3

The Pedagogical Solution:

Freire’s Critical Pedagogy
and Social Democracy

‘A critical [educational] process is driven and justified by mutuality.

This ethic of mutual development’, argued Ira Shor (2009) in the con-
text of his analysis of Freire’s dialogic pedagogy, ‘can be thought as
of a Freirean addition to the Vygotskyan one’ (p. 291). As this quote
suggests, the aim of this chapter is to describe the essential feature of
Paulo Freire’s solution to the conundrum that Lev Vygotsky’s frame-
work stumbled upon. While Shor’s sentence hits the target, it relies on
a widespread opinion among education scholars, who tend to empha-
size the ethical component of critical pedagogy in general and Freire’s
project in particular (Darder, 2009; Flores-Kastaris et al., 2009). In
contrast to this ethical turn, this chapter argues that the main reason
why educators should push dialogue, equality, freedom, and tolerance
to the foreground of their teaching, as Freire did, is not ethical but
specifically pedagogic, and hence that it has less to do with the con-
venience of treating these principles as abstract, ethical values (and
thus valid irrespectively of the social situation people find themselves
in: educational, political, economic, and so on), than with the educa-
tional need that has been repeatedly explained in this book: namely,
the need to overcome the negative effects of the phenomenal forms.
In other words, dialogue, equality, freedom, and tolerance should
orient teachers’ practice not because they are ethical or virtuous in
themselves, but on account of their educational efficiency vis-à-vis
the specific pedagogical problem posed by the phenomenal forms.
This argument will be developed indirectly, at the same time as
the chapter engages in a political debate which has remained active
since the 19th century, namely, the debate on social democracy and

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L. S. V. de Castro, Critical Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire

© Luis S. Villacañas de Castro 2016
68 Critical Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire

on whether or not it belongs to a common stem of Marxist socialism.

As the reader is about to see, the same ideas used to explain and
defend the previous thesis concerning Freire’s pedagogy will also
be drawn on to claim not only that social democracy is the closest
political counterpart of Freire’s educational project, but also to
justify why both of them are undeniably rooted in Marxist socialism.
At the end of the day, I find a similar balance in the two between
their contents and their processes, between their objectives and their
methods, between their epistemological concepts and their peda-
gogical concerns. Regarding this distinction, whereas the contents of
Freire’s and social democracy’s projects can be traced back to Marx’s
central theses, this chapter will argue that it was their common deci-
sion to allow their educational and political processes to be guided by
dialogue, individual freedom, equality, and tolerance that ended up
giving the Freirean and the social democratic frameworks a unique
pedagogical potency in relation to the distortions resulting from the
phenomenal forms.

The Marxian backbone of social democracy

I understand that the suggestion that social democracy follows from

Marxian sociology may have surprised the reader—yet it inevitably
stems from the claims I am about to defend. In order to justify that
thesis, this chapter will re-examine first the debate which caused
the earliest major fracture in the socialist movement (definitely
established by the Third International) with the aim of identifying
the main characteristic of social democratic political thought. As is
well known, the direct consequences of the break established by the
Third International shaped the balance of power in the Western left
throughout the 20th century and beyond, at least till the outbreak
of the present crisis. I am referring to the controversy over revisionism,
that is, over the reformistt or revolutionaryy nature of socialist politics,
with Eduard Bernstein and Luxemburg being two of its major
voices, together with Karl Kautsky, former leader of the German
Social Democratic Party (SPD). The question this debate centered on
was precisely whether Bernstein’s model remained Marxist or not.
‘[… A]re we to regard Bernstein’s “Revisionism” as a form of Marxism
or as something different?’, Tudor (1993, p. xxi) asked himself in the
introduction to his edition of Bernstein’s The preconditions of socialism,