Paulo Freire and a Curriculum for the Capitalocene

Abstract

The teaching of utopian dreaming in a classroom setting can be made relevant to the current situation facing humanity through a confrontation with what Jason W. Moore calls the “Capitalocene.” With the “Capitalocene,” the inhabitants of the capitalist system confront their place in natural history, within an era in which capitalism ultimately transforms the planet as an extinction event. The “Capitalocene” manifests itself most immediately as an environmental crisis. With the environmental crisis, the “Capitalocene” acquires epic proportions which must be addressed in education.

For Paulo Freire (1921–1997), the utopian dream of a humanized society was promoted through “problem-posing education,” in which dialogue would ultimately take the form of praxis. The pivotal question for Freireans today is one of what utopian dreams of education will develop most successfully through praxis in the present era, confronting the power of the Internet, opposed to neoliberal political economy, and fueled by hopes for a utopia of sustainability.

The question of how education can be made relevant to the “Capitalocene” can be answered in part through an examination of the philosophy of Ivan Illich, with his utopia of self-directed learners, and of Peter McLaren’s “Schooling as a Ritual Performance,” with its incitement to utopian experience through ritual antistructure. Illich and McLaren suggest meaningful models of student life, which can be applied to a North American college context in which Freire is applied here.

The paper will conclude through the formulation of a curriculum for the Capitalocene.

“The future does not make us. We make ourselves in the struggle to make it.”—Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of Indignation, pp. 34).