Praxis, hegemony, and consciousness in the work of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire

Abstract

The radical debate on education frequently features references to Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire, often cited in the same breath. All this occurs despite the fact that they lived and operated at different times and in different contexts. Some of their ideas are considered central to discussions on education and power. Indeed there has been a connection between the thought of one and that of the other; needless to say Gramsci was the source of influence. Paulo Freire encountered Gramsci’s thought in the mid to late 1960s, around about the time when he wrote his most famous work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In a talk in London (Freire, 1995) he states that he gained acquaintance with Gramsci’s thought when he lived abroad in exile realizing that they shared similar ideas; he claims to have “known” Gramsci’s ideas before reading the work. In actual fact, it was Marcela Gajardo in Chile, during Freire’s time of exile there, who introduced him to Gramsci’s work by lending him the anthology of writings Letteratura e Vita Nazionale (Literature and National Life) (Morrow & Torres, 1995). It was the time when Freire’s pedagogical ideas began to become more robust through his exposure to a whole range of writings, extending beyond those of the Brazilian Catholic Left; the French Catholic Left, especially Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Leopando, 2017); and those of writers such as John Dewey, the latter also through the mediating influence of Anisio Teixeira (Morrow & Torres, 1995). They extended beyond all these to incorporate a variety of other writings, especially Marxist ones. One can notice the difference between Freire’s early work as captured in Educação como prática da liberdade, published in English as part of Freire (1973), and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Torres, 2014), especially when appreciating the Marxian dialectical streak that runs throughout the latter book (Allman, 1999), at least the first three chapters.