brain too dumb

I think both Gramsci’s prison notebooks and PotO suffer from the same affliction for different reasons, which makes both of them really prone to co-optation and bastardisation.

In Gramsci’s case, he was writing cryptically under extremely adverse conditions and smuggling writing out from prison so he wasn’t able to draft a really explicit and coherent manuscript with the luxury of a desk free from the interference of prison guards, so his work is very piecemeal and it’s prone to being interpreted in different ways because it was written vaguely out of necessity.

On the other hand, despite how much I really do adore Paolo Freire, I think PotO is pretty wishy-washy in how it was written. You can argue that it was intended to be as accessible as possible meaning that the writing isn’t sequestering his pedagogical approach in academia through the use of needlessly complex, obscurantist language or heavily Marxist discourse and tbh I’m inclined to agree with this take. But in doing so, PotO is a victim of its own success because likewise this makes it very prone to being “interpreted” and misapplied since it isn’t balls-to-the-wall Marxist in the way that, say, Lenin wrote.

I know of one social work student who enthusiastically gushed to me about how they were being tasked with a photovoice assignment based on Freire’s principles and, upon gentle inquiry, it became very apparent to me that this student didn’t have a clue about a Freirian approach to education/community development and it was just a glorified exercise in disadvantage porn with some quaint philosophical window-dressing to make it seem like it was something much grander than just taking some pictures of homeless people for other people’s consumption. (Fitting, I suppose, for a discipline that has a tendency to do consultations almost compulsively.)

I’m not saying that I was some smug jerk about it, I was genuinely interested in hearing about the application of a Freirian approach to social work but a couple of softball questions didn’t get answered with anything even close to what I’d expect to hear from someone who has sat in a lecture where PotO summarised. It was all just “giving them a voice” kinda non-answers which gave me the biggest ick because framing it in those terms and talking about how homelessness is “invisible” just isn’t in line with Freire whatsoever.

Honestly I think that one of the ways that academia sterilises things that once had radical potential is to not only bastardise them like this but to give students the impression that they genuinely grasp, say, the Freirian pedagogical approach by diluting it through filters like that photovoice exercise while actively discouraging the students from engaging with the core of the subject; if they think they already know it because they are given the impression that they have “done it” then they are going to be very unlikely to revisit it or really engage with the theory itself, especially if the exercise is itself kinda vapid. This serves to convince the student that they understand it, they know how to do it, that there’s nothing to it, and worst of all that it doesn’t really achieve anything or hold much value when nothing could be further from the truth.

The only time I’ve ever spoken to a social work student on a placement where I’ve been able to engage them in a discussion on where theory and practice meet happened to be with a post-graduate student. Every other time I have tried, I’d walk away shaking my head wondering wtf they’re actually teaching these students in university. And I think this is really why you see these graduates who are really opinionated about topics but when you dig into the details it becomes clear that their opinions greatly exceed their knowledge base and they’re mostly recalling a slide or two and a lecturer’s commentary from a few years ago rather than having genuinely engaged with whatever happens to be the topic of discussion - this is where Va*sh is the epitome of this dilettante attitude.

(I wrote a massive rant about Va*sh, a sociology graduate, not knowing basic sociology while talking out of his arse in his classic authoritative style here but I realised that nobody needs to read it lol. Y’all already know the attitude and the inherent anti-intellectualism of dorks who are convinced that they know things when they can’t even muster basic definitions that are accurate.)