Silence of Dewey and Freire About the Nature of the Ecological Crisis
At first glance it may appear as unfair to criticize Dewey for ignoring the ecological crisis since it was well after his death that scientists and elements of the public recognized the sustaining capacity of natural systems were being undermined. Yet the fact remains that the ecological crisis as we now understand it was well underway during Dewey’s most formative years. The method of intelligence, he tells us over and over again, is initiated by problematic situations—that is, when there is doubt about how to proceed. The clear cutting of the forests across the United States was in full swing during his years in Chicago and New York. The killing off of millions of bison, which was given wide press coverage, also escaped his attention as a problematic situation. The writings of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir also appear to have escaped his attention, as well as conservation arguments of Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot.

It should also be pointed out that Dewey, the apostle of democratic decision making, also ignored the killing off of the indigenous people in order to appropriate their land, and the efforts to culturally subjugate those who survived what some have called genocide. Dewey was born in 1859. He was in his twenties and thirties when America turned its attention from the Civil War to carrying out a number of military campaigns in the West. The campaign against the Sioux lasted from 1854 to 1890, against the Southern Plain indigenous cultures from 1860 to 1879, against the Nez Perce in 1877, and against the Apache from 1861 to 1900. The best explanation for Dewey’s silence about these morally “problematic” situations is that he shared the racist attitudes of his era—which were reflected in his references to how the lives of “savages” (his word) were governed by habits rather than the use of intelligence.

As many of his current followers are likely to react negatively to the criticism that Dewey shared the racist attitudes of his times, I shall provide a quotation from Democracy and Education (1916)—which is a surprising book for the expression of such ignorance and prejudice by one of the country’s leading philosophers. The following represents his explanation of the “savage’s” lack of intelligence.

Savages react to a flaming comet as they are accustomed to react to other events that threaten the security of their life. Since they try to frighten wild animals or their enemies by shrieks, beating of gongs, brandishing weapons, etc., they use the same methods to scare away the comet. To us, the use of the method is plainly absurd—so absurd that we fail to note that savages are simply falling back upon habit in a way which exhibits its limitations. (396) Dewey’s way of representing habits, or what in a cultural context can be understood as traditions, as the opposite of the exercise of what he calls the method of intelligence represents another basic misconceptions that has broader implications that will be examined later.

Paulo Freire, the contemporary theorist who has followers around the world, also ignored the ecological crisis. His most influential book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (English translation published in 1969) as well as his other books published in the nineteen seventies and eighties, are totally silent on the implications of the ecological crisis for educational reform. The closest he comes to acknowledging the crisis is his generalized reference to “environmental problems”. But this was not followed by any rethinking of his main concern—which was to explain how the practice of “conscientizacao” (awaking of critical awareness) enables people to realize their fullest potential as human beings. Moacir Gadotti, as mentioned earlier, claims that just before his death, Freire began to write on the need for an “ecopedagogy.” At an international conference held in Toronto in 2003, Gadotti predicted that when Freire’s initial thoughts on the nature of an ecopedagogy were published he would be recognized as a leading environmental thinker. In the meantime, Gadotti’s writings were to be understood as an elaboration on Freire’ s unpublished insights.

While we only have access to Gadotti’s elaborations on Freire’s last thoughts on the educational reform implications of the ecological crisis, it is important to recognize that Gadotti’s proposals are consistent with Freire’s two main ideas: that there is only one legitimate approach to knowledge (critical reflection), and that the opposite approach to knowledge involves the “banking approach” to learning. The development of a planetary consciousness, according to Gadotti, requires that knowledge not be passed on from one generation to the next. To quote him directly, “Education then, would not be as Emile Durkheim explained as the transmission of Culture ‘from one generation to the next,’ but the grand journey of each individual in his interior universe and the universe that surrounds him.” Gadotti’s recommendation that a planetary consciousness should replace the current diversity of the world’s cultures is consistent with Freire’s idea that there is only one approach to knowledge. This profoundly questionable recommendation is justified on the following grounds: “Globalization in itself does not pose a problem, since it constitutes an unprecedented process of advancement in the history of humankind” (2002, 8).

Equally questionable is Gadotti’s sweeping generalization that knowledge should not be passed from one generation to the next. Given that being born into a culture and learning its languaging patterns is an inescapable aspect of human existence as well as cultural transmission, Gadotti’s recommendation seems extremely naïve as well as problematic. Yet, this is where Gadotti is accurately representing Freire’ hard-and-fast distinction between what he identifies as the de-humanizing banking approach to learning and the humanizing nature of critical reflection. As Freire put it:

Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men transform the world. To exist humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Men are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection. But while to say the true word—which is work, which is praxis—is to transform the world, saying that word is not the privilege of some few men, but the right of every man. Consequently, no one can say a true word alone—nor can he say it for another, in a prescriptive act which robs others of their words. ( 1974, 76) 

Freire goes on to discuss the importance of dialogue as a way of avoiding any form of domination, but he ignores the problem of whether it is totally possible to avoid what he refers to as “dehumanizing aggression.” The opposite of dehumanizing aggression is when each individual and, by extension, each generation, is expected to arrive at her/his own understanding—including what changes are occurring in the environment and what the implications are for “transforming the world.” Even if individuals were to arrive at an understanding of the extent of the ecological crisis, this knowledge could not be passed on to the next generation without it becoming an example of “dehumanizing aggression”—to recall Freire’s words.