Critical Education in International Perspective

by Peter Mayo and Paolo Vittoria

published by Bloomsbury

Critical pedagogy, the philosophical and sociological enquiry into education and schooling practices, has long been associated with North American critique; however, Peter Mayo and Paolo Vittoria’s book, Critical Education in International Perspective, published by Bloomsbury in 2021, supplements this by resituating it within an international dimension, extending the boundaries of critical pedagogy to Afro-America, Latin America, Africa and Turkey.

The book consists of 12 chapters and carries an extensive introduction, outlining its mission to “critically address the relationship between education and power and issues concerning social justice”.

In this respect, the authors refer to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a foundational work in the history of critical pedagogy, and further influences by established North American philosophers, thinkers and educators such as John Dewey, the Frankfurt school, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Jürgen Habermas, Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren.

This study also diversifies its wide approach to the subject by considering other theorists and writers, less known in the Anglo-Saxon world, such as Lorenzo Milani, Aldo Capitini, Danilo Dolci and Ada Gobetti.

In line with the precepts of cri­tical pedagogy, Mayo and Vittoria appeal for educators to “take sides and not remain indifferent” to social injustice, and this lack of indifference in critical pedagogy is reflected in the Italian cultural hatred of all forms of social indifference, as present in Gramsci, Milani and Gobetti.

In the first of four parts, titled ‘Education, Markets and Alternatives’, Mayo and Vittoria consider the possibilities of alternative forms of education and life-long learning, especially in response to market needs.

These demands, however, do not necessarily translate into employment, regardless of the fact that life-long learning enjoys more funding opportunities.

In the wake of Freire’s ideas, the authors express that “forms of education that enable people to learn to express critically with work” are necessary.

A problem-posing form of edu­cation – one that draws collectively from learners’ experience – is preferable to one where educators and learners play out traditional and socially-assigned roles of teachers as depositors of knowledge and learners as passive receivers.

A separate chapter in this section focuses on two contemporary Italian feminist authors, Anna Maria Piussi and Antonia De Vita, who in the 1970s embarked on a project related to working class education where knowledge was based on “alternative social relations that allow for different and more humanistic types of […] social creation”.

In Part 2, Mayo and Vittoria perform ‘A Critical Reading of the World’, with a chapter dedicated to Freire’s foundational notion of critical pedagogy as an emancipatory education, one which resists the binds of neo­liberalism in favour of a social constructivism where know­ledge is acquired through colla­boration and the gentle erasure of teacher and student roles.

Here the tone is set for chapters centring on other figures whose life and work, albeit marginal, contributed to critical pedagogy. The first is the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, a pseudonym for Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga, and the first Latin American recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1945.

Two other chapters turn attention to anti-fascist Italian teacher and journalist Ada Gobetti and the Catholic priest Don Lorenzo Milani, whose schools of San Donato and Sant’Andrea in Barbiana, a scattered community of about 20 households outside of Florence, would become paragons of pedagogical difference and social emancipation in the post-war years.

Mayo and Vittoria appeal for educators to take sides and not remain indifferent to social injustice

Part 3, titled ‘Education and Migration’, comprises two powerful chapters that diversely approach migration, racism, and precarity ‒ summed up by Zygmunt Bauman as globalisation’s creation of “an entire human waste disposal industry” ‒ through a pedagogy of human solidarity.

Here, Mayo and Vittoria encourage participants to become ‘border-crossers’ and adopt an “authentic dialogue” structured on the “confrontation of ideas [rather than] sanitised exchanges”.

Part 4, ‘Popular Education, Social Movements and the Struggle for Independence’, consists of three chapters that take as their subject matter, respectively, the anti-colonial Amílcar Cabral, the former Tanzanian politician Julius K. Nyerere, and social movements and critical education in Brazil.

Mayo and Vittoria highlight how the critical pedagogical potential within these figures played out in historically and culturally specific moments. Cabral wed revolutionary practice with people’s education by revealing the colonial falsification of history and restoring faith in people’s cultures.

He also initiated literacy programmes in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde as a liberatory form of community politics and cultural action until his assassination in 1973.

Another chapter presents a wide-ranging genealogy of the role of social movements as learning sites in Brazil, especially the Movimento Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), considering the revolutionary role of popular education in Brazil in the early 1960s in the work of Freire, the Popular Culture Movement and the Basic Education Movement.

Mayo and Vittoria’s Critical Education in International Perspective, due out in hardcover this month, successfully highlights authors, movements and ideas that may have not yet enjoyed the recognition they deserve in the critical education archive.

The struggles identified in this book are multi-faceted and occupy diverse positions: the university, the school, etc. Photo: Shutterstock.com

The struggles identified in this book are multi-faceted and occupy diverse positions: the university, the school, the policy-making channels, state apparata, social movements and grass roots, trade unions, popular education initiatives, and more.

While Mayo and Vittoria warn that an education which “does not fully develop a critical stance […] constitutes an easy target or corpse for the vultures of marketisation and commodi­fication”, they identify promise in the presence of alternatives, concluding that “there are so many engaged in struggle […] to give up on hope”.

Undoubtedly, this book remains a must-read for all those people who have at heart issues of social justice education and critical education.

Manuel Joseph Ellul is by profession a teacher. He currently works and studies at the University of Toronto. A longer version of this article forms part of a review symposium, co-ordinated by Dr Kurt Borg (University of Malta) and the author, and published on The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (July 2022). A hardcover of the book is out this month.