Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich: technology, politics and the reconstruction of education

This article examines the theories of education and technology held by two of the most important philosophers of education during the last few decades, Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich. These two related thinkers each charted a unique approach to the questions surrounding modern education and technology, and despite their widely acknowledged brilliance, and in Freire's case the establishment of an entire field of critical pedagogy throughout North America, almost no attention has been paid to examining their views on educational technology. This article fills that important gap and attempts to dialectically mediate their two positions towards a broader critique of media culture and the role of educational technology generally. By utilizing both Freire and Illich, it is argued, a critical pedagogy of technology can be reconstructed that is capable of speaking to today's needs, and this critical pedagogy itself can be reconstructive of the current terrain in education as it works to overcome inequalities through the appropriate use of technology and the establishment of critical consciousness on the issues surrounding technology and society. In her essay 'The Social Importance of the Modern School', Emma Goldman (1912) considers the importance of history as a subject of education, noting that schools must 'help to develop an appreciation in the child of the struggle of past generations, for progress and liberty, and thereby develop a respect for every truth that aims to emancipate the human race'. With this in mind, we might wonder about the legacy of radical pedagogues like Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, and whether their struggles still live for the students of standardized curricula, whose schools are littered with corporate advertising and products, and who are themselves either tracked into broken-down buildings lacking adequate textbooks and materials or into a cut-throat competition for admissions' placement that begins with preschool and continues on through college. Sadly, schools today are not regularly engaged by the emancipatory arguments and social movements sparked by the work of these two great mentors, who are among the late twentieth century's most important figures in the field of education due to their wide-ranging and perceptive theories linking politics and culture, capitalist economics and human ethics to a rigorous critique of schooling. Today, as schools cuddle up to business and replace programs for literacy with a profit- friendly 'computer literacy' (Aronowitz, 1985, p. 13), steadily moving computers from the production line to 'the center of the classroom' (Apple, 1992), those who currently theorize and practice education will find Freire's and Illich's philosophies of education extremely relevant to the wide range of questions that the current proliferation of technology produces for pedagogy. Routinely, culture everywhere is becoming saturated with media, in which many aspects of myriad people's lives are mediated by technology (Stone, 2001). Technologized media themselves now constitute Western culture through and through, and they have become 'the primary vehicle for the distribution and dissemination of culture' (Kellner, 1995, p. 35). Thus, as the sociologist Manuel Castells has noted: 'Politics that does not exist in the media ... simply does not exist in today's democratic politics' (1999, p. 61). While the North American followers of Paulo Freire