What would it mean to overcome or transform this? What have movements imagined, attempted, and built?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes. The school does not resolve the disagreements among traditions. It puts them in front of the room and lets the room think.
This is the school’s most self-critical lens, and it should be. Having built its whole method on Freire and the popular-education tradition, the school here turns that tradition into an open argument. Should we transform schooling, or abandon it? Does the Freirean educator, for all the talk of dialogue, become a new authority over the room? What have feminists, Indigenous scholars, and practitioners found wanting in critical pedagogy? A school that could not ask these questions of itself would have failed its own first principle.
Anchor questions
- Should we fix schools, or build learning outside them entirely? What does each side argue?
- Can the oppressed be “given” liberation through education, or must they make it themselves?
- What is the risk of the educator becoming a new authority over the room?
- What would learning look like if it were fully free?
- How does this room, right now, practice the world it wants?
Materials
Free unless marked otherwise. This lens deliberately gathers positions that disagree with each other, including critiques of the school’s own method.
Education as collective liberation
- Augusto Boal (1931 to 2009), Theatre of the Oppressed (1974). Applies Freire’s pedagogy to theatre, turning spectators into “spect-actors” who rehearse resistance together. A vision of education as embodied, collective liberation rather than reading alone. Free: archive.org
Transform schooling, or deschool it?
- Ivan Illich (1926 to 2002), Deschooling Society (1971). The case that compulsory schooling manufactures dependence, and that learning should be reclaimed through convivial webs rather than institutions. The sharpest counterpoint to Freire’s project of transforming schooling, and best read directly against Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Free: archive.org
Critiques of critical pedagogy
- Elizabeth Ellsworth, Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? (1989). A classroom-based critique arguing that “empowerment,” “voice,” and “dialogue” can themselves become repressive when they assume a single rational path to liberation. The essay every facilitator should sit with. Free PDF: mariaacaso.es
- Kathleen Weiler, Freire and a Feminist Pedagogy of Difference (1991). Questions Freire’s single abstract category of “the oppressed” and his male referent, arguing feminism offers a more situated account of liberatory teaching. This one was searched for hard and has no free copy anywhere: not in any open-access index, not borrowable on archive.org, and the promising course PDFs are dead. It is a library request, and worth making one for. Paywalled: harvardeducationalreview.org
- Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor (2012). An Indigenous critique of how “decolonize” gets absorbed into school reform and critical-pedagogy language while land and sovereignty go unaddressed. A bridge to Imperialism and the Global System. Free PDF: clas.osu.edu
- Blanca Facundo, Freire-Inspired Programs in the United States and Puerto Rico: A Critical Evaluation (1984). A practitioner’s hard look at what happened when Freire’s method was transplanted, raising unresolved questions about the outside intellectual, vanguardism, and results. Free: bmartin.cc
The anarchist pole
- Sarah Mills, Colin Ward: the ‘gentle’ anarchist and informal education (2010). Introduces Colin Ward’s anarchist vision of learning that organizes itself without authority and outside the school building, the horizontalist and prefigurative pole of the debate about liberatory education. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
Abolitionist teaching
- Bettina L. Love (b. 1979), We Want to Do More Than Survive (2019). Reform aims to help Black children survive a system built to sort them; abolitionist teaching aims at their thriving, which is a different project and not a friendlier version of the same one. The contemporary abolitionist statement in education. Paywalled: beacon.org. Her free hour-long talk, already in the practical lens, carries the argument: cityclub.org
- Critical Resistance, Abolitionist Organizing Toolkit. A hundred and twenty-six free pages on running abolitionist political education, from the organization that put prison abolition on the map. Practical: how to run the workshop, not only what to believe. Free: criticalresistance.org
- Abolitionist Teaching Network, Guide for Racial Justice and Abolitionist Social and Emotional Learning. The argument that most social-emotional learning teaches Black and brown children compliance and calls it wellbeing. Written by teachers, committed and short. Free: dcareaeducators4socialjustice.org
Disability justice, and who the room is built for
This lens argues about whether to transform schooling or abolish it. These texts ask a question that cuts underneath both: who can get into the room, stay in it, and be understood in it. A school that cannot answer that has not yet earned its arguments.
- Sins Invalid, Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People (2019). The disability justice primer, from a performance project led by disabled queer and trans people of color, and the source of the ten principles. It is a direct challenge to any liberatory pedagogy that quietly assumes the room can climb the stairs, read the handout, and sit still for two hours. Free: the full primer, and the ten principles as a three-page handout
- Mia Mingus, Access Intimacy: The Missing Link (2011). Names the feeling when someone simply gets your access needs without being walked through them, and separates it from legal compliance. Access as a relationship rather than a ramp, which is a pedagogical claim as much as a political one. Free: leavingevidence.wordpress.com
- Talila A. Lewis, Working Definition of Ableism (2022). One paragraph, built with disabled Black and brown people, rooting ableism in anti-Blackness and eugenics rather than treating it as a freestanding prejudice. Read it aloud early; it tends to restructure the discussion that follows. Free: talilalewis.com
Debates and disagreements
The school holds the disagreements open, including about itself. Freire (in the theoretical lens) wants to transform schooling from within through dialogue; Illich wants to abolish the school; Ward wants learning to organize itself without any institution at all. Ellsworth, Weiler, Tuck and Yang, and Facundo, sympathetic critics all, warn that “dialogue” and “empowerment” can mask a new authority, that “the oppressed” is not one thing, that decolonization is not a classroom metaphor, and that Freirean programs have often disappointed in practice. Bring these to bear on this very room and its facilitator. The point is not to abandon the method but to keep it honest.
Video
- “Deschooling Society: Why Our Education System Is Broken?” (2025). Roughly 12 minutes, about 5,000 views, a niche pick. A summary of Illich’s deschooling argument and learning webs, a short companion for the deschool position. youtube.com/watch?v=6Z5wiJAjY4c
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially accounts of self-organized learning experiments, and writing on education by currently or formerly incarcerated people themselves: the prison education material here describes programs from the outside, and the people inside them have not been given a voice in this lens.