593

PROCESS, ORIENTATION, AND SYSTEM: THE PEDAGOGICAL

OPERATION OF UTOPIA IN THE WORK OF PAULO FREIRE
Darren Webb

School of Education
University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

Abstract. Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in utopianism within educational theory.
In this essay, Darren Webb explores the utopian pedagogy of Paulo Freire in the context of what one
commentator has dubbed ‘‘the educational comeback of utopia.’’ Webb argues that Freire’s significance
lies in the way he embraced both ‘‘utopia as process’’ and ‘‘utopia as system.’’ This is significant because
the contemporary rejuvenation of utopianism has extended only so far, embracing utopia conceived
as an open-ended process of becoming but shying away from utopia conceived as the delineation of a
normative vision to be struggled for and won. Webb outlines the pedagogical operation of utopia as
process, cognitive-affective orientation, and system, and he argues that Freire was right in insisting that
each is constitutive of effective educational practice.

Introduction
The significance of Paulo Freire, both within the field of education and
beyond, is widely recognized. Not everyone, perhaps, would agree that he was
the exemplary intellectual of our time or the prime catalyst for pedagogical
innovation in the second half of the twentieth century.1 Nonetheless, even his
critics concede that the prevalence of such claims testifies to his influence.2 An
interesting feature of the literature over recent years is that a subtle shift has
taken place in assessments of the nature of Freire’s pedagogical innovation and of
why he was such an exemplary intellectual. Here we see a shift in emphasis from
Freire the grounded inspiration behind critical pedagogy to Freire the visionary
instigator of utopian pedagogy. This is evident in various recent collections
exploring the interplay between utopia and education, and one now finds Freire’s
‘‘utopian pedagogy’’ informing developments in areas such as drama education
and autoethnography as well as in more familiar fields such as critical literacy
education.3

1. These are the assessments offered by Cornel West, Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times (Monroe,
Maine: Common Courage Press, 1993), 179; and Carlos Alberto Torres, ‘‘Twenty Years after Pedagogy
of the Oppressed: Paulo Freire in Conversation with Carlos Alberto Torres,’’ in Politics of Liberation:
Paths from Freire, ed. Peter McLaren and Colin Lankshear (London: Routledge, 1994), 100.

2. In spite of her trenchant critique, for example, Diana Coben concedes, ‘‘To his many admirers, Freire
seems to offer a noble vision of adult education as politically liberating and spiritually redemptive, shot
through with poetic insights, imbued with hope and crowned with love.’’ Diana Coben, Radical Heroes:
Gramsci, Freire, and the Politics of Adult Education (New York: Garland, 1998), 204–205.

3. See Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter, eds., Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments
Against Neoliberal Globalization (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Michael Peters
and John Freeman-Moir, eds., Edutopias: New Utopian Thinking in Education (Rotterdam: Sense
Publishers, 2006); Carlos Alberto Torres and António Teodoro, eds., Critique and Utopia: New

EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 62 Number 5 2012

© 2012 Board of Trustees University of Illinois
594 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 62 Number 5 2012

Contemporary interest in utopian pedagogy is part of a renewed interest more

widely in utopia and utopianism. Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili talk of ‘‘the
implicit and sometimes explicit rejuvenation of utopianism’’ within contemporary
social theory.4 This they explain with reference to the transformations associated
with globalization. On the one hand, as has frequently been noted, globalization
carries with it a wide range of utopian significations — from the borderless world
and global citizenship to unbounded freedom and choice to material prosperity and
the satisfaction of needs.5 On the other, one encounters economic crisis, growing
polarization of wealth, cultural and military imperialism, and an overwhelming
sense of agentic impotence in the face of an uncontrollable process. For Hayden
and el-Ojeili, the revival of utopian thinking is a response to the jarring disjuncture
between the utopian significations and the dystopian realities of globalization.6
Related to this is growing dissatisfaction with postempiricist deconstructive social
science. Concerned primarily with dismantling and demystifying truth claims and
value commitments, deconstructive science is seen to have generated an enfeebling
‘‘vocabulary of deficit’’ within which the concept of future possibilities is absent.
Deemed inadequate in the face of the injustices of globalization, what is called
for instead is a socially enabling, future-oriented, utopian ‘‘vocabulary of hope.’’7
Tom Moylan speaks for many when he argues that the dystopian realities of the
present demand as a response ‘‘a courageous embrace of the utopian project.’’8
This is the spirit underpinning the revival of utopia in educational theory.
The essays collected in the volume Utopian Pedagogy are presented as ‘‘Radical
Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization’’; those collected in the volume

Developments in the Sociology of Education (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007);
Monica Prendergast, ‘‘Utopian Performatives and the Social Imaginary: Toward a New Philosophy of
Drama/Theater Education,’’ Journal of Aesthetic Education 45, no. 1 (2011): 59–73; Joannie Halas and
Jeanne Adele Kentel, ‘‘Giving the Body Its Due: Autobiographical Reflections and Utopian Imaginings,’’
Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education 107, no. 1 (2008): 207–222; and Snezana
Dabic, ‘‘The Alchemy of Learning and Work: Negotiating Learner Knowledge in a Global Society,’’
International Journal of Lifelong Learning 27, no. 6 (2008): 613–624.

4. Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili, ‘‘Reflections on the Demise and Renewal of Utopia in a Global
Age,’’ in Globalization and Utopia: Critical Essays, ed. Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 8.

5. See, for example, Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘‘Global Civil Society,’’ Theory, Culture and Society 23, no.
2–3 (2006): 521–524; and Ivana Milojevic, ‘‘Hegemonic and Marginalised Educational Utopias in the
Contemporary Western World,’’ in Edutopias, ed. Peters and Freeman-Moir.

6. Hayden and el-Ojeili, ‘‘Reflections on the Demise and Renewal of Utopia in a Global Age,’’ 8.

7. James D. Ludema, Timothy B. Wilmot, and Suresh Srivastva, ‘‘Organizational Hope: Reaffirming the
Constructive Task of Social and Organizational Inquiry,’’ Human Relations 50, no. 8 (1997): 1015–1052.

8. Tom Moylan, ‘‘Realizing Better Futures: Strong Thought for Hard Times,’’ in Utopia–Method–Vision:
The Use Value of Social Dreaming, ed. Tom Moylan and Rafaella Baccolini (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007).

DARREN WEBB is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield, 388 Glossop
Rd., Sheffield S10 2JA, UK; e-mail <d.webb@sheffield.ac.uk>. His primary areas of scholarship are the
history of utopian ideas and the politics and pedagogy of hope.
Webb Process, Orientation, and System 595

Edutopias respond with a sense of urgency to a foreboding anxiety that ‘‘nothing

like an alternative to global capitalism seems remotely possible’’; and those
collected in Critique and Utopia are framed by a perceived need to ‘‘guide
the transformation of society and imagine a postneoliberal era.’’9 Freed of the
pejorative connotations that have long been associated with it, the concept of
utopia has been embraced more broadly within educational theory.10 It is not
uncommon to find educational theory being cast in positive terms as inherently
utopian, concerned as it is with our desires and hopes for the future.11 In light of
these developments, Marianna Papastephanou is not overstating the case when
she refers to ‘‘the educational comeback of utopia.’’12
Freire’s significance in the context of this utopian comeback lies in the way he
embraces both ‘‘utopia as system’’ and ‘‘utopia as process.’’ The former conceives
utopia as the imaginary reconstitution of society, the delineation of a normative,
prescriptive vision to be struggled for and won.13 The latter conceives utopia as
an open-ended process of becoming that resists closure: a process giving rise to
utopian texts as expressions of critical longing, but one that can never end with the
realization of any particular vision.14 A certain tension exists between these two
competing conceptions of utopia, with advocates of process utopianism critiquing
‘‘utopia as system’’ for its totalizing act of closure and process utopianism being
critiqued in turn for its retreat from political engagement.15
In this article, I explore whether Freire, in simultaneously embracing utopia
as system and process, succeeded in resolving the tension between them. Did he
succeed in articulating a utopian pedagogy of political engagement that avoids the
totalizing act of closure? This is an important question because the educational

9. Mark Coté, Richard Day, and Greig de Peuter, ‘‘Introduction: What Is Utopian Pedagogy?’’ in Utopian
Pedagogy, ed. Coté, Day, and de Peuter, 3–19; Michael Peters and John Freeman-Moir, ‘‘Introducing
Edutopias: Concept, Genealogy, Futures,’’ in Edutopias, ed. Peters and Freeman-Moir, 2; and António
Teodoro and Carlos Alberto Torres, ‘‘Introduction: Critique and Utopia in the Sociology of Education,’’
in Critique and Utopia, ed. Torres and Teodoro, 5.

10. See Darren Webb, ‘‘Where’s the Vision? The Concept of Utopia in Contemporary Educational
Theory,’’ Oxford Review of Education 35, no. 6 (2009): 743–760.

11. See Michele Borrelli, ‘‘The Utopianisation of Critique: The Tension Between Education Conceived
as a Utopian Concept and as One Grounded in Empirical Reality,’’ Journal of Philosophy of Education
38, no. 3 (2004): 441–454; and Milojevic, ‘‘Hegemonic and Marginalized Utopias in the Contemporary
Western World.’’
12. Marianna Papastephanou, ‘‘Dystopian Reality, Utopian Thought and Educational Practice,’’ Studies
in the Philosophy of Education 27, no. 2–3 (2008): 91.

13. For example, Ruth Levitas, ‘‘The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society: Utopia as Method,’’ in
Utopia–Method–Vision, ed. Moylan and Baccolini.

14. For example, Erin McKenna, The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective (Lanham,
Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).

15. See the discussion between two leading figures in the field: Ruth Levitas and Lucy Sargisson, ‘‘Utopia
in Dark Times: Optimism/Pessimism and Utopia/Dystopia,’’ in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the
Dystopian Imagination, ed. Rafaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge, 2003).
596 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 62 Number 5 2012

comeback of utopia has extended only so far. Utopia has been embraced with a
hint of caution, accompanied by warnings against a kind of ‘‘bad’’ utopianism
characterized by ‘‘unrealistic’’ visions and prescriptive ‘‘blueprints.’’16 Positive
reevaluations of Freire’s utopianism have also fallen short of a wholehearted
endorsement of his normative, prescriptive vision, focusing more instead on his
notion of utopia as a critical process. Here, I seek to offer a presentation and
defense of Paulo Freire’s utopian pedagogy of process, orientation, and system.

Utopia as Process
Freire regarded utopia as an anthropological constant, an innate human
propensity, ‘‘part of human nature . . . an integral part of the historic-social
manner of being a person.’’17 So integral is utopia to our nature and being that
it is ‘‘a fundamental necessity for human beings’’ — without utopia, we cease
to be human.18 For Freire, however, what it is to be human is in a permanent
process of becoming. Like many other philosophers of hope (Ernst Bloch, Gabriel
Marcel, Josef Pieper, and Jean-Paul Sartre, to name but a few) Freire subscribed to
the notion of homo viator — the human being as ontological traveller.19 Speaking
shortly before his death, Sartre suggested that ‘‘what a human being is has not yet
been established. We are not complete human beings . . . we could say that we are
sub-beings, beings who have not yet reached a final point, a point we may never
reach, though we are moving toward it.’’20 Freire, too, was convinced that humans
are travelers but not aimless wanderers; rather, ‘‘men are searchers and their
ontological vocation is humanization.’’21 Humanization, becoming more fully
human, is that toward which we are traveling, and the promise of humanization
is experienced as an unconscious ontological pull from the future that drives us
on in our journey. By placing repeated emphasis on the inherent openness of the
future, however, Freire suggested that our vocation to become more fully human
is a point we may move toward but never reach.22

16. Stuart Hall, ‘‘Universities, Intellectuals, and Multitudes,’’ in Utopian Pedagogy, ed. Coté, Day,
and de Peuter, 21; and David Halpin, ‘‘Utopian Totalism Versus Utopian Realism,’’ Oxford Review of
Education 35, no. 6 (2009): 761–764.

17. César Augusto Rossatto, ‘‘An Interview with Paulo Freire,’’ in Engaging Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy
of Possibility: From Blind to Transformative Optimism (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield,
2005), 17; and Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope (London: Continuum, 1994), 77.

18. Paulo Freire, Daring to Dream (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm, 2007), 25.

19. See Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995); Gabriel Marcel,
Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysics of Hope (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); Josef Pieper,
Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991); and Jean-Paul Sartre, Hope Now: The 1980
Interviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For more on Freire’s philosophy of hope, see
Darren Webb, ‘‘Paulo Freire and ‘The Need for a Kind of Education in Hope’,’’ Cambridge Journal of
Education 40, no. 4 (2010): 327–340.

20. Sartre, Hope Now, 67–68.

21. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin, 1972), 48.

22. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 74.
Webb Process, Orientation, and System 597

Freire thus conceptualized utopia as an open-ended and incessant process of

becoming. As human beings, we have a ‘‘vocation’’ or ‘‘calling’’ to humanization,
but we are fated never fully to realize this calling; we are traveling the route to
ourselves but will never reach our destination. How does utopia, so conceived,
operate pedagogically? Looked at negatively, it means ‘‘there is no guaranteed
prescription nor ready-made project that can be suggested.’’23 Because reality,
history, and human nature are undergoing constant transformation, all substantive
utopian prescriptions and projects become obsolete before they can ossify. Indeed,
because the utopia of liberation is a social process, the politico-pedagogical
project of striving to realize a single utopian vision is ‘‘incompatible with human
existence.’’24
Looked at more positively, the pedagogical operation of utopia-as-process
entails the educator aiding the learner in ‘‘the effort of searching.’’25 More
specifically, ‘‘the duty of the educator [is] to search out appropriate paths for
the learner to travel.’’26 Although reality and being are conceived as open-ended
and undecided, the role of the educator is one of ensuring that the learner treads
an appropriate path toward humanization. This is important because, while ‘‘we
live the life of a vocation, a calling, to humanization,’’ our response to this calling
can be exploited, manipulated, and distorted by the material and ideological forces
of dehumanization.27 Helping the learner negotiate and overcome the obstacles
and perilous dead ends that line the path to humanization is a key educational
endeavor. A constant trope within Freire is that of ‘‘illumination,’’ and the
pedagogical operation of utopia-as-process is one of illuminating the path toward
humanization (even if neither educator nor educand quite knows where this path
will end).28
Utopia as Orientation
Traveling the path toward humanization and engaging actively in the process of
human becoming requires, for Freire, a particular cognitive-emotional orientation.
This he termed ‘‘the orientation toward being more’’ or the adoption of ‘‘a
utopian attitude to the world.’’29 The key characteristics of this orientation
are ‘‘epistemological curiosity’’ and ‘‘radical hope.’’ Epistemological curiosity

23. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy in Process (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1978), 153.

24. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart (New York: Continuum, 2007), 32.

25. Freire, Pedagogy in Process, 11.

26. Ibid., 10.

27. Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 84.

28. See, for example, Paulo Freire and Ira Shor, A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming
Education (Westport, Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey, 1987), 13–14, 49, and 112.

29. Paulo Freire, Letters to Cristina: Reflections on My Life and Work (New York: Routledge, 1996),
151; and Paulo Freire, ‘‘A Few Notes about the Word ‘Conscientization’,’’ in Schooling and Capitalism:
A Sociological Reader, ed. Roger Dale, Geoff Esland, and Madeleine Macdonald (New York: Routledge,
1976), 225.
598 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 62 Number 5 2012

is the rigorous and critical interrogation of the world in order to decode and
decipher its inner workings and to reveal that beyond every ‘‘limit situation’’
there lies ‘‘untested feasibility.’’30 Radical hope is a profound confidence in the
transformative capacities of human agency, a confidence that enables real subjects
to insert themselves into history and commit themselves to confronting and
overcoming the limit situations that face them.31 Driven by such curiosity and
hope, learners are able to respond to their ontological calling and pursue as active
subjects their incessant search for humanization.
This utopian orientation toward the world, however, is not the spontaneous
orientation of the human subject. Here one finds a key role for utopian pedagogy.
For while curiosity is an essential human attribute, in its spontaneous form it
lacks the rigor and methodological exactitude needed to fully ‘‘read’’ the world.32
For Freire, ‘‘It’s precisely because ingenuous curiosity does not automatically
become critical that one of the essential tasks of progressive educational praxis is
the promotion of a curiosity that is critical, bold, and adventurous.’’33 The same
applies to ingenuous hope, which, without guidance and direction, becomes fixated
on ideologically manipulated objectives — such as striking it rich and ‘‘private
notions of getting ahead’’ — and appeals for the realization of its objectives to
external agents such as luck, fate, or God.34 There is a fundamental role for utopian
pedagogy, then, in educating both curiosity and hope.35
Utopia as understood here becomes a cognitive-emotional orientation, the
possession of which enables one to decipher and transform the world in
pursuing the calling to humanization. It comprises, on the one hand, ‘‘a
rigorous methodological curiosity’’ capable of piercing through ideology, myth,
and common sense in order to ‘‘reveal the world.’’36 On the other, it consists
of a sense of possibility grounded in a profound confidence in the capacity of
human beings to transform and recreate the world. The pedagogical operation of
utopia-as-orientation requires from the educator ‘‘the sharpening of the learner’s
epistemological curiosity’’ and, as William Morris once put it when describing the
pedagogical imperatives of his own project, ‘‘educating people to a sense of their
real capacities as men.’’37

30. See Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom, 35–38; and Rossatto, ‘‘An Interview with Paulo Freire,’’ 16–17.

31. See Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 71–72; and Freire, ‘‘A Few Notes about the Word
‘Conscientization.’’’
32. Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart, 95–97.

33. Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom, 38.

34. Freire and Shor, A Pedagogy for Liberation, 110; and Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom
(Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin, 1972).

35. See Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart, 31; and Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 3.

36. Rossatto, ‘‘An Interview with Paulo Freire,’’ 16–17.

37. Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart, 75; and William Morris, Political Writings of William Morris, ed. A.L.
Morton (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973), 157.
Webb Process, Orientation, and System 599

Freire as Critical Utopian

Little in the preceding accounts will come as a surprise to writers sympathetic
to Freire’s utopianism. From the very earliest commentaries on his work, the
dominant interpretive frame within Anglo-American theory has been that of
utopia-as-process.38 Since the publication in 1986 of Tom Moylan’s Demand the
Impossible — still the definitive statement of utopia-as-process — Freire’s ideas
have been commonly analyzed using Moylan’s category of ‘‘critical utopianism.’’
The defining feature of the critical utopia is that it ‘‘reject[s] utopia as blueprint
while preserving it as dream,’’ and his critical utopian rejection of blueprints
has been highlighted and enthusiastically endorsed by those working within the
Freirean tradition.39
This reading of Freire argues that his critical utopianism resists closure,
offers no answers, and presents no blueprints; is open, partial, provisional, and
undecidable; and jettisons meaning in favor of metaphor and rejects the quest for
certainties in favor of indeterminacy.40 For Tyson Lewis, Freire’s is a project of
‘‘radical uncertainty’’ that ‘‘lacks a blueprint to a utopian future or a manifesto
that outlines transformative action’’ but rather opens up ‘‘the possibility of
new possibilities.’’41 Embracing the openness that defines humans as indefinable
beings, Freire’s pedagogy takes us on ‘‘an educational quest for liberation without
recourse to a set road.’’42 The principal function of utopia becomes that of critical
demystification — unveiling, uncovering, and unmasking the operation of power
so that new (open, provisional, partial, undecidable) spaces of possibility can
emerge.43 Utopia consists of future-oriented critical engagement that resists the
hypostasis of closed representation and refuses to focus on a final static goal.
There is much within Freire to suggest that he did reject utopia-as-blueprint.
He argued, for example, that ‘‘Every prescription represents the imposition of one
man’s choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the man prescribed
to into one that conforms to the prescriber’s consciousness.’’44 This critique of the

38. See Arthur S. Lloyd, ‘‘Freire, Conscientization, and Adult Education,’’ Adult Education 23, no. 1
(1972): 3–20.

39. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York:
Methuen, 1986), 10.

40. See, for example, Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren, ‘‘Paulo Freire, Postmodernism, and the
Utopian Imagination: A Blochian Reading,’’ in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, ed. Jamie O. Daniel
and Tom Moylan (London: Verso, 1997); Peter McLaren, ‘‘Postmodernism and the Death of Politics: A
Brazilian Reprieve,’’ in Politics of Liberation, ed. McLaren and Lankshear; and Peter McLaren and Peter
Leonard, ‘‘Absent Discourses: Paulo Freire and the Dangerous Memories of Liberation,’’ in Paulo Freire:
A Critical Encounter, ed. Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1–7.

41. Tyson Lewis, ‘‘Messianic Pedagogy,’’ Educational Theory 60, no. 2 (2010): 209, 245, and 209–210.

42. Ibid., 245.

43. Peter Mayo, ‘‘Critical Literacy and Emancipatory Politics: The Work of Paulo Freire,’’ International
Journal of Educational Development 15, no. 4 (1995): 363–379.

44. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 23.

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pedagogy of the blueprint — what Mark Coté, Richard Day, and Greig de Peuter
refer to as ‘‘the indignity of speaking for others’’ — underpins the warnings against
‘‘bad’’ utopianism found within contemporary educational theory.45 Freire himself
framed his critique of blueprintism using themes and terms borrowed from Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels. Echoing Engels, he emphasized that the shape of the
utopian future could be announced only by those who create it; like Marx, he
refused to concoct utopian ‘‘recipes’’ for the cookshops of the future; and like
both, he attacked the arrogance of ‘‘utopian prophets’’ who seek to fill the empty
consciousness of the people with the knowledge they themselves cannot attain.46
Paraphrasing a key passage from The German Ideology, Freire declared, ‘‘The future
is not a province some distance from the present which just waits for us to arrive
some day. . . . The future is born of the present, from possibilities in contradiction,
from the battle waged by forces that dialectically oppose each other.’’47
Here, then, one returns to utopia as process and orientation. The utopia of
humanization is a future-in-becoming rather than, as Marx and Engels put it, ‘‘an
ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself.’’48 In order to fight for this future,
educators and educands together require the adoption of a utopian attitude, an
orientation toward being more, so they can engage with the world as active
subjects. The pedagogical operation of utopia becomes, as Henry Giroux and Peter
McLaren maintain, one of critical demystification (epistemological curiosity) and
evoking within subjects a confidence in their transformative agential capacities
(radical hope).49

Utopia as System
The most common definition offered by Freire sees ‘‘utopia’’ as a process
of denunciation-annunciation: ‘‘Utopia is the dialectical process of denouncing
and announcing — denouncing the oppressing structure and announcing the
humanizing structure.’’50 In nurturing and evoking both epistemological curiosity

45. Mark Coté, Richard Day, and Greig de Peuter, ‘‘Utopian Pedagogy: Creating Radical Alternatives in
the Neoliberal Age,’’ Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 29, no. 4 (2007): 324.

46. Compare Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation (New York: Bergin
and Garvey, 1985), 127–128, with Friedrich Engels, ‘‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and
the State,’’ in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1968), 508; compare Freire, Letters to Cristina, 112, with Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical
Analysis of Capitalist Production, vol. 1, ed. Friedrich Engels (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), 17;
and compare Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 98–99, with Marx’s attack on Wilhelm Weitling as summarized
by Paul Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade: Literary Memoirs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1968), 169.

47. Freire, Letters to Cristina, 152. Compare with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), 56–57.

48. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 56.

49. Giroux and McLaren, ‘‘Paulo Freire, Postmodernism, and the Utopian Imagination.’’

50. Freire, ‘‘A Few Notes about the Word ‘Conscientization’,’’ 225.
Webb Process, Orientation, and System 601

and radical hope, the critical role of utopian pedagogy in the process of denunciation
is clear. But what about the process of announcing humanization? Here, Freire
argued that a ‘‘blueprint’’ (the word is his) of the world in which we would like to
live is needed in order to ‘‘propel’’ us along the path to humanization.51
In arguing for the necessity of a utopian blueprint or system, Freire placed
emphasis on the purposive nature of human being:
As project, as design for a different, less-ugly ‘‘world,’’ the dream is as necessary to political
subjects, transformers of the world and not adapters to it, as it is fundamental for an artisan,
who projects in his or her brain what she or he is going to execute even before the execution
thereof.52

In order, then, to travel (as curious, hopeful agents) the path toward humanization,
we need a clear ‘‘design’’ or ‘‘blueprint’’ depicting the form and shape that
humanization will take. Just as artisans cannot operate with an open-ended,
undecided, indeterminate understanding of what they are about to execute, so too
for humans following their ontological calling to become more fully human. This
is an argument commonly deployed in defense of utopia-as-system. For example,
Maurice Meisner states that
people must hope before they can act, and their hopes must be lodged in a vision of a better
future if their actions are not to be blind and devoid of purpose. Indeed, it is an inherent and
unique attribute of mankind that human actions are both purposive and future-oriented. In
this respect, the utility of utopias is obvious. Utopian visions of the future not only serve as
critiques of existing social orders but offer alternatives to it, and thus not only make people
aware of the imperfections of the present but also move them to transform it in accordance
with the utopian ideal.53

Utopia is conceptualized here as a representational and prescriptive vision. This

is fully consistent with Lyman Sargent’s widely used definition of utopia as ‘‘a
non-existent society described in considerable detail . . . that the author intended
a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in
which that reader lived.’’54 The pedagogical operation of utopia-as-system sees
the educator engaging the learner in their curious, hopeful ontological journey by
presenting to them a detailed vision of that toward which they are striving.
Freire’s reading of utopia-as-system has generated no little criticism. From both
left and right, he has been denounced for the elitist, paternalistic, and messianic
privilege he afforded the educator in leading the flock of educands toward a vision
of salvation that only the educator can fully grasp.55 For Freire, because the masses
51. Freire, Letters to Cristina, 187.

52. Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 78. This clearly follows Marx’s distinction between the worst of architects
and the best of bees. See Marx, Capital, 178.

53. Maurice Meisner, Marxism, Maoism, and Utopianism: Eight Essays (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1982), 20–21.

54. Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), 6. Sargent’s definition was first formulated over two decades ago and is widely used within the
field of utopian studies.

55. From the right, for example, one has Peter L. Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and
Social Change (New York: Basic Books, 1974). From the left, one of the more powerful Marxist critiques
602 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 62 Number 5 2012

with whom the radical educator works are trapped in a culture of silence, ‘‘they
cannot see, beyond their present situation, the untested feasibility, the future as
a liberation project that they must create for themselves.’’56 It is the educator’s
role, therefore, to present a vision of this untested feasibility, and it is essential
that ‘‘the educators have the courage to take responsibility for the job of showing
the way.’’57 Importantly, Freire suggested that the radical educator can see the
future and can show the way. While the process utopian sees utopia as ‘‘naming
that space we cannot yet know,’’ Freire insisted that ‘‘Utopia is an act of knowing
critically. I cannot denounce an oppressing structure if I do not penetrate into it
and know it. Nor can I announce what I do not know.’’58 The utopian educator
thus announces the future they know and leads the way.
Recounting a story to illustrate the power of the utopian imagination, Freire
described how Amilcar Cabral addressed his followers by closing his eyes and
dreaming out loud, speaking for forty minutes on the details of the organization
of postrevolutionary Guinea-Bissau, its administration, its education system, and
the newly reborn people who would inhabit it. This is presented by Freire as an
example of the pedagogical value of utopia-as-system, the educative power of a
normative vision described in considerable detail.59 As Alasdair Morrison once
put it, ‘‘utopia can, and often does, generate both enthusiasm and determination.
It attracts supporters who will not be content with thought-experiments: they
want the real thing. That indeed is what utopia is for: it is an inspiration and a
goal.’’60 Cabral’s detailed depiction of his systematic utopian vision served as a
goal — imbuing humanization with content — for which his ontological wayfaring
followers could strive. Freire, too, sought to offer a goal. He once remarked that
‘‘I believe my strongest calling is exactly the calling to realize my dream,’’ and
he used phrases such as ‘‘revelation’’ and ‘‘conversion’’ to describe the role of the
educator in helping to realize this dream.61
This, however, is the kind of ‘‘bad’’ utopianism (the educator leading the
masses to redemption with his or her prophetic utopian vision) that contemporary
educational theorists warn against. As we have seen, attempts are often made to

of Freire’s elitism remains Jim Walker, ‘‘The End of Dialogue: Paulo Freire on Politics and Education,’’
in Literacy and Revolution: The Pedagogy of Paulo Freire, ed. Robert Mackie (New York: Continuum,
1981), 120–150.

56. Freire, Politics of Education, 132.

57. Freire, Daring to Dream, 37.

58. Tom Moylan, ‘‘Steps of Renewed Praxis’’ (keynote address at the Twelfth International Conference
of the Utopian Studies Society [Europe], Nicosia, Cyprus, July 8, 2011); and Freire, ‘‘A Few Notes about
the Word ‘Conscientization’,’’ 225.

59. Freire, Pedagogy in Process, 18.

60. Alasdair Morrison, ‘‘Uses of Utopia,’’ in Utopias, ed. Peter Alexander and Roger Gill (London:
Duckworth, 1984), 144.

61. Rossatto, ‘‘An Interview with Paulo Freire,’’ 18–19; and Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the City (New
York: Continuum, 1993), 69.
Webb Process, Orientation, and System 603

distance Freire from this ‘‘bad’’ utopianism and to construct him positively as a
critical utopian who rejected utopia-as-blueprint. Freire, however, did emphasize
the necessity of utopia-as-system. Positive annunciation was required not only
because humans are purposive creatures, but also as a means to counter the
conservative drive to domesticate the future and render it merely ‘‘a repetition of
the present.’’62 When so much ideological weight is placed behind the proclamation
that ‘‘there is no alternative,’’ utopian pedagogy needs to depict such an alternative
to rouse homo viator from a state of ontological paralysis. For Freire, liberatory
pedagogies ‘‘cannot exist without being driven by fundamental visions of a utopian
society.’’63
Utopia as Process, Orientation, and System
The tension in Freire’s work, between an open-ended being-on-the-way
historicism and the call for prophetic educators to present a vision of the
known goal, is widely recognized.64 He has been described as simultaneously
a postmodernist and a Leninist, and some see this tension as an unresolvable
contradiction within Freire’s thought.65 It need not be seen this way, however.
We can begin by pointing to the pedagogical insufficiency of utopia-as-process.
Taking Utopian Pedagogy as an example, this volume is framed explicitly by
utopia conceived as process. The editors emphasize that the contributors reject
traditional ‘‘blueprint’’ utopianism and ‘‘look to utopia not as a place we might
reach but as an ongoing process of becoming.’’66 The utopian experiments outlined
in the volume are less concerned with ‘‘a point of arrival’’ than with creating ‘‘a
point of departure.’’67 These points of departure have dialogue at their heart
and are variously presented as dialogical spaces, communities of learning, and
participatory classes.68 Taking place within these spaces is an antinormative series
of exploratory encounters, a process of posing questions without the pretence of
giving answers, and an ‘‘objectless’’ process of critical questioning.69

62. Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom, 72.

63. Rossatto, ‘‘An Interview with Paulo Freire,’’ 17.

64. See, for example, Ronald Glass, ‘‘On Paulo Freire’s Philosophy of Praxis and the Foundations
of Liberation Education,’’ Educational Researcher 30, no. 2 (2001): 15–25; and Gerard Huiskamp,
‘‘Negotiating Communities of Meaning in Theory and Practice: Rereading Pedagogy of the Oppressed
as Direct Dialogic Encounter,’’ in The Freirean Legacy: Educating for Social Justice, ed. Judith Slater,
Stephen Fain, and César Rossatto (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).

65. Andrés Mejı́a, ‘‘The Problem of Knowledge Imposition: Paulo Freire and Critical Systems Thinking,’’
Systems Research and Behavioral Science 21, no. 1 (2004): 63–82.

66. Coté, Day, and de Peuter, ‘‘Introduction: What Is Utopian Pedagogy?’’ 13.

67. Ibid., 14.

68. See Shveta Sarda, ‘‘Before Coming Here, Had You Thought of a Place Like This?’’ 227–241, Allan
Antliff, ‘‘Breaking Free: Anarchist Pedagogy,’’ 248–265, and Richard Toews and Kelly Harris-Martin,
‘‘An Enigma in the Education System,’’ 266–279, all in Utopian Pedagogy, ed. Coté, Day, and de Peuter.

69. See Mark Coté, Richard Day, and Greig de Peuter, ‘‘Academicus Affinitatus: Academic Dissent,
Community Education, and Critical U,’’ 334–352, Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, and Gigi Roggero,
604 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 62 Number 5 2012

There are significant limitations to this understanding of utopian pedagogy.

The emphasis on creating spaces of dialogue and points of departure misses the
point that dialogue ‘‘is not a ‘free space’ where you say what you want. Dialogue
takes place inside some program and content.’’70 As Richard Rorty once put it,
all discursive spaces do ‘‘is give you freedom of discussion; you still need the
poetic imagination, still need revolutionary recontextualizers to give you new
alternatives to discuss.’’71 In other words, without content and vision utopian
spaces run the risk of remaining empty and barren. David Harvey makes much
the same point when he argues that utopia conceived as process has ‘‘the habit of
getting lost in the romanticism of endlessly open projects that never have to come
to a point of closure.’’ Without closure in the form of a vision and a goal, utopia
remains ‘‘a pure signifier of hope destined never to acquire a material referent.’’72
Even Giroux and McLaren, passionate and persistent critics of utopia-as-system,
concede that ‘‘without a vision for the future — without asking, ‘Empowerment
for what?’ — critical pedagogy becomes reduced to a method for participation that
takes democracy as an end, not a means.’’73 Indeed, in order to prevent it from
becoming an empty and endless project that romanticizes the process while losing
sight of the goal, Giroux recognizes that ‘‘radical pedagogy needs a vision — one
that celebrates not what is but what could be, that looks beyond the immediate to
the future and links struggle to a new set of human possibilities.’’74
Underpinning the reluctance to embrace the need for utopia-as-system is
the fear of totalizing closure and the indignity of speaking for others. This fear,
however, is misplaced. Freire’s utopian pedagogy was always concerned with
creating the conditions for utopia to emerge:
One of the most important tasks of critical educational practice is to make possible the
conditions in which the learners, in their interaction with one another and with their
teachers, engage in the experience of assuming themselves as social, historical, thinking,
communicating, transformative, creative persons; dreamers of possible utopias.75

The pedagogical value of utopian visions is that they help create these conditions,
that is, conditions through which learners themselves emerge as dreamers of
utopia. This was recognized long ago by William Morris. In News from Nowhere

‘‘Conricerca as Political Action,’’ 163–185, and Colectivo Situaciones, ‘‘On the Researcher-Militant,’’
186–200, all in Utopian Pedagogy, ed. Coté, Day, and de Peuter.

70. Freire and Shor, A Pedagogy for Liberation, 102.

71. Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 311.

72. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 189 and 174.

73. Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren, ‘‘Radical Pedagogy as Cultural Politics: Beyond the Discourse of
Critique and Anti-Utopianism,’’ in Theory/Pedagogy/Politics: Texts for Change, ed. Donald Morton and
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 158.

74. Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedagogy of Opposition (London:
Heinemann, 1983), 242.

75. Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom, 45.

Webb Process, Orientation, and System 605

Morris offered us one of the great utopian visions — a vision of society

reconstituted in its totality and a vision full of detailed and normative content.
Yet Morris himself was critical of utopian ‘‘prophets’’ and fully maintained that
the humanized future would be shaped by those who live in it.76 Morris’s project
is commonly referred to now as ‘‘the education of desire,’’ while Freire described
his own as ‘‘a pedagogy of desire’’ and ‘‘the education of longing.’’77 For Morris, the
crucial role of utopian visions in the education of desire was that ‘‘these dreams for
the future, make many a man a socialist whom sober reason deduced from science
and political economy and the selection of the fittest would not move at all.’’78 Like
Morris, Freire believed that ‘‘As progressive educators, one of our main tasks seems
to be with respect to generating political dreams in people, political yearnings,
political desires.’’79 Also like Morris, Freire believed that utopian visions were
needed to guide purposive creatures — moved more by annunciations of the future
goal than by denunciations of the dehumanizing present — along their ontological
journey toward humanization. Utopian visions liberate the imagination as to the
possibilities for change and help to both generate and shape dreams, yearnings, and
desires. Importantly, though, for Freire utopian systems have the status of ‘‘draft
projects’’ or ‘‘pre-projects’’ that develop and change shape as they become true
projects through praxis.80 Announcing a pre-project that becomes project through
transformative action is, indeed, ‘‘the meaning of historical engagement inspired
by a prophetic, utopian, but critical hope.’’81
Utopia, for Freire, is a process of becoming driven by critical curiosity and
radical hope toward a vision of a new way of being. Utopia as process, orientation,
and system is constitutive of human being. He feared, however, that each
element of utopia is currently under threat: curiosity becomes resignation, hope
is commodified, the future is foreclosed, and the path of the wayfaring human is
channeled increasingly toward dehumanization. We are repeatedly told that there
is no alternative, that everything has been worked out, that the future will be a
repetition of the present, and that ‘‘there is no more place among us for the dreamer
and believer in utopia.’’82 For this reason ‘‘the struggle for the restoration of utopia’’
is all the more necessary and must become the animating imperative of political
and educational practice.83 For Freire, ‘‘There is no tomorrow without a project,
without a dream, without utopia, without hope, without creative work, and work

76. Morris, Political Writings of William Morris, 106–107 and 188–189.

77. Freire, Daring to Dream, 5; and Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 25.

78. Morris, Political Writings of William Morris, 189.

79. Freire, Daring to Dream, 5.

80. Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom, 71.

81. Freire, ‘‘A Few Notes About the Word ‘Conscientization’,’’ 225.

82. Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom, 41.

83. Ibid., 103.

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toward the development of possibilities, which can make the concretization of

that tomorrow possible.’’84 The pedagogical operation of utopia becomes that
of sharpening the learner’s epistemological curiosity, educating their ingenuous
hope, and illuminating the path toward humanization in light of a design for a
new way of being.

Freire as Active Utopian

Ruth Levitas describes utopianism in its ‘‘will-full’’ form as evaluative in
unambiguously declaring one particular vision of society to be better than another;
prescriptive in advocating the realization of a normatively preferred vision of
society; and totalizing in advocating the systematic and systemic transformation
of society.85 This she contrasts with the hesitant and restrained process orientation
of ‘‘utopian proposals which are provisional, temporary and reflexive, or which
celebrate the act of imagining rather than what is imagined.’’86 In the pedagogy
of Paulo Freire, one finds both at work. While ‘‘the educational comeback of
utopia’’ has thus far shied away from embracing utopia-as-system, and while
radical educators tend to present Freire as a ‘‘critical utopian,’’ Freire himself
highlighted the necessity of the pedagogical act of utopian annunciation. Without
a normative vision with which to illuminate the path toward human becoming,
utopian pedagogy is reduced to the celebration of objectless discursive spaces.
In practicing a utopian pedagogy of process, orientation, and system, Freire
stated, ‘‘What is implied is not the transmission to the people of a knowledge
previously elaborated, a process that ignores what they already know, but the act
of returning to them, in an organized form, what they themselves offered in a
disorganized form.’’87 This key point is phrased differently at different times —
teaching better what the people already know, transforming knowledge based
on feelings into knowledge based on critical understanding, and teaching with
precision what the educator receives with confusion.88 With regard to the design
for a new way of being that illuminates the path toward humanization, this, for
Freire, emerges from the learners’ reality in confused form and at the affective
level. The role of the educator is to work with learners to provide the design with
a deeper cognitive foundation and a sharper, more precise shape.
Borrowing a concept from Karl Mannheim, it is possible to interpret Freirean
pedagogy as ‘‘an active utopia.’’ According to Mannheim, ‘‘it is a very essential
feature of modern history that in the gradual organization for collective action
social classes become effective in transforming historical reality only when their

84. Freire, Daring to Dream, 26.

85. Ruth Levitas, ‘‘For Utopia: The (Limits of the) Utopian Function in Late Capitalist Society,’’ in The
Philosophy of Utopia, ed. Barbara Goodwin (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 34–35.

86. Ruth Levitas, ‘‘On Dialectical Utopianism,’’ History of the Human Sciences 16, no. 1 (2003): 148.

87. Freire, Pedagogy in Process, 24–25.

88. Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart, 273; and Freire, Pedagogy in Process, 134 and 25.
Webb Process, Orientation, and System 607

aspirations are embodied in utopias appropriate to the changing situation.’’89

The role of the educator is crucial here in giving clear utopian form to popular
aspirations. For Mannheim, the utopian conceptions of the educator seize on
currents present in society, give expression to them, flow back into the outlook
of a social group, and are translated by this group into action. Rather than
corresponding directly to a concrete body of articulated needs, the active utopia
‘‘transmits’’ and ‘‘articulates’’ the amorphous ‘‘collective impulse’’ of a group.90
While Freire’s utopian pedagogy starts from and is grounded in the experiences of
the educands, seizing and reflecting on the ‘‘collective impulse’’ of the group, it
is also an active and constructive pedagogy giving positive utopian expression to
this amorphous collective impulse.

Conclusion
Russell Jacoby argues that the reshaping and commodification of childhood
that has taken place over recent decades has diminished the foundations of utopian
thought: ‘‘If unstructured childhood sustains imagination, and imagination
sustains utopian thinking, then the eclipse of the first entails the weakening
of the last — utopian thinking.’’91 This chimes with Freire’s concerns about the
stifling of epistemological curiosity, the privatization of hope, and the foreclosing
of the future. It also signals the importance of education as a utopian endeavor.
Moving beyond the characterization of education as merely a site of cultural
reproduction, it is seen now as — potentially — ‘‘the foremost social means’’ of
liberating the imagination, redirecting the paths of human desire, and keeping the
future open to new possibilities.92 Educationalists are urged to work and to act to
ensure that education operates as a ‘‘site of utopian possibility.’’93
The difficulties are considerable. ‘‘Banking education’’ has increasingly
displaced student-centered approaches as the exchange between teachers and
students is narrowed to one of teaching and learning for assessment and
certification; learning space has been colonized by a testing apparatus designed
to measure the extent to which students have digested a prescribed curriculum;
the education sector is framed by managerial values and a performative audit
culture whose emphasis on measurable outcomes has further entrenched a banking
concept of education; and the under-resourcing of the sector, and the struggle of
educators to cope with the resultant work intensification, have served to increase

89. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London:
Kegan Paul, 1940), 187.

90. Ibid., 185–186.

91. Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005), 30.

92. See Peters and Freeman-Moir, ‘‘Introducing Edutopias,’’ 9; and Giroux and McLaren, ‘‘Paulo Freire,
Postmodernism, and the Utopian Imagination,’’ 180.

93. Henry Giroux, ‘‘Educated Hope in an Age of Privatized Visions,’’ Cultural Studies/Critical
Methodologies 2, no. 1 (2003): 96.
608 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 62 Number 5 2012

the distance between students and teachers.94 It is the ensuing closure of critical
space within the education system, together with the need for a vocabulary of
hope to guide a transformative response to globalization, that underpins the calls
for a courageous embrace of utopian pedagogy.
Utopian pedagogy cannot, however, confine itself to creating spaces of critical
dialogue and communities of learning.95 Nor is it enough to interrogate the student
voice in order to uncover submerged longings and desires.96 As Mannheim rightly
highlighted, unless the longings, desires, and ‘‘collective impulse’’ of a group
are seized upon and articulated as a utopian system by the visionary educator,
then this collective impulse remains just an impulse — an objectless process —
because it lacks the ‘‘situationally transcendent ideas’’ that alone can guide and
direct transformative action.97 Without a positively enunciated utopian goal to
motivate and guide the praxis of purposive human actors, social hope will take
the form of a directionless passionate longing and the process utopianism that
emerges from and feeds back into this hope will run the risk of getting lost in
the romanticism of endlessly open projects — thus the pedagogical necessity,
recognized by Freire, of utopia as process, orientation, and system. The role of
the active utopian educator becomes one of unmasking reality, of illuminating
the path toward humanization, of sharpening the curiosity and radicalizing the
hope of the educands, and, crucially, of directing their purposive action toward the
realization of a utopian vision, system, and goal.

94. See Patrick Ainley and Joyce E. Canaan, ‘‘Critical Hope in English Higher Education Today,
Constraints and Possibilities in Two New Universities,’’ Teaching in Higher Education 10, no. 4 (2005):
435–446; Stanley Aronowitz, introduction to Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom, 1–19; and Cath Lambert and
Andrew Parker, ‘‘Imagination, Hope and the Positive Face of Feminism: Pro/Feminist Pedagogy in ‘Post’
Feminist Times?’’ Studies in Higher Education 31, no. 4 (2006): 469–482.

95. The form of utopian pedagogy advanced by Coté, Day, and de Peuter in Utopian Pedagogy.

96. The form of utopian pedagogy advanced by Giroux and McLaren in ‘‘Paulo Freire, Postmodernism,
and the Utopian Imagination.’’

97. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 185.