. In presuming that they have succeeded in
reaching an advanced level or stage of awareness, conscience, or
even liberation (at least in theory, in imagination, in dreams) and
even more, that what their oppressed lack is this specific notion or
stage, they assume and legitimate their own role as liberators.
Herein, they betray their intentions.

THE CORRUPTION OF LOVE

At the very end of his life, Freire (1997) wrote a short book,
Pedagogy of Freedom. In it, he offers a meditation on his life and
work, while returning to his most important themes. Freire reminds
us that his education, his pedagogy, are pointedly and purposively
ideological and interventionist. It requires mediators. Here again, it
 From a Pedagogy for Liberation to Liberation From Pedagogy 17

addresses those mediators: a final call to involve them in the

crusade. The leitmotiv of the book, the thread woven through every
page as it occurred every day in the life of Freire, is the affirmation
of the universal ethic of the human being: universal love as an
ontological vocation. He recognizes its historical character. Derived
from caritas, the Greek and Latin word for love, charity—
motivated by care, by benevolence, by love for the other—is
essential to the vocation of each person. But Freire also implores us
that the universal ethic of the human being is specifically the ethic
of human solidarity. He proclaims solidarity as a historical
commitment of men and women, in order to promote and instill the
universal ethic of universal love of human beings (Freire, 1997, p.
13). In this way, solidarity legitimizes intervention in the lives of
others in order to conscienticize them. And caritas softens the
universal, ethical imperative of conscientization. If “conscience”
means in this context a form of human guidance and arbitration that
has been internalized, “conscientization” is the process by which
those endowed with such conscience are compelled to universalize
it, to bring it to every one. If such conscience implies a corruption
of awareness, as we contend, the process of conscientization implies
something worse: a corruption of love.
Freire was fully aware of the nature of modern aid, of what he
called false generosity. He identified clearly the disabling and
damaging impact of all kinds of such aid. Yet, for all of his clarity
and awareness, he is unable to focus his critique on service,
particularly that service provided by service professionals, Freire’s
specific blindness is an inability to identify the false premises,
presuppositions, and dubious interventions—in the name of care—
of one specific class of service professionals: educators. In its
modern institutional form, qua service, care is the mask of love.
This mask is not a false face. The modernized service providers
believe in their care and love, perhaps more than even the serviced.
The mask is the face (McKnight, 1977, p. 73). Yet, the mask of care
and love obscures the economic nature of service, the economic
interests behind it. Even worse, this mask hides the disabling nature
of service professions, like education.
All of the caring, service professions are presented as a “cure”
for a deficiency, lack, or need that the professional service can best
satisfy. Modern living has now become so dependent on such
services that it is rarely perceived how they have transformed
18 Rethinking Freire

traditional sufficiency into the need they supposedly satisfy.

Modern needs are not born out of necessities, as human limitations
are defined in traditional societies. Modern needs are created
through forms of deprivation and destitution, which reorganize the
society and redefine the human condition. The “needy man,” a new
species, is a product of capitalism and is continually reproduced in
the economic society.
Those arriving destitute in the cities of England in the 16th
century needed employment for the first time in their lives…and in
history. The enclosure of their commons, where they were able to
fulfill all of their necessities for centuries, had transmogrified their
condition. They could no longer live by their means and ways. For
their sustenance, they now needed employment. The process
continued, all over the world, creating not only generation after
generation of jobless people but also all other modern needs. When
learning, for example, was redefined as education and the
traditional freedom and capacity for learning in commons was ruled
out or severely restricted, millions of people were transmogrified
into the uneducated or undereducated, desperately in need of
educational services, always scarce and insufficient for the
majority.
Freire applied the logic behind the construction of modern needs
to the conscience he conceived. In attributing such need to his
oppressed, he also constructed the process to satisfy it:
conscientization. Thus, the process reifies the need and the
outcome: Only conscientization can address the need for an
improved conscience and consciousness, and only education can
deliver conscientization. This educational servicing of the
oppressed, however, is masked as care, love, vocation, historical
commitment, as an expression of Freire’s universal ethic of
solidarity. Freire’s blindness is his inability to perceive the
disabling effect of his various activities or strategies of
conscientization. He seems unaware that the business of modern
society is service and that social service in modern society is
business (McKnight, 1977, p. 69). Today, economic powers like the
United States pride themselves in being postindustrial, with the
replacement of smoke stacks and sweatshops moved to the South,
with an economy retooled for global supremacy in providing
service. The global economy creates and expands needs requiring
service professionals, promising unlimited economic growth.
 From a Pedagogy for Liberation to Liberation From Pedagogy 19

Freire was particularly unable to perceive the impact of the

corruption that occurs when the oppressed are transformed into the
objects of service as clients, beneficiaries, and customers. Having
successfully created a radical separation between his oppressed and
their educators, Freire was unsuccessful in bringing them together,
despite all his attempts to do so through critical dialogue, deep
literacy, and his other key concepts for empowerment and
participation. All these pedagogical and curricular tools of
education prove themselves repeatedly to be counterproductive:
They produce the opposite of what they pretend to create. Instead of
liberation, they add to the lives of oppressed clients more chains
and more dependency on the pedagogy and curricula of the
mediator.

RESISTING LOVE: THE CASE AGAINST

EDUCATION

Freire never questioned his central presupposition that education is

a universal good, part and parcel of the human condition. In spite of
the fact that he was personally exposed for a long time to an
alternative view, he failed to critically examine his presuppositions.
This seems to us at least strange, if not abhorrent.1
Freire was explicitly interested in the oppressed. His entire life
and work were presented as a vocation committed to assuming their
views, their interests. Yet, he ignored the plain fact that for the
oppressed, the social majorities of the world, education has become
one of the most humiliating and disabling components of their
oppression, perhaps even the very worst.
Education creates two classes of people everywhere: the
educated and the uneducated or undereducated. The educated, a
minority, receive all kinds of privileges from their position. The rest
get all kinds of deprivation and destitution. No literacy campaign or
educational project has or can overcome that deprivation and
destitution in any society. Why did Freire close his eyes to such

1
Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich parted ways when Illich, in the 1970s,
moved from the criticism of schooling to the criticism of what education
does to a society; that is, from promoting alternatives in education to
seeking alternatives to education.
20 Rethinking Freire

facts? Like all other educational reformers, he concentrated his

efforts on polishing and cosmetizing people’s chains. This further
legitimized and deepened the oppression he was supposedly
struggling against.
Despite the fact that the uneducated are not able to read the texts
of the educated, they are not stupid.2 They retain their common
sense. In the era of accelerated educational reforms, the uneducated
are better equipped to accept the fact denied by the educated: the
foolishness of placing faith in the possibility of secular salvation
through education. The growing awareness among the illiterate, the
uneducated, and the undereducated that the enterprise of education
will not “save” them or bring them security today marks the
beginning of the end of the era of education.
For the experts, the contemporary state of education is dire. The
educational system becomes more oppressive to those enrolled
within it, even as it expands. With every step of its expansion,
teaching becomes more mechanical, monotonous, and irrelevant.
Students discover faster than their teachers can hide how irrelevant
their learning is—how little it prepares them to do useful work or to
live well a good life.
Despite this, reform proposals proliferate, grouped into three
categories of reformers. Some look to improve the classroom: its
methods, equipment, or personnel. Others attempt to liberate it from
any bureaucratic imposition, promoting teachers, parents, and
communities as the principal decision makers for determining the
content and methods of education. Still others attempt to transform
the whole society into a classroom, with new technologies
substituting for the closed space of the classroom, providing for
open markets and remote teaching. The reformed, free, or
worldwide classrooms represent three stages in the escalation of
interventions to increase social control and to subjugate people.
Educators continue to educate the world in the fallacy that
education is as old as the hills. However, the idea of education is
exclusively modern. Born with capitalism, education perpetuates it.
The past is colonized every time the cultural practices or traditions

2
In fact, the very idea of modern education emerged with the conviction,
generalized in the 17th century, that men are born stupid. Stupidity became
equivalent to original sin. Education became its cure, defined as the inverse
of vital competence.
 From a Pedagogy for Liberation to Liberation From Pedagogy 21

for learning, study, or initiations into traditions of nonmodern

peoples are reduced to that category called “education.”
Across the globe, education is promoted in the name of equality
and justice. Education is presented as the best remedy for the
oppressive inequalities of modern society. It produces, however,
exactly the opposite. Education creates the most oppressive of the
class divisions now in existence today, separating people into two
groups: the “knowledge capitalists” and the “destitute.” In this new
class structure, more value is attributed to those consuming more
knowledge. And because society invests in them for the creation of
“human capital,” the means of production are reserved for them.
The few receive all kinds of privileges, whereas the uncredentialed
majority suffers all kinds of discriminations and disqualification.
Beyond any consideration of the quality of the services provided
by educational institutions, the fact remains that everywhere the
outcome is the same: to disqualify the social majorities. According
to the educational experts of UNESCO, 60% of the children now
entering into the first grade will never be able to reach the level
considered obligatory in their countries. They will live forever with
the handicap of a distinctly modern social category: the “dropout.”
Meanwhile, a small minority will get 20 or 30 years of schooling.
The contemporary compulsion, now achieving epidemic
proportions across the world, is to expand and to reform the
educational system. This compulsion is derived from two well-
established facts: (a) that more than two thirds of the people in the
world are uneducated or undereducated, and (b) that increasingly,
the educated can no longer find the types of jobs for which their
education supposedly prepared them.
Unceasingly, educational reformers debate the content or method
of their reform agendas while sharing the same purpose: the
reaffirmation of the social prejudice that holds that education via
schooling and its equivalents is the only legitimate way to prepare
people to live, and that whatever is learned outside of them has no
value. New generations are thus educated to consume knowledge
under the assumption that their success will depend on the quantity
and quality of their consumption of that commodity, and that
learning about the world is better than learning from the world.
Today’s most dangerous reformers are those who promote the
substitution of the classroom for the massive distribution of
knowledge packages via global communication technologies. These
22 Rethinking Freire

reformers go further in establishing knowledge consumption as a

basic need for survival. While traditional reformers are still
promising more and better schools, these current reformers are at
this moment winning the race. They present themselves as the only
ones who will be able to achieve the goal accepted by everyone:
equality of access.3 Rather than diminishing the need for
classrooms, these reformers extend its function. Theirs is an attempt
to transform the global village into an environmental womb in
which pedagogic therapists will control, under the appearance of a
free market, the complex placenta necessary for nourishing every
human being. Furthermore, the regulation of intellectual rights, now
being negotiated in international institutions, will serve to protect
the corporations that produce and distribute the knowledge
packages that from now on will define education in the global
campus.
Like capital, education was initially promoted through force.
Today, police and armies are still used to extend and deepen
educational control. However, education has now been established
as a personal and collective need. Like other needs, it has been
transformed into a right. More than bureaucratic imposition,
education has become a legitimate and universally accepted social
addiction: It stimulates knowledge consumers to freely,
passionately, and compulsively acquire their chains and thus
contribute to the construction of the global Big Brother. In
attempting to define “education,” Tolstoy observed that education is
a conscious effort to transform someone into something. More and
more, that “something” is a subsystem, a creature that functions
within an oppressive system. As a central tool for reproducing this
system, modern technologies, particularly those linking TV and the
Internet, will lead the oppression farther than ever before.
Marx observed that the blind compulsion to produce too many
useful things would end up producing too many useless people. The
current global escalation of educational needs only accelerates the
process. And, although capital has more appetite than ever, it has
not enough stomach to digest everyone. The promise of

3
The promise is, of course, another illusion, legitimizing the current
campaign. Less than 1% of the people in southwest Asia have access to the
Internet. Two thirds of the people on Earth have never made a phone call.
So much for the equality of access through the Internet!
 From a Pedagogy for Liberation to Liberation From Pedagogy 23

employment for everyone is increasingly recognized as an illusion.

Globalized markets simply cannot absorb the masses. Increasingly,
people become disposable human beings: Capital cannot use or
exploit them. However, by giving them, with public funds, access to
knowledge packages, capital educates them as consumers and
prepares them for the moment in which it can subsume them again
in the system of exploitation.

LIBERATION FROM PEDAGOGY

These “disposable” people have started to react everywhere. Today,

the proliferation of initiatives escaping the logic of capital is
evident. Everywhere, “disposable” people are transforming the
drama of exclusion into an opportunity to follow their own path and
to create by themselves their own lives. One of their first steps is to
escape education. In 1953, when education was included in the
promotion of development launched by Truman in 1949, UNESCO
experts concluded that the main obstacle to education in Latin
America was the indifference or resistance of most parents. Eleven
years later, the same experts warned that no Latin American society
would be able to satisfy the demand for education. Their campaign
had been more than successful. Educated to accept the idea of
education, parents began to clamor for more teachers and schools,
always in short supply for the majority. Throughout the world
during different periods, the same process was reproduced. During
the last 20 years, the impulse to claim or resist education, however,
has been transformed into a struggle for liberation—liberation from
professional pedagogy and the very idea of education.
The illusion that education delivers employment, prestige, and
social mobility, which proved real for a minority, led many people
to accept its high price: severe cultural destruction and
dismembering of family and community life (Stuchul, 1999). Step
by step, the social majorities received proof that diplomas did not
certify competence or skills but the number of hours and years
during which a student has sat on a chair in a classroom. Far from
guaranteeing employment, they doom many of those advancing up
the educational ladder to permanent frustration. The humiliation of
engineers or lawyers, forced to work as taxi drivers or hotel porters,
has become an opportunity for liberation for those without diplomas
24 Rethinking Freire

or those having one of low value. In time, the “disposables” or the

educated unemployed/unemployable are revaluing their own
traditional wisdom, skills, and competencies for living.
While the Internet accelerates the irrelevance of most schooling,
the social majorities are bypassing schooling altogether as they do,
whenever they can, with all bureaucratic impositions and the
addictions of the rich. They are no longer surrendering themselves
to the illusions of education. People are saying, “Enough!” while
recovering, little by little, their traditional arts of learning. In
rejecting the need of mediators and the dominant paradigm that
holds that the people cannot govern themselves or change and rebel
by themselves autonomously, we are of course affirming the
opposite: that the people can govern themselves. Even more, it is
our contention that people liberate themselves from oppressors only
when both the initiative and the struggle come from them—from
within themselves rather than from external agents of change.
Instead of promotion (which operates under the assumption that the
people are paralyzed or are moving in the wrong direction), those
taking initiatives at the grass roots to govern themselves
autonomously or democratically speak of co-motion: moving with
the people, rather than moving the people.
In Spanish, the words conmover and conmoción are instructive
and strong in their denotation. Conmoción means not only to dance
with the other the common tune (which does not necessarily define
a common conscience), it also denotes moving together with the
heart and the stomach, not only with the brain, with rationality. The
real plurality of the world is thus manifest in a pluralist attitude,
fully respecting both the radical otherness of the other and his or her
visions and initiatives. Commotion may thus operate as a vaccine
against the corruption of awareness and love.
In response to colonization, Dion-Buffalo and Mohawk recently
suggested that colonized peoples have three choices: (a) to become
good subjects, accepting the premises of the modern West without
much question, (b) to become bad subjects, always resisting the
parameters of the colonizing world, or (c) to become nonsubjects,
acting and thinking in ways far removed from those of the modern
West (quoted in Esteva & Prakash, 1998, p. 45). The assumption of
Freire is that his oppressed are trapped within the dominant
ideology, that they have been dehumanized by the system, that they
are its subjects. But his rebellion, as much as his solidarity,
 From a Pedagogy for Liberation to Liberation From Pedagogy 25

succeeds at best in creating the condition of a bad subject, a rebel

subject. In this way, neither Freire nor his conscienticizers can
perceive their own oppression. As the old Arab saying wisely
warns: “Choose your enemy well; you will become like him.”
Freire’s presuppositions trap him within the ideology of his
oppressor. He becomes a bad subject, though not embracing his
oppression, not loving his chains, or even loving power. Although
bad, he remains yet a subject. By reducing his definition of himself,
of his own being, to the terms of the oppressor, even for the sake of
resisting or opposing him, he cannot become a nonsubject.
The initiatives happening among people at the grass roots in the
era of globalization have solid and numerous historical precedents
in what Shanin (1983) calls “vernacular revolutions.” The term
vernacular means native, indigenous, not of foreign origin or of
learned formation (OED). The antonyms of vernacular are:
cosmopolitan and worldly-wise, artificial and subtle, expert,
official, universal, and scientific. When in the 19th century the idea
of progress was accepted as self-evident, the dual conceptions of
vernacular and its antonyms turned into the stages of a “necessary
evolutionist scheme: the uplifting of men from the vernacular to the
universal, the scientific and the sublime” (Shanin, 1983, p. 249).
Changes made during the 20th century further transformed the
meaning of vernacular:

Now, vernacular was defined as unique, hand-made,

informal, autonomous, self-genera ted or even
native…. It is therefore a product or a situation in
which the mass market, price accounting and
bureaucratic administration cannot be handled to full
effect. The directionality of progress becomes an
official strategy of reforms due to bulldoze, replace
in plastic and electronics or else to educate-out any
vernacular substances, i.e. the inadequate and
archaic products, humans and ways. (Shanin, 1983,
p. 249)

According to the dominant modern perception, vernacular

initiatives and movements, expressing the rebellion of the oppressed
against their oppressors or at least their resistance, are unseen,
irrelevant, or nonexistent. Or, even worse, they are viewed as
26 Rethinking Freire

counterproductive, traditionalist, parochial, fundamentalist, and

reactionary or counterrevolutionary because they do not follow the
official program. According to the prevailing perspective, the only
movements or initiatives taken into account are those conceived and
promoted by cosmopolitan, universal, educated agents of change,
agents who educate the people toward progress, pointing the way
out of the vernacular toward the universal…the global.
Yet, recent decades have increasingly revealed that the vision of
a world integrated under the rule of reason, welfare, and the very
ideal of progress has become archaic, an intellectual and conceptual
artifact fit for any museum (Sachs, 1992; Sbert, 1992). No longer
can the existence of vernacular revolutions be denied. Those
studying the vernacular insurrections of subordinated knowledge
with a new gaze have escaped the dominant dilemma: If your vision
of the world is not associated with the idea of progress, you are
going back in history. Instead, seeking considerations of social
transformation in the full richness of peoples’ cultural diversity,
they are discovering the multiplicity, multidirectionality and
multiquality of actual and potential social routes (Shanin, 1983, p.
250). What is therefore increasingly in question is the real nature
and potential for transformation of the conscience, which all sorts of
revolutionaries have attempted to instill in the people in order to
promote their own projects. Berry (1972) states:

The thinking of professional reformers and

revolutionaries usually fails to escape the machine
analogy operative in military and other coercive
thinking. And a machine is by definition subservient
to the will of only one man. In the formula Power to
the People, I hear “Power to me, who am eager to
run the show in the name of the People.” The
People, of course, are those designated by their
benevolent servant-to-be, who knows so well what is
good for them. Thus by diseased speech, politics, as
usual, dispenses with the facts, (p. 41)

Often, when it becomes impossible to deny the very presence

and the social and political impact of peoples’ initiatives or
vernacular revolutions, the dominant reaction is to associate them
with prominent characters or charismatic leaders—of the likes of a
 From a Pedagogy for Liberation to Liberation From Pedagogy 27

Gandhi, Subcomandante Marcos, or Wendell Berry.4 Such

attributions of the origins and orientations of peoples’ movements
to enlightened or educated leaders legitimize the prejudice that
nothing progressive can happen without mediators. It fails to
recognize that teachers like Gandhi, Marcos, or Berry do not
conscienticize, empower, or educate for liberation. Being the
change they wish for the world, their integrity, courage, and vitality
cannot but be contagious. They boldly declare that the emperor is
naked. He wears no clothes. He is not needed for the “good” of the
people.
With their feet firmly on their soil, uneducated common men and
women are recovering their own notions of learning and living free
of educational mediation. Inasmuch as the noun education imposes
a completely passive dependence on the system that provides
education, people are substituting this noun with the verbs to learn
and to study. Unlike the noun, these verbs reestablish the
autonomous capacity for building creative relationships with others
and with nature, relationships that generate knowing and wisdom.
People are again acknowledging that to know is a personal
experience, and that the only way to know, to widen the
competencies for living, is to learn from the world, not about the
world.

4
A prominent case in point is the Zapatista movement. For the
government, the political parties, many analysts, and even many of its
followers and sympathizers, the Zapatistas are in fact reduced to the now
famous Subcomandante Marcos. In this, they express their racist prejudice:
The only educated White man of the movement, who has performed a
brilliant role as speaker (a kind of cultural bridge between the indigenous
peoples and the educated world), should be the one conceiving and leading
the movement. Time and again, the Zapatistas have declared, or
demonstrated with facts, that their uprising came from peoples’ own
initiative, from their communities, not from an enlightened leader. They
affirm that they are not guerrillas: Instead of fish (the revolutionaries) that
swim in the sea of the people, as Che Guevara said, they are the sea, the
people themselves. They have no interest in seizing power. Even their army
is subordinated to a civil command. Zapatismo was born from the
communities themselves that have since then been in control. Marcos
himself has explained how he was “converted” by the communities, which
cured him of the ideological burden he brought to the jungle. But no fact
seems to be able to dissolve the prejudice: The Zapatistas are still seen, by
the elite, as a group of manipulated Indians under the control of a mestizo.
28 Rethinking Freire

Everywhere, dissident groups are enjoying the sufficiency of

their initiatives, the opening of new spaces for freedom (Prakash &
Esteva, 1998). Here and there, some people close the schools or put
them under community control. Instead of allocating public funds
for education, they start public campaigns to impose heavy taxes on
schooling, like those on alcohol and tobacco. Other campaigns seek
to abrogate all laws making education obligatory. The main impulse
of these initiatives, however, follows another direction. While the
educated persist in their competitive struggle to consume more
knowledge, the uneducated and undereducated are weaning
themselves of the secular faith in such dependency. Confronted by
the propaganda of knowledge peddling, they adopt the same attitude
that they take before junk food: They know that the latter does not
nourish, although sometimes it may curb hunger. They realize that
education, akin to junk food, is unable to generate communal
wisdom or to guide experience.
While Bill Gates and his colleagues prolong the agony of
education, many people are anticipating its death with creative,
convivial initiatives that widen their capacity for learning, studying,
and for doing (instead of the capacity to buy and to consume),
avoiding the various debilitations and dependencies fostered by
education, however conceived. Such initiatives are proving useful
in their living and working within their old or new commons. While
undermining the dominant institutions, they prepare their inversion.
Their hope: that the extinction of the ritual of schooling and of the
myth of education is appearing on the horizon, a horizon that will
represent the beginning of an era ending privilege and license
(Illich, 1971; Stuchul, 1999).
Freire (1972) was entirely unable to anticipate such evolution or
even to perceive the nature of the problem. In his very famous
essay, “Education: Domestication or Liberation?”, written 2 years
after Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he presented the essence of his
thesis: Education cannot be neutral.

If we claim to go beyond the naive, formal

interpretations of the human task of education, this
must be the starting point of a critical dialectical
reflection. Lacking this critical spirit, either because
we are alienated to thinking statistically and not
dynamically, or because we already have ideological
 From a Pedagogy for Liberation to Liberation From Pedagogy 29

interests, we are incapable of perceiving the true role

of education, or if we perceive it, we disguise it. We
tend to ignore or to obscure the role of education,
which, in that it is a social “praxis,” will always be
at the service of the “domestication” of men or of
their liberation, (p. 18)

From there on, Freire concentrated all his efforts, in that essay and
in his life, on the idea of designing an “education for liberation.” He
was thus unable to perceive the victimization created by education
and to derive the pertinent conclusions. He was unable to bring his
brilliant critique of “banking education” to the modern enterprise
called “education.”

REFERENCES

Berger, P.L. (1974). Pyramids of sacrifice: Political ethics and social

change. New York: Basic Books.
Berry, W. (1972). A continuous harmony: Essays cultural and agricultural.
New York: Harcourt Jovanovich.
Esteva, G., & Prakash, M.S. (1998). Grassroots postmodernism: Remaking
the soil of cultures. London: Zed Books.
Freire, P. (1971). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder & Herder.
Freire, P. (1972). Education: Domestication or liberation. In Prospects
(Vol.2, No.2, summer, pp. 15–24). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Freire, P. (1997). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic
courage. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. New York: Harper & Row.
Illich, I. (1982). Gender. New York: Pantheon.
McKnight, J.. (1977). Professionalized service and disabling help. In
I.Illich, I.K. Zola, J.McKnight, J.Caplan, and H.Shaiken, Disabling
professions (pp. 63–74). London: Marion Boyars.
Prakash, M.S., & Esteva, G. (1998). Escaping education: Living as
learning within grassroots cultures. New York: Peter Lang.
Sachs, W. (1992). One World. In W.Sachs (Ed.), The development
dictionary: A guide to knowledge as power (pp. 102–115). London: Zed
Books.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
accounted for or given up peaceably and free from damage at the
expiration of the three months notice. As witness our hands this
27th day of October, 1827. Richard Mallinson, 1 \ • . ^. , . . '
Assistant Signed in the presence of for 'Overseer William Turton.
John Mallinson, J John Gaunt. Jonathan Shaw. The following is an
Inventory of goods placed in the Workhouse by Richard Mallinson,
loth mo., 27th, 1827 : 2 bedsteads and cords, 2 beds with straw, 2
long pillows, 2 coverlids, 2 long pillow-cases, 4 forks, i round table, I
long pillow-case, i twill tick bed and chaff, 3 sheets, 4 blankets, i tub,
3 stools, 4 knives, 3 spoons, 2 blankets (new), 3 sheets (new), i
coverlid (new). Amongst queries asked the Overseers of Denby by
the Poor Law Commissioners in 1834 was the following : State for
what number of persons there is room in such poorhouse or
workhouse or other houses, and also the greatest number which
have been in the workhouse or other houses at any one time.
Answer : The premises occupied by the contractor for the reception
and maintenance of the poor are pretty large and might
accommodate twenty paupers. The greatest number that he has had
at any time has been seven paupers. The premises referred to in the
answer were Shaw's.
 MRS. SUNDERLAND. H5 LORD WHARTON'S CHARITY. Long
before the foundation of the Bible Society the distribution of the Holy
Scriptures throughout the more populous parts of the County of York
had been provided for, if not sufficiently yet liberally, by a nobleman
of former times distinguished by benevolent and religious zeal. This
was Philip Lord Wharton, the " Old Lord Wharton," as he was usually
called when his son and grandson gained notoriety of another kind.
This Charity begun in 1692 — By Indentures of Lease and Release
dated the iith and 12th July, 1692, Lord Wharton bargained and sold
to Sir Edward Harley, of Brampton Bryan, K.B., and six others their
heirs and assigns ; all that capital messuage, grange, and demesnes
of Smythwayte, otherwise Syningthwaite, with the appurtenances in
the county of the city of York, and in the towns, &c., of Bilton,
Walton, Bickerton, and Syningthwaite, and all his other houses and
lands in those places upon trust ; the rents to be employed for the
buying of English Bibles of the translation established by authority
and catechisms to be distributed yearly to and amongst poor
children who could read in such places as he should direct, and for
the preaching of sermons yearly in such manner as he should direct.
For their guidance in managing the trust he left a writing entitled : "
Instructions by me, Philip Lord Wharton, for my trustees." Hunter
has the following from the Doncastev Parish Register for interments
: "Mem. Anno. Dom. 1683 was a very great frost, and by reason of
the depth and long continuance thereof was forced to bury in the
church the poor as well as the rich. It began about the eleventh of
November, 83, and continued for the space of three months." There
is a held near the Oil Mill, Thurlstone, called the " Abbey Hill," but I
cannot find any record of an Abbey existing at Thurlstone. A mound
is still to be seen in the held which might have been the site of the
Abbey. Another field adjoining is called the " Work Ing " where
probably, if there was an Abbey, the Monks worked. At Penistone
also an Abbey called " White or Green Foot Abbey " is said to have
existed, and several places I have heard named as its site. Where
the Old Hall stood was one, and my old residence Green House,
Penistone, another. If any reader of these pages could furnish any
information as to these Abbeys I should be glad to hear from them.
Castle Green, Penistone, is mentioned in an old description of the
Grammar School property written in 1630. If there ever was a Castle
I should conjecture it would be situate in the second field from the
back of the farm buildings of Castle farmhouse. There is a splendid
view from that held all around. MRS. SUNDERLAND. Just after the
reference before recorded to the Chorus Singers of Yorkshire had
passed through the press the papers announced the death on May
7th, 1905, at Brighouse, of Mrs. Sunderland the once famous "
Yorkshire Oueen of Song," at the age of 86 years. She was born at
Brighouse, April 30th, i8ig. Her maiden name was Susan Sykes, she
was the daughter of a gardener, and on June 7th, 1838, married Mr.
Henry Sunderland. She made her debut in 1834 at Deighton, near
Huddersfield, sang before the Queen and other Royalty on various
occasions, and appeared at all the principal concerts of the country.
K
 146 HISTORY OF PENISTONE. She had the reputation of
having " the most flexible voice for its power ever known in
England." The purity of tone and the expression, however, of her
singing were also great marks of her superiority. It is said that she
so entered into her task that in sacred music she herself became
much affected. There are those who say they have seen her with
tears in her eyes when singing *' I know that my Redeemer liveth,"
and others who hold that her rendering, of it has never been
equalled. She was associated with some of the greatest singers of
the middle part of last century. At the last Festival in which she took
part in St. George's Hall, Bradford, she was listened to for the first
time by the famous M^^<^ Titiens, who, after hearing her sing
Linley's " O bid your faithful Ariel fly," went to meet her as she
entered the anteroom and embracing her declared, " You have the
most charming voice I have heard since I came to England." The last
public appearance of the " Yorkshire Queen of Song " was at the
festival promoted in her honour at Huddersfield on June 2nd and
3rd, 1864. On the occasion of her golden wedding in 1888 the
proceeds of the festival then organised went to found the
Sunderland Musical Competition, which annual event was celebrated
in February last, and on the same occasion an address in a silver
casket was presented to Mrs. Sunderland. She appeared at
Penistone on various occasions, when I well recollect hearing her.
One entranced with her singing wrote : " What enchantment,
charming syren, Lingers on those hps of thine, Hearts would* melt
tho' made of iron, Touch'd by melody divine, Philomel would cease
to warble List'ning to thy dulcet strain ; Handel from his sculptured
marble Into life would start again." THE OLD CHURCH CHOIR, ETC.
The choir at Penistone Church who were deposed by a surpliced one
consisted of Messrs. Joseph Hudson, of Nether Mill, Thomas Marsh,
Thomas Roebuck, David Crosland, and Misses Bedford and Brown.
They had done good and faithful service for many years and felt
being superseded so much that I believe they never attended the
church afterwards. Mr. Benjamin Shaw was the last of the old Parish
Clerks. Mr. William Brearley, brother to John Brearley the sexton,
held the office for a long period. Mr. Michael Camm, of
Roughbirchworth, who had been the organist at the church for over
40 years, died in March 1864. The following document relates to the
Progress of king Charles I. in 1633. To the high constable of
Osgodcrosse and Stayncrosse and to either of them. These are in his
majesty's name streightly to chardge and commaund you presently
upon the sight hereof to warne and provide within your hundred the
number of twentie sufficient carts or wains with able teems or
draughts well furnished to be at the court at Bawtree upon Friday
next by foure of the clocke in the morninge, from thence to remove
part of his majesty's household stuffe to Tuxford ; and that you be
there personally, as well to see this service performed, as also to
make retorne of all their names who you shall warne, and that you
shall forbeare to warne the demeane cart of any nobleman,
 OLD CUSTOMS. H7 knight, or spiritual person for they are
privileged by law from this service. Fail not hereof at your perills.
The Court at Durham, 1633. Henry Knollys Your day is upon Friday,
the 26th of July. Let your v^aines come furnished as they carry
corne and haye. The following is an extract from a Memorandum
Book of the Rev. Benjamin Greaves, vicar of Brodsworth, as recorded
in Hunter : " 1704, March 15 — Scarcely a shower of rain between
Martinmas and this day. Water never so scarce. Nor rain, nor frost,
nor snow, nor wind in Jan. or Feb. They cannot plough in some
places. All wells dried up, especially in the levels. No water at
Hemsworth and Tickhill. Many days in February as hot as
Midsummer, especially the last day." The magistrates at the Sessions
at Rotherham, 1676, ordered that Adam Hawksworth, inn-keeper at
Ringston-hill, should have his sign taken down for having harboured
Nevison, the notorious highwayman. The first show of the present
Penistone Agricultural Society was held on September 21st, 1854. In
1868 the harvest began at Penistone on July i8th. On October 20th,
1880, there was a great snowstorm at Penistone which did great
damage to oak trees. On the 30th of March, 1826, the first
steeplechase on record was ridden between Captain Horatio Ross on
his horse " Clinker," against Lord Kennedy's horse " Radical," steered
by Captain Douglas — the former won. By an order in Council dated
the 2nd December, 1856, the old Burial Ground at Penistone Church
was closed. Lord Bacon said : " In the youth of a state, arms do
flourish ; in the middle of a state, learning ; and then both of them
together for a time ; in the declining age of a state, mechanical arts
and merchandise." Professor Heeren said : " The increase of
dictionaries and cyclopaedias is a proof of the decline of a nation."
"... Time cannot withhold A precious boon which mem'ry gives to all
: Fond recollection, when the tale is told, Which forms the record of
life's festival, Recals the pleasures of youth's opening scene, And age
seems young — rememb'ring what hath been." OLD CUSTOMS.
Penistone, like many other places, in my recollection observed the
custom of having eggs and collops (slices of bacon) on Shrove
Monday and pancakes on Tuesday — indeed the latter custom is still
observed — and the Monday was called CoUop Monday. It appears
from "The Westmoreland Dialect : G. A. Walker, 1790" that cock-
fighting and " casting " of pancakes were then common in that
county, thus : " Whaar ther wor tae be cock-feightin', for it war
pankeak Tuesday ; " and " We met sum lads and lasses gangin' to
kest their pankeaks."
 148 HISTORY OF PENISTONE. " Let Christmas boast her
customary treat, A mixture strange of suet, currants, meat. Where
various tastes combine the greasy and the sweet. Let glad Shrove
Tuesday bring the pancake thin, Or fritter rich, with apples stored
within ; On Easter Sunday be the pudding seen, To which the tansey
lends her sober green. Each diff'rent county boasts a diff'rent taste,
And owes its fame to pudding and to paste ; Squab pie in Cornwall
only can they make, In Norfolk dumpling, and in Salop cake ; But
Yorkshire now from all shall bear the prize — Throughout the world
its pudding's famed and Denby Dale for pies." WILL OF GILBERT
EARL OF SHREWSBURY. The following is a copy of the last Will and
Testament of Gilbert Earl of Shrewsbury : — In the name of God,
Amen. I Gilbert Earl of Shrewsbury having by God's good favour
attained to the age of three score and two years and more and
finding my bodie weakened with sickness and infirmitie but being of
good and perfect memorie I give God thankes for it doe ordain and
make this my laste will and testamente in forme following. Fyrst I
committ my soule into the handes of Almightie God hopinge to be
saved by the abundant mercie and goodness of Almightie God
thoroughe the deathe and passion of Jesus Christ my onlie
medeater, redeamer and most blessed Saviour. My bodie I committ
to the earthe and requier the same to lie interred in Sheffielde
churche where my graundfather, father, mother and elder brother lye
buried and my funeralle to be performed in such sort as befitts my
rank and calling. All my goodes jewelles plate utensiles howsholde
stuffe iron leade woU debtes owing me arrearages of rents leases
and chattelles of what kinde soever whereof I am or during my life
shall be possessed or intituled unto or whereof any other is
interested to my use or in trust for me at my disposition ; and all
and singuler the manners, landes tenementes and hereditaments
whereof I myselfe am seized of any estate of inheritance in fee
simple in possession, remainder or reversion, immediatlie depending
uppon anie estate for life lyves or yeares or whereof anie other or
others is or are seized in fee to my use or in trust at my disposition
(the manors lands tenements and hereditaments late in the
possession of my late Brother Henrie Talbot esquier deceased and of
Henrie Cavendishe esquier or either of them in the Counties of
Derbie and Stafforde excepted and foreprized) I devise and
bequeath to my executors in this my last will and testament named
their heires and assigns for and towards the performaunce of my
funeralles and the speedie payment and discharge of my debtes in a
schedule hereunto annexed by me subscribed mentioned and
expressed ; and all other my juste and due debtes and full
performaunce of my legacies in this my will or in the schedule
thereunto annexed limitted and bequeathed. And after my funeralles
and debtes and legacies paide and discharged I further will and
devise the surplusage thereof remaininge (yf anie be) to my
executors their heirs executors and assignes. Item I will and
appointe an hospitall to be founded at Sheffielde for pepetuall
maintenaunce of twentie poore personnes and to be called the
hospital of Gilbert Erie of Shrewsbury ; and the same to be endowed
with such revenues and possessions as my executors shall thincke
fitt not beinge under two hundred poundes a year. Item I give to my
gratiouse Soveraigne in remembraunce of my dewtie a cupp of
goulde of two hundred poundes value ; and to the Queene's Maiestie
a cupp of gould of the same
 THE HOSPITAL OF GILBERT EARL OF SHREWSBURY. 149
value and to the Prince Charles a cupp of goulde of one hundred
poundes value. Item I give and devise to my deere and beloved
daughters eche of them a cup of goulde of an hundred poundes
value. Item to their lordes and husbandes my sonnes in lawe to each
of them a cup of goulde of an hundred pounds value. Item to my
foure grandchildren the sonnes of my daughter Arundell eche of
them a cup of goulde of an hundred poundes value. Item to my
executors herein named a cupp of goulde of an hundred poundes a
peice. Item I will and devise for a legacie to my servaunte Thomas
Cooke one annuitie or yearlie rente of threescore poundes a yeare to
be paide unto him yearlie during his naturall life at the feastes of the
Annunciation of the blessed Virgine Marie and Sainte Michaell the
Archangell by equall portions to be yssuing and goinge out of all my
fee simple landes tenements and hereditaments aforesaide with full
libertie to distraine for the nonpaiment of the same in anie of the
saide landes tenementes and hereditaments and in anie of the saide
leases. Item I will and devise to my servant William Hamonde one
annuitie or yearlie rent of an hundred poundes by yeare to be paide
unto him duringe his naturall lyfe at the feastes aforesaide to be
yssuinge and goinge out of my fee simple landes tenementes and
hereditamentes with like libertie of dystresse in anie the said landes
tenementes and hereditaments and in anie the saide leases. And of
this my last will and testament I ordaine and make my honorable
and worthie friend S*" Ralph Wynwood knight principalle secretarie
to the Kinges most excellent Maiestie and my loving nephewe S»'
William Cavendish knight my executors. In witness whereof I have
hereunto subscribed my name and sett my seale and published it as
my last Will and testament this fourth dale of Male in the yeares of
the reign of our Soveraign Lorde Kinge James of England Fraunce
and Ireland the fowerteenth and of Scotland the nyne and forteth.
GiLB. Shrewsbury. Signed, sealed, and published in the presence of
Edwarde Cooke. Proved at London before Sir John George Moore.
Bennet 14 May 1616. " Three centuries and more ago, when
Sheffield castle stood. And nearly all the country round was
moorland wild and wood, There was no master cutler, but cutlers by
the score, Who worked in shops beside the Don, as their fathers
worked before. Great Gilbert, Earl of Shrewsbury, was then the
reigning lord, A proud and potent man was he, and always wore a
sword. Whilst his vassalls' carved whittlers stuck in their leathern
hose, And this distinguished lord from serf, as everybody knows. And
early each September, by this famous feudal chief, These apron-
men, the cutler-smiths, for bodily relief, Were freely sent to Shellield
Park, amongst his antlered deer, With leave to slaughter what they
could, and feast with wine and beer." THE HOSPITAL OF GILBERT,
EARL OF SHREWSBURY. There were two strong bars to the
performance of this part of the Will of Earl Gilbert — want of assets
and the statute of mortmain — and the inhabitants of Sheffield
would m all probability have lost the benefit of his gracious
intentions had not his heir-at-law and descendant in the fourth
degree been a person of a liberal and noble mind. In or about the
year 1665 the foundations of the Hospital were laid. In 1673 the
buildings became inhabited by ten men and ten women, of whom
one of the men was appointed governor.
 159 HISTORY OF PENISTONE. This inscription was placed
over the entrance : — ■ " The Hospital of the right hon. Gilbert Earl
of Shrewsbury erected and settled by the right hon. Henry Earl of
Norwich, earl marshal of England, great grand-child of "the aforesaid
earl in pursuance of his last will and testament. Anno domini 1673."
On the 23rd day of November, 1680, the said Henry earl of Norwich
then by the death of his elder brother without issue became duke of
Norfolk conveyed certain portions of his Estate to Trustees for the
perpetual support of the hospital namely the rectory of Peniston with
all the glebe lands tythes oblations obventions profits and
commodities thereunto belonging — the tythes of Cumberworth the
rectory of Kirk-Burton with the glebe lands and tythes thereunto
belonging in Holm-Firth, Shepley, Thirstyland and Shelley or
elsewhere within the said rectory the farms and lands at Meadowhall
in the Parish of Rotherham reputed or called Executory lands ; a
piece of land at Ardsley near Barnsley and other lands cottages and
woods in the Parish of Barnsley and Jeoffry Croft in the Parish of
Sheffield all in the County of York also lands in Bameley-Critch
Heage Belperward and Duffield in the County of Derby. All these
premises were assigned by the duke to Francis Jessop of Broomhall
Esquire Thomas Chappell senior Cuthbert Browne of Hans worth
clerk and William Spencer of Attercliffe gentleman in trust out of the
proceeds thereof to keep the hospital in repair and to provide gowns
and provisions for the pensioners, a power being reserved to the
duke and the heirs of his family to add to the number of the trustees
at their ^own discretion. At the present time we read there is
accommodation for twenty poor men and twenty poor women at the
Hospital with money allowances, coals and certain clothing. There
are eighty out pensioners with allowances of 7s. weekly ; the
recipients are selected from a class who have seen better days,
preference being given to those who have been tenants of the Duke
of Norfolk. Besides these inmates of the Hospital there are outdoor
recipients of the funds of the institution sixty in all, each of whom
receives 7s. a week. The governor has a house and £200 a year. In
Hunter's " Hallamshire/' it is stated that in the year 1715 William
Birley, of London, endowed the governor with an income of ;f 300 a
year and a share of an estate at Neepsend. This enormously wealthy
charity, besides its great landed and other properties, had, according
to the Shejfield Telegraph of the first week of February, 1876, which
contains full particulars of the Hospital Estates at that time, some ;
{^6o,ooo accumulated funds. What must be the income and
accumulations now ? BULLHOUSE CHAPEL. Copy of an old Letter
relating thereto and to the maintenance of the Minister thereof : —
My dear and Christian Friends, I hope you have all of you many
serious thoughts of the great and awful breach it has pleased the
Lord to make upon us by the death of the worthy and never-to-be-
forgotten Mr. Denton. God knows and our own consciences will tell
us if we make a faithful inquiry how we have prised and improved
his excellent Ministry ; we have all of us been faulty in this matter
and some of us (I fear) very much so. It is now, therefore, our duty
to be very deeply humbled for what has been amiss in the midst of
us and speedily to reform, as we expect the Gospel in its power and
purity to be continued unto us. What I have done in building the
Chapel and for the maintenance of
 CHRISTOPHER DICKINSON. the Ministry in this place I
need not to tell you, nor need I mention how little has been done at
all except by two or three persons. When Mr. Denton came hither at
first I was both able and willing to allow him his Table, a horse
keeping and twenty pounds a year in money. But since when I had
many children to maintain, considerable sums to pay upon the
marriage of my Daughters and had been at near two thousand
pounds charge in building, I was obliged to borrow a great deal of
money and so was not able to make good the twenty pounds a year
to Mr. Denton which he was so sensible of that he was willing to
make a considerable abatement. Now, after all that I have done I
will for the future allow ten pounds a year to a Minister in money, his
Table and a horse keeping or one of my own when he has occasion
to go abroad. I hope you will all think this a good allowance from me
but not a sufficient encouragement to a Minister of worth, learning
and parts to fix with us such a one we have had, and such a one we
will have or I will in my old age leave the place, but I hope better
things. You know that in all other places the Dissenting Ministers are
supported by the Free Gifts of their people and that it has not been
so in this place is what you cannot find elsewhere ; now not to
trouble you or myself with words more than are necessary the
matter in short is this — appoint two such persons as you think
proper and fit to go about amongst us and see what everyone will
freely subscribe to give a Minister and let them begin with me, and
when that is done we shall know what prospect we have of
supporting Religion and the work of the Gospel in this place. What I
have now written I shall I hope follow with my serious and fervent
prayers to the God of all Grace and mercy that he would be pleased
effectually to incline all our Hearts to do and follow those things
which make for the present, future and eternal peace and salvation
of our own souls and the souls of all ours and to this end that we
may obtain and maintain an able and faithful Minister to fix and
reside with us. I am, Dear Friends, Your affectionate Friend and
Servant, Elk. Rich. Dear Friend, I wrote this in March and laid it aside
until now, which I begin to think was too long a delay,. You are the
fittest person to see what our people will freely do in this great
affair. I beg, therefore, you will undertake it, and take one with you
which you judge most proper. James Rigby and Caleb Roebuck soon
after Mr. Denton's death did offer to do it, but I put them off,
doubting something of their fitness. John Hadfield lately, I am told,
intimated his willingness to go with you on this occasion, but I leave
that to your own discretion. I am, your affectionate cousin,
Bullhouse, June the iGth, 172 1. Elk. Rich. It is indorsed as follows :
" To John Haigh, Shye." The original letters, which are both on the
same sheet of paper, I found in our office, and sent them to the late
Lord Houghton, November 26th, 1878. CHRISTOPHER DICKINSON.
On the removal about 1644 of Sir Francis Wortley's garrison from
Penistone, one Christopher Dickinson intruded himself into the
ministry at Penistone under the pretence of a tytle from one Mr.
Copley, and there was considerable difficulty in getting him removed.
 152 HISTORY OF PENISTONE. It is recorded of him " that
during all the tyme of his being here which is nere hand three years,
liee hath preached though sometimes twice a day yet either
altogether or for the most part other men's works ; and one thing
four or five tymes or oftener repeated, on so many severall dayes
without any progress at all only tyreing the tyme with tautologes and
vaine iteracions to the wearying of the hearers and dishonour of the
great God, Whose name ought not to be taken in vaine. " That hee
is a common frequenter of alehouses and of idle company and hath
been severall tymes drunk since his coming to Peniston ; and that
before his coming thither and after his entrance into the ministery,
he kept a common tipling house. " That about November last having
publicly in the oarish church of Peniston given notice of a solemne
thanksgiving to be celebrated the week following with promise to
officiate himselfe the next day save one hee went on foote to
Barnesley a market town 5 myles distant and there spent the said
day of soUemnity and 2 days more in tipling and drinking amongst
base lewd company, and when hee was halfe drunk for want of
money sold his gloves. " That in January 1645 he was drunke on the
fast day and not able to keepe it whereupon wee were forced to
provide one Mr. George Didsbury to performe the office of that day. "
That about . . . being halfe drunke hee fought with and abused the
schoolmaster and sexton of the said towne of Peniston without any
occasion given by them ; and that hee hath had sundry quarrells
with other men of worse esteeme." On Mr. Dickinson's removal from
the vicarage, in a report issued by the Commissioners for ejecting
scandalous ministers, some time afterwards we find him in the
possession of the incumbency of Bolsterstone, which is at no great
distance, and where it is reported that there was then " no
maintenance for a minister ; the incumbent, Mr. Dickinson, is a
scandalous man and a common haunter of ale-houses." Instead of
Mr. Dickinson the parishioners " had made choise of one Mr. Walker,
a godly and prayerfuU minister, of whom by reason of Dickinson
being there wee were disappointed." After Dickinson had left, Mr.
Copley, of Spro thorough, who probably claimed the right of
presentation, proposed to find a successor, but this appears to have
occasioned some demur on the part of the parishioners. Parliament
had authorised Lord Fairfax to fill up the vacant pulpits in the County
of York. In carrying out this order it is probable that he consulted the
wishes of the principal parishioners ; so that the parishioners of
Penistone seem to have regarded themselves as having the right to
control the election. With this view several of the more influential
inhabitants had been looking forward to Mr. Dickinson retiring, and
had made overtures to the Rev. Adam Martindale, of Gorton, in
Lancashire, who was about to leave his congregation. We do not
find, however, that any stranger was brought to Penistone at this
time to reside. It seems not improbable that Mr. Timothy Broadley,
who had been vicar previous to Mr. Dickinson, again returned to the
vicarage ; but his stay could only have been of short duration, as we
find recorded in the parish register 1650-1, Jan. 8, "Timotheus
Broadley, artium magister, vicarius ecclesiae Penistoniensis, sepult
Cawthornia3." Eyre's Journal, however, states Jan. 17, 1648-9, that "
Mr. Swift promised to come to us the following Sunday," but as the
Journal ceases on the 26th of that month no further allusion is
made. At the muster of Militia at Barnsley in 1587 to repel the
expected Armada, only two men were sent from Penistone and
singularly enough these names
 THURLSTONE. 153 represented the two oldest families in
the township — William Wordsworth and John Biltclyfe, both of
whom were armed with pikes. On the north side of the Church is a
stone which commemorates the death of Edward Hardy, a surgeon,
.who died June 13th, 181 1, during services which led to the capture
of Batavia. He thus lost his life in the last action of " the Maritime
war which also brought the extinction of the last remnant of colonial
empire of France " (Alison) previous to the conclusion of peace in
1814. John Moxon, a bill-man, and John Holmes with a caliver
attended the muster in 1587 from Hoylandswaine. William Catling
the town soldier failed to appear. The fact that one of the Catlings
served as a paid soldier for the township shows how the family was
reduced. At this time Catling Hall was occupied by the Rev. John
Sotwell, vicar of Penistone. He had come from Andover, in
Hampshire, had been inducted into the living at Penistone April 2nd,
1374, and died 1594. THURLSTONE. Thurlstone before the Conciuest
had been one of the most valuable holdings in the Wapentake, but
sixteen years after the Conqueror's march was lying useless in the
hands of de Laci. The village is not named in Kirkby's hK^uest 1284,
but it appears in the "Nomina \'illarum " 1316, and it was taxed with
Penistone at the Inquisition of the Ninths 1341. In 1379 when we
get the best view of the village in those early times we lind it was
more than three times as large as Penistone. In this Roll the village
is called Dhurlestone, fifty-six persons were taxed, i6s. lod. was
raised and seven persons were in business. Some of these names
relate to families not yet forgotten in the neighbourhood : — d.
Willclmus Ryhs and Alicia vx ejus Mevccv ... ... ... ... iij Alexander de
Hesilhed and Johanna vx ejus Selastev vj Thomas de Turton and
Beatrix vx ejus Smyth ... vj Thomas Russell and Johanna vx ejus
Soutcv vj Hugo de Rodword and Beatrix vx ejus Smyth... ... ... ... vj
Rogerus filius Roberti Herryson, Taylor ... ... ... ... vj Thomas de
Apilyard and Cecilia vx ejus Shoreman vj Johnannes Rankeslay and
Agnes vx ejus iiij Thomas de Ranaw and Isabella vx ejus ... ... ... ...
iiij Johannes filius Johanna and Alicia vx ejus ... ... iiij Thomas
Huddeson and Alicia vx ejus ... iiij Willelmus Russell and Alicia vx
ejus ... iiij Thurlstone sent a strong detachment to the muster at
Barnsley, December 4th, 1587, at the alarm of the Spanish Invasion.
Private men : Edward Rich, William Marsden, and John Skott were
pikemen, but William Scott sent his man Nicholas Lee, an archer. Of
the paid village soldiers there were Edward Firth and John Michell,
archers ; and William Thomson and John Nichols, pikemen. In 1822
there were fourteen woollen manufacturers in Thurlstone, and
several black warp and cloth dressers. William Wainwright was a
pocket-book maker, and Thomas Crossley, of BuUhouse Hall, had a
fulling and scribbling mill.
 154 HISTORY OF PENISTONE. Hunter refers to a deed of
the first year of Queen Mary as of importance in connection with the
topography of the woollen trade in Yorkshire. It is made between
Michael Wentworth of the first part and Robert Waterhouse, of
Halifax, gent., John, George, and Gregory his sons on the other. The
Queen had just granted to the Waterhouses " the ferme of subsidy
and alnage of all saylable woollen clothes and peaces of cloth
hereafter to be made within the county of York and the moiety of all
forfeitures of the same cloths and pieces of cloth put to sale not
sealed with the seal ordained for the same " — for forty years at the
yearly rent of £g6 2s. The Waterhouses assign to Wentworth the
profit from the places following : — Wakefield, Mirfield, Dewsbury,
Ardslaw, Thornell, Woodkyrk, Leeds, Rothwell, Sandall, Darton,
Hoyland, Emley, Almanbury, Huddersfield, Kirk-heton, Kirk-burton,
Whike, Peniston,^ Silkston, Sheafield, Ecclesfield, Bradfield,
Barnsley, Cawthorne, Darfield, Wolley, Wyspurdale, Rotherham,
Rawmarsh, Doncaster, Royston, Wath, Thriburgh, Aston, Aghton,
Laughton, Cudworth, Loversel, Wadworth, and Elland — except the
alnage and subsidy in Brighouse, Herteshed, Clyfton, and Kirkelease.
John Ellis, surgeon, of Silkstone, who died October 7th, 1766, and
was buried at the Church there, has the following curious epitaph : "
Life's like an inn where travellers stay ; Some only breakfast and
then away, Others to dinner stop and are full fed ; The oldest only
sup aad go to bed." WATER HALL. INGBIRCHWORTH AND
GUNTHWAITE. From an interesting article entitled " About
Penistone," in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph of August 3rd, 1895, I
cull the following extracts : — At the foot of the hill near the town is
an ancient house known as Waterhall, the old seat of the
Wordsworths, from whom the poet sprang. It is so near to a. stream
that like Waterhouse it must have derived its name therefrom, 1 No
doubt as regards Peniston the parish would be intended, and
Thurlston thus be included.
 INGBIRCHWORTH AND GUNTHWAITE. 155 or perhaps from
a public well with a roof over it. It is mentioned in the fourteenth
century as " Atte Waterhalle." As we get higher in the direction of
the moors the air is cooler and rarer — it makes one feel more at
ease with oneself ; we begin to get hungry and to fancy that there is
something almost delightful in Ingbirchworth — a hamlet which we
have just reached — though the trees are so few and the buildings
of the little place look as if once wealthy landlords had deserted
them a century ago. As we ramble on we are conscious by the local
names that Danes or Norwegians once found a new home here in
the days when parts of England were like the backwoods of America
and wanted settling. I noticed on a handbill that this place was
written Ing Birch worth. I daresay people think that this " Ing " is
the well-known word which means *' a meadow." But it is not. That
comes of knowing a little too much. Instead of leaving the good old
name as it was all in one piece, somebody has cut its head off and
left its tail too long. It was better as it was, for it is the old Norse
feminine name Ingibiorg, so that translating roughly we may call the
place " Ingburg's farm," just as the next hamlet Gunthwaite was
formerly Gunnhildthwaite or " Gunnhilds enclosure," from the
feminine name Gunnhildr. The odd thing is that these two places
should be called after women. The sober antiquary will, of course,
guess that their husbands had had their heads cut off for high
treason, or that they had emigrated to Iceland and " left their girls
behind them " and so on. It is an interesting study, but I will pass it
by for the present as it may improve in the keeping. Leaving
Ingbirchworth we come to Denby — the Danish village. We are now
right in a Danish district, and passing on a little further we come to
Gunthwaite, the seat of an ancient family w^ho occupied it for ages.
It belongs to the Bosvilles still, but they have ceased to live there.
The old hall was pulled down many years ago, but many proofs still
remain of the wealth and dignity of its former inhabitants. They have
carved their arms on the stonework of the outer buildings here and
there, and the work is so fresh that it seems to have been done
yesterday. One wonders why they pulled the old hall down. There
was a rage for pulling things down sixty or seventy years ago, just
as there is a fashion for "restoring" them just now. From the
scientific point of view that is the worst of the two, for it is better to
have no evidence than false evidence. The most striking building at
Gunthwaite is an immense barn which covers nearly half-an-acre. It
seems to have been built in the fifteenth century. The upper part of
it is a vast timber framework now painted in black and white, like
the old houses one sees in Cheshire, the black representing the
wood and the white the rubble and plaster by which the interstices
are filled. But the most remarkable part of the building is the inside.
The roof is supported by 24 great wooden pillars with stone bases,
and the building reminds one of an ancient church with its nave and
aisles. There are no less than six tall barn doors to gain access to
this remarkable building. Formerly the whole produce of the estate
— straw, hay and everything— was stored here. It was a roofed
stack yard. The building is now divided into two parts by an internal
wall, and this seems to have been the original arrangement. The size
of the two parts is unequal, and one may suppose that the larger
division was used for rye which occupied more space than wheat
straw, and the smaller for wheat. If the partition wall had not been
there the building would have resembled the long nave and aisle of
a cathedral It smells of dust and cobwebs of course, and many
generations of rats must have found a home there. In the roof above
the tie beams barn swallows flit about. They seem quite tame as
though their grandfathers and grandmothers had long ago acquired
a right to live there.
 156 HISTORY OF PENISTONE. GUNTHWAITE OLD BARN. If
the hall has gone, the old garden has not. It is sheltered from every
unkind breath of wind b3' crumbling red brick walls covered by
immense fruit trees, pears and plums, which occupy every inch of
space on the inside, and on a hot summer's day seem to be as warm
as a toast. The garden keeper is deservedly proud of his garden, and
he showed us every nook and corner of it. It is not like your modern
artificial garden, with foreign flowers set in rows, in squares and
triangles. There is a sweet smell of lavender, of lad's love, and many
a herb and flower such as you see or used to see in cottage gardens
far away from town. In one corner is a square stone summer house,
with the Bosville arms carved upon it and a date which I forget
exactly, but somewhere about 1680. It looks as if it had been built
yesterday and is quite perfect. It is entered by a door of carved oak,
studded with great square nails. Here the Bosvilles and their friends
may have smoked their little pipes and talked over the affiair of the
State, or here the studious men may have retired to meditate or to
turn over the leaves of some " kind-hearted play book." Near the
buildings is a huge oak which has seen better days for it is drawing
near the end of its span of years. Hunter has described it in his "
South Yorkshire " — One often meets with such great trees near to
old country seats and they seem to have been regarded with
veneration. Sometimes you will meet with a cluster of four or five of
them together, and hence such names as Sevenoaks, Five Oaks,
which occur both in England and Germany. Judgment was given
under such trees even as late as the thirteenth century. Gunthwaite
lies amidst beautiful scenery, deep lanes and mysterious woods. It is
hardly four miles from Penistone and is well worth a visit.
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