Q: I see that your license plate frame says “Education is Freedom,” a quote by Paulo Freire. Do you believe that?

A: Yes, I believe that.

Fetters

A: So we have to understand it this way: education, in broad terms, provides skills, knowledge, literacy, and the capacity to assess new situations, to decide what those opportunities or dangers or challenges actually mean for us, to understand the choices for what they are. Freedom, again in broad terms, is about maximizing the choices available to us, in having more opportunities to choose than fewer opportunities.

For instance, let’s consider a typical high school student. If she is failing in all her classes academically, she will end up less educated than the student who is earning honors. The delinquent student now has fewer choices about what occupations to pursue, and statistically, fewer chances that she will make a decent income: simply, fewer careers will be open to her, despite any potential interest in them. The successful student has all of the opportunities offered to the drop-out, but also has all of the new choices which, say, a university education will now offer. More, we know that job satisfaction is higher for people who have the ability to direct their lives through their own careers.

And this doesn’t apply merely to employment and economics. Our civic lives are enriched when we better understand the workings of government, or we have the ability to read and evaluate candidates, or we can negotiate our health choices, or we can assess what we hear through the media. That enrichment relies upon our understanding the choices before us, in discerning which candidate will best serve us, which medical plan to choose, which plumber to trust, why one news story is meaningful or another deserves skepticism. These choices consequently give people a sense of power, of agency, of control over their lives: freedom.

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator, of course. He spoke about a “culture of silence” that occurs when people don’t have this power or control. Deprived of literacy, thus of opportunities, thus of power, they often revert to passivity, to a negative self-image, of loss. They feel trapped, fettered in their lives, “know” only that whatever dull course they are on, it will not change. They cannot see or understand the possibilities for change because, without education, they rarely have the capacity to envision something different for themselves. And, meeting those around them who are living literate, educated lives of apparent freedom, they reduce themselves to a defeated silence.

“It is always a freedom ‘out there, in some future space,’ existing as a potential, a possibility.​”

Transformation

I’d take this moment to say something like “Language is Power,” but then we’d be back to the same issue of teasing out a pithy phrase, wouldn’t we? Instead, I’ll say this: it’s nearly impossible to think an idea that we don’t have a word for. How could we, for instance, think or talk about or debate the concept of “freedom” if we’d never heard the word before? What if the concepts we didn’t have in our vocabulary included things like “political resistance” or ‘human rights” or “individual choice”? These are the kinds of ideas that Freire’s adult laborer students did not know about, did not have words for. They were easy targets for oppression by those with political and economic power; they were denied choices not because the choices were not available, but because the laborers literally could not comprehend them. And if it’s hard to think an idea that we have no word for, consider trying to communicate it. The best teachers, the best educations–in this case, maybe, the only genuine education–is one which develops, strengthens, the individual’s ability to understand choices. More, it enables people to transform themselves into the identity they desire, to remake themselves. That’s freedom, especially compared to the person whose education taught them only how to tally numbers more efficiently.

In my own classroom, it was a matter of inquiry about real situations in the students’ lives. The goal wasn’t merely that they ask a question and get “the answer” to deposit in their brains. That leaves them open to the same oppression: they accept too readily what they are told, and the “answer teacher” who lectures at them fits that model too easily. Most schooling has been this. Instead, the teacher assists them in designing their questions and in the skills to pursue their own answers, draw their own conclusions, and to test them, as well. As they develop their own power, they seek others for growth, and ideally they assist others in the same skills. They build communities where more and more people can realize their potential. I don’t think it’s too much to say that freedom means discovering our humanity.

Our ability to decide, the will we enact to decide, is critical. The philosophical puzzle Buridan’s Ass makes the point with some amusement: Place a hungry donkey equally distant from food and water and it will starve to death, paralyzed in indecision. Humans have this decision-making capacity, if they learn they may use it. Less amusing than an 800 year old donkey story, though, are the multitude of tantalizing “choices” offered to so many today, nearly all a distraction to what will grow our literacy and discernment: what streaming show to watch, what menu choice to make, who to choose for healthy relationships, what recreational choice is dangerous, which political crisis is worth our investment and which is trivial . . . This is how political and economic power keep today’s workers paralyzed, less likely to see the overshadowed choices which may free them to humanity. So, it is becoming self-evident that the kind of education I support is not limited to school education; and, in fact, much school education works contrary to what we need.

Equally to defining the kind of education I mean, we should also talk about the nature of freedom beyond merely the words “choice” or opportunity. I know there are determinists out there who want to talk about biochemistry or divine fate or some more superstitious “purpose” or  destiny. Frankly, while these may be interesting, they’re not relevant to our sensibility to humanity, to agency. That would require several books of philosophical musing. Instead of debating that, I will borrow from Aristotle and suggest that the freedom most fulfilling to the human desire for a meaningful life is a belief in one’s agency to change, and that this belief is also justified and true.

If we cannot always change our community, we can alter our response to that community. If we cannot alter the negative consequences of our jobs or activities, we can change activities. If we are dealt difficulty or challenge, we can find the means to overcome that difficulty. And we can actually do it, not merely have the “sense” of doing it, or the dream to do it, or the impression or illusion of having done it. The victim who escapes abuse is not free if he only escapes to another abusive scene. If my neighbor resists my attempts to alter her ugly behavior, my wasting further emotional energy on what I cannot alter does not free me. If I fail to reverse an unjust law or practice, my immediate deference to defeat may be owed to my seeming impotence or inexpert skill set in activism, but freedom comes when I am able to find and learn those skills for the next round of resistance.

And freedom, of course, comes in thinking and believing freely, in evaluating those thoughts and changing my mind about them as I desire. Freedom of thought is no simple act, not if I have learned only one or two choices to consider. What if my desire is for caramel when I’ve been offered only chocolate and strawberry? What anxiety arises from having a thought that resists the majority? That freedom of thought demands a degree of resilience and will along with the expectation for a community that respects it. This seems to suggest both innate and external dimensions for freedom beyond a critical literacy, unless we imagine that these, too, might be taught, or that our critical thinking might bring about such communities and healthy minds.

So it’s not that education equals freedom necessarily, but that US President Bill Clinton asked us, too, to define the word “is.”  And while we’re not here to banter lamely in legal depositions about extra-marital affairs, that simple linking verb is surprisingly agile, isn’t it? It supposes a sameness which must necessarily be false, perhaps a particular condition or even a metaphor. A house is not a home, exactly; a father is not a dad; a tree is not a palm; freedom is not education. There is a directionality to “is,” a kind of causality; but even then, we cannot say it is absolute. Education perhaps “sets the conditions for” freedom, “is an essential ingredient for,” “stages a future for.” The metaphors reveal themselves when we consider “is” in these terms: as if freedom/humanity is a “state” towards which we move, or a recipe, or a performance in time. In no case here is freedom a “present” condition: it is always a freedom “out there, in some future space,” existing as a potential, a possibility.

Why can’t freedom be in the present with a present-tense verb? I think it is because, when we are educated to transformative possibility, we more readily witness the fetters upon our choices and recognize what must be removed to free ourselves to the meaningful, to humanity. We say, “Well, I am not fully free just yet, but when I am able to better understand the legal language set before me, or I am able to cast aside my dependency upon a particular job, or I am able to finally set aside my prejudices against a wrongful past, I will be free.” But this, too, is a misunderstanding of freedom and of the present of “is.”

Paradoxically, presuming we are transformationally educated, that we have a kind of critical literacy in reading and understanding our world, the ever-shifting readiness state we have achieved reveals to us how truly limited our present choices always are: that no utopic condition of freedom exists, but that we are ever bound by social and mortal limits, that the future of further uncertainties expands ever outwards, but might even end in mid-thought. There is nothing in “Education is Freedom” that demands happiness.

Criminals

I do not believe that anything we might call the ‘human soul’ is ‘evil,’ though phrasing it even this way demands its own exposition of the pithy phrase. Instead we are cursed with what might have saved Buridan’s Ass: we are compelled to choice. And what is worse, we are held accountable to the choices we make. Without discernment, a capacity for critically reading and thinking about our world (education), we do not understand precisely what our choices mean, nor do we see all which might be available. Our errors, even crimes, are the result of this failure.

When we are caught, interrogated, tried, we are asked repeatedly: “Do you understand what you did was wrong? Do you have remorse?” As if we deliberately chose a wicked or evil thing, but afterwards came to our senses and now are free to recognize ourselves. Yes, crimes of passion occur, but aren’t these also dependent upon the failure of a particular kind of education, that of recognizing the external and internal fetters on our thought? I can think of few scenarios where anyone would make any but the best choices they could make in the circumstances and as they understood those choices. Education must necessarily include an examination and meditation upon self, upon ego.

But we are all criminals. Even those of us educated to the greatest capacity for potential freedom. So long as there is a future with uncertain variables, all of us are responsible for our choices; the consequences are our own. Education does not change this. It merely frees us to know that the guillotine will fall, the boulder will roll again, the grave just ahead.

Let’s play a game: School or Prison?

Myopia

But I pursue each, nonetheless. And just when I think I’ve caught one for a moment, as I reach towards another, the trickster word slips away again. What’s worse, tomorrow they will color themselves differently. But I could never say this to Freire’s Brazilian laborers in the 1950s. And I couldn’t dare tell them, could I, that there is no utopic “arrival,” just more struggle still, another kind of near-sightedness to adapt to? We’re Mr. Magoo, with varying levels of comedy and tragedy ahead.

Coherence

A: 

In the early evening, she asks, the knitting in her lap.
And I pause. An owl in a distant tree. The moment brought small.
Cool air over tongue,          this breath before

A: Yes. Education is Freedom.