O LEGADO DE PAULO FREIRE PARA AS POLÍTICAS DE CURRÍCULO E PARA O TRABALHO DOCENTE, NO BRASIL
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We Are All Paulo Freire
Alice Casimiro Lopes1
State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
If he were alive, Paulo Freire would be 100 years in 2021. Also in 2021, I say goodbye to the
Managing Editor of TCI, after 10 years. In my research about curriculum policies, I do not
support my ideas in the texts of Paulo Freire. However, it doesn't mean that Paulo Freire
wasn't part of my life as a professor and Curriculum researcher. Thinking about this
coincidence of events, I tried to analyze my relationship with Freire´s thought.
In the post-structural and discursive theories with which I work, I question a certain
essentialist approach of the subjects and knowledge, typical of critical curricular approaches,
among them that of Paulo Freire. I argue that every curriculum is a political dispute for
meaning. Binary statements, such as "dominant knowledge and popular knowledge",
"dominant subject who defines curriculum and oppressed subject who are submitted to a
selection, being able only to resist it", "historically constructed knowledge versus traditional
knowledge", presuppose fixed positions in the political dispute. I argue that there were not
subjects with fixed identities linked to each of the categories of knowledge. Differently, I
argue that political antagonisms constitute subjects and identities (curriculum, knowledge,
competences) and these antagonisms and identities change in the course of the disputes for the
meaning of culture. In other words, curriculum is a product of a dispute to signify legitimate
knowledge, competences, content. Curriculum is the dispute for the production of meaning
itself, the political dispute itself for the production of culture.
In this perspective, it is not worth talking about introducing popular knowledge in
school, but about disputes in the production of meanings in the school. This dispute does not
precede the production of the curriculum: it is the very production of the curriculum. This
dispute is not restricted to the school. It is linked to a whole social process that has the school
as an important locus of power. In this case, Paulo Freire's thinking can be understood as one
of the discourses that enters the dispute for the meaning of the curriculum and education more
broadly.
Subjects are decentered, there are not full identities. Groups and projects in dispute are
not predefined. Subjects, identities, groups and projects are effects of political articulations,
they are constituted and changed in a political dispute. In these articulations, there are traces
of histories, traditions and multiple processes of social identification – such as citizens,
professors, researchers, teachers, men, women, blacks, whites, lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, queer, affiliated or not to social movements. All of them are translated and
hybridized to the new processes of representation developed. All these articulations are
precarious, unstable, ambiguous, contingent.
Nevertheless, how does an articulation constitute itself? How does the articulation
among different demands take place in a given political context, in order to construct a
discourse about what comes to be curriculum, education, quality of education? These are
some of the questions I have been researching in curriculum policy. Within the limits of this
presentation, I mention only Ernesto Laclau's theoretical notion: the closure of a discursive
Lopes. We are all Paulo Freire
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 18 (2) 2021
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articulation is guided by the logic of equivalence (Laclau,1996). Usually the articulations,
linked to the formation of political groups, are conceived according to an equality of purposes
or conceptions or even identities. Laclau questions this perspective by proposing that
equivalence (never equality) depends on antagonism to a difference expelled from the
articulatory chain. This difference is an exterior against which all other differences included
in discursive totality are antagonized and become equivalent, giving up their particularities.
In this process, a group is built. Some individuals remain together around contextual
and contingent demands and drive others away from that same group. Sometimes we call this
group as “our group”. In politics (even curriculum policy or any policy), we are always
building this “our group” (we) against “the others”, the ones that are against us (them). In this
antagonistic relationship "we" against "them", antagonism is not due to previously constituted
identities that are denied. The identifications of “who we are” and “who they are” are
constituted by the antagonistic relationship. The identities in an antagonistic relationship are
interdependent, they are established as a result of mutual opposition and this opposition is
always constitutive: I can only say that something threatens a certain identity if at the same
time I affirm the existence of that same identity. Affirming Western and Eastern identities in
contemporary political dispute, for example, is not based on a set of characteristics common
to different peoples inserted in each of these classifications. The construction of the meaning
we confer on the East is a result, not necessary nor obligatory, of a discourse on the East
produced in the West, and with its power in geo-political disputes. This discourse on the East
makes equivalent multiple differences, often signified as the stranger, the enemy, "the outside
ones". From this perspective, the East is not represented as formed by identities that are not
Western. The East is represented as an anti-West.
At this point of investigation on the political disputes of curriculum, marked by
antagonism, I return to Paulo Freire and the politics in Brazil today. Some of the central
clashes during the 2018 presidential election campaign developed around education. The
criticism of gender policies, the proliferation of fake news related to sexuality policies in
education and what is privileged in the curriculum were some of the moments of a discursive
articulation that led Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency of the Republic. During this process,
ultraconservative educational discourses identified these differences as associated with Paulo
Freire's thinking. Attacking Paulo Freire has become one of the central movements in the
elections and even now. In this interpretation, it is possible to represent politics as instituted
by an antagonism between the pro-Bolsonaro and anti-Bolsonaro discursive articulations. As
there are many articulations at the same time, it is also possible to identify a discursive chain
anti-Paulo Freire and pro-Paulo Freire. In Education, if some (they) become anti-Paulo Freire,
others (we) become pro-Paulo Freire, even if we were not working with the Freire´s theory or
could be identified with such thinking before this moment.
And it was thus, in the political dispute, that people like me began to value Paulo
Freire more, reread Paulo Freire, to cite Paulo Freire.
The force with which the pro-Bolsonaro movement built the representation of its
enemy (Paulo Freire and us) in a given way, as well as the very representation of an
antagonistic dispute, also constitutes us. I want to reiterate here that such representations of
“them against us” are not just an antagonism to be situated on an outside. They are also
constitutive. To the extent that we are inserted in this dispute, we are also constituting the
other and we are being constituted in a given way. If all processes of signification are
relational, such antagonistic discursive chains engender new and precarious meanings of who
they are and who we are.
However, Laclau's theory of discourse not only highlights the logic of equivalence, it
also theorizes about the logic of difference. Political movements remain in process, marked
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Lopes. We are all Paulo Freire
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 18 (2) 2021
https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/tci/index
by difference. The temporarily constructed equivalence among educational and curricular
demands does not erase the differential movements that make impossible any discursive
fullness, prevent the end of politics. Some articulations have secured an election, although
they are not necessarily the articulations that make it possible to govern. New disputes are in
process. At this moment, I argue an investment in a democratic political dispute in Brazil
(Lopes, 2020). For this, it is necessary to invest radically in the deconstruction of the chains
of antagonistic meaning that constitutes the devaluation of public education, a political
dispute in favor of education and social justice. At this political moment, this radical
investment is also a defense of Paulo Freire. Today, Paulo Freire no longer just means an
educational thought of an internationally known researcher who has built a popular education
project and a new way of thinking about literacy and the teacher/student relationship. Paulo
Freire is a possible name for the democratic political dispute for the education in Brazil. To
agree or disagree with Freire, to perform different readings of Paulo Freire – what he
represented and what he represents in Brazil, in the world – to defend Paulo Freire is to insert
himself in an articulatory chain that produces an emblematic discourse, the representation of a
political dispute. Like the meme "Eu Paulo, tu Freires, ele não" (I Paulo, you Freire, not
him)22 , widely disseminated on Brazilian social networks on Paulo Freire's 100th birthday,
we can say that in today's Brazilian Education which is waging a political dispute in defense
of democracy: "We are all Paulo Freire".
Notes
1
alicecasimirolopes@gmail.com
2 The expression "not him" appeared at the time of the presidential campaign, when different social movements
organized to say that it would be possible to agree with any candidate, but Bolsonaro – not him, ever.
References
Laclau, E. (1996). Emancipation(s). London: Verso
Lopes, A. C. (2020). Investment in curricular normativity in Brazil: a critical-discursive
perspective. In: John Chi-Kin Lee; Noel Gough. (Org.). Transnational Education and
Curriculum Studies: International Perspectives. Routledge, p. 68-82
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