Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (review)

This book represents a missed opportunity. A polemicist in a hurry, McLaren does not provide an adequate analysis of the thought of either Ernesto Guevara or Paulo Freire. He does argue strenuously for the need to create a "pedagogy of revolution," which presumably would involve an attempt to transform popular consciousness on a grand scale so that the vast majority of the world's population could become "self-reflexive" agents "of struggle" (p. 88). His goal is to criticize contemporary capitalism, and not to analyze Guevara and Freire as historical actors.

It should hardly be surprising that this book will fail to satisfy historians, since they are not its intended audience. Since this review is intended for historians, and not educational theorists, I will address issues of primary interest to historians. There is no denying that Paulo Freire was Latin America's most significant educational theorist in the second half of the twentieth century. With the notable exceptions of Celso de Rui Beisiegel and Vanilda Paiva, however, there has been a tendency among those who write about Freire to ignore the historical context in which he operated, not least of all his roots in the developmental nationalism of the 1950s. One also would think, from the way that he is treated here, that Freire worked for the administration of Salvador Allende during his time in exile in Chile, instead of for the administration of Eduardo Frei. This is unfortunate, because it obscures much about the political evolution of Freire himself during what was, arguably, the most productive period of his life. Similarly, McLaren extracts Ernesto "Che" Guevara from his historical context, most particularly in terms of his role as the inspirer of "two, three, many Vietnams." Guevara's choice of violence as his means to political ends led to both his spectacular success in Cuba and his pathetic failure in Bolivia. That Guevara's primary contribution to Latin American history was as a proponent of a "pedagogy of love," as McLaren suggests, remains to be proven. The late Jacobo Timerman provocatively argued that Che, and those he inspired in his native land, greased "the wheels" of the Dirty Warriors' "killing machine." More recently, Paul Berman has suggested that Guevara's "unmentionable achievement" was the establishment of "Soviet-style prison camps in Cuba." Clearly, there is a need to move toward a less sentimental understanding of Guevara, especially at a time in which even students with "Bush 2000" T-shirts claim to be his admirers. Nevertheless, McLaren's prose is forceful, and his book might provoke some interesting discussion if assigned in a class on modern political movements in Latin America. Since the best biographies of Guevara available in English are too lengthy to use in undergraduate classes, this book might provide a reasonable alternative. His analysis of the symbolic uses of Che might be combined profitably with the movie El dia que me quieras.

It is unfortunate, however, that McLaren himself is so prone to quite literal demonization of his enemies, a practice I presume we will not encourage our students to emulate. Shouldn't those like McLaren who practice "critical pedagogy" have respect for what Freire called the "reciprocal power of dialogue"? And given recent trends in historical scholarship that have celebrated the agency of the popular classes, will any of us want to revive the concept of "false consciousness"? Otherwise, how can we criticize the Bolivian peasants for failing in their historic duty to support Guevara?