Far from Brazil, 40 years on, and without the guidance of an acolyte, it reads like a peculiar piece of Marxist rhetoric, designating students as teachers and calling for them to "critically recognize" the oppressor "as a force 'outside' themselves" in order to be "more fully human." Anyone who has been through, or near, a typical school of education is familiar with this language—but would not have been before Freire’s book. The philosophy’s oblique relationship to what schooling actually is recalls how, for medievals, learning to recite in Latin and Greek and engaging in disputes about religion was what constituted a proper education. Freire's work will look just as contingent in 100 years.

It’s one thing to think of leftism as a component of an education—although even that is open to question. The problem with Freire’s influence is that it has conditioned a sense that leftism should be the central pillar of education, with facts themselves distrusted as “dry” and “colonial” (a point Freire himself made), at best something to get to later or in passing. The uninitiated would be shocked at how deeply this notion pervades the way many teachers are “trained”—check with someone you know who’s getting an ed degree to get a sense of this. Example: an acquaintance has reported that two years of training at Columbia’s Teachers College included not a thing about actual classroom teaching technique and everything about shielding your students from a world of oppressors.

The idea is that this stuff is especially crucial when teaching poor and minority kids. Plus, white kids in private schools are less likely to be stuck with teachers who think this way, because private schools are less likely to require ed school certification. The adoption of Freire’s book by people caught up in a passing, quirky quest to unite their sixties politics with their classroom technique was a historical accident. Now set as a tradition, it has left countless innocent black kids (and others) undereducated at a crucial age. I wish it hadn’t happened. Specifically, black American history would be better off if Freire’s book had not been translated into English.