Paulo Freire and the pedagogical traditions of the subject English

Paulo Freire and thepedagogical traditions ofthe subject English

Dr. David Stevens1

Durham University School of Education

AbstractI seek here to explain and elaborate on how and why Paulo Freire’s work hassignificance for educators in today’s ‘affluent’ west, not least in reminding uspowerfully of core critical and celebratory values at a time when manyteachers, and not only of English, feel under huge pressure – a pressure that infact verges on the oppressive. My focus here is on native language teachingand learning – English, in effect – thus echoing Freire’s concern for criticalliteracy and pedagogy and how these may relate constructively tofundamentally Romantic traditions of English pedagogy.

Key Wordscritical pedagogy, English teaching traditions, romanticism, Paulo Freire,praxis and synthesis

Some reflections on radical traditions in EnglishA colleague recently explained to me that Paulo Freire’s insights into educationhave no relevance for present day UK educators or teacher educators for threereasons: firstly, Freire was concerned largely with adult education; secondly,the context of his work was one characterized by extreme oppression andconditions amounting to slavery; and, finally, he worked almost entirely withilliterate, or at best semi-literate, subjects. I profoundly disagree with thiscolleague’s assertion, and in this paper I’d like to say why, and in particularwhy and how Paulo Freire’s work has continuing – and indeed growing –significance for educators in today’s ‘affluent’ west, not least in reminding uspowerfully of core critical and celebratory values at the heart of educationat a time when many teachers, and not only of English, feel under huge

1Corresponding author: [email protected]

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English in Education Vol.46 No.2 2012 DOI: 10.1111/j.1754-8845.2012.01122.x

pressure – a pressure that in fact verges on the oppressive. My focus here is onnative language teaching and learning – English, in effect – thus echoingFreire’s concern for critical literacy as the basis for a liberating conception ofeducation, and his imaginative emphasis on language as centrally significantfor all experience. As Freire himself expressed it:

‘Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished byfalse words, but only by true words, with which men and womentransform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, tochange it. … Human beings are not built in silence, but in word,in work, in action-reflection’ (1970: 69).

There is something especially apt, I feel, in focusing through the particular lensof English. The subject has in many respects embodied and exemplified thepedagogical tensions and battles of the past three decades (Stevens andMcGuinn 2004, Ellis 2007). English teachers have been in the forefront of thestruggle against reductionist strangulation, both practically and theoretically:witness, for example, the movement towards linguistic diversity (as opposedto a narrow insistence on Standard English as the only ‘correct’ version),for intercultural literary scope beyond the assumed British ‘classics’, formulti-modal exploration instead of limited (and limiting) instrumental literacy,and for genuinely critical literacy in the face of bland obedience to pre-ordained generic characteristics (Alexander 2007). In this radical context,Glazier’s neat formulation is helpful:

‘Critical literacy essentially asks one first to understand how it isthat texts perpetuate systems of oppression and suppression andthen moves on to identify ways of disrupting the status quo’(2007: 377).

Particularly interesting throughout this time of flux is the continuingcombination of radical criticality and Romantic celebration in the pedagogy ofEnglish (Stevens 2011) – not always comfortably, but certainly dynamically –and in this I wonder whether English may be seen as a microcosm for wider(and perhaps deeper) cultural movements in education. It is this possibility Iexplore here, partly in terms of the English experience reflecting broadereducational concerns, and – perhaps more importantly, in an era of hugeuncertainty – partly as suggestive of philosophical and practical ways forward.

The subject English, then, may provide this helpful lens through which to vieweducation more generally, having its roots in what Abbs has called ‘the tougherside of Romanticism’ (1976: 5). Inglis (1987: 11–12) developed this observation,noting that:

‘English teachers are caught upon the twist point of contemporaryBritish politics. They are structurally impelled by the drives of

English in Education Vol.46 No.2 2012 Paulo Freire and pedagogical traditions

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society towards its inhuman and ungainsayable goals:production, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, profitability,consumption – the technical imperatives. At the same time, theyhave tried to keep faith with another, better tale of the goodpersonal life, and even the good and public society… . Teachersof English have been contradictorily prominent in providing aradical critique of their society allied to a strong sense of theirduty towards the inevitable creativeness of ordinary lives’.

If anything, this observation is all the more pertinent today, although the‘radical critique’ may be less noticeable in a school culture of more or lesswilling compliance (Ellis 2007). I find, however, that a significant majority ofstudent teachers of English I encounter continue to be drawn to subversive,creative, and inspirational models of English teaching, as underlined by morerecent research (Marshall 2000, Marshall, Turvey and Brindley 2001), and bycountless professional conversations. And this despite, or perhaps to somedegree because of, the overcrowded, over-prescribed, over-tested curriculumwe now have; a curriculum serving, directly or indirectly, a progressively lessequal social order increasingly manifesting signs of deprivation and hardship.As Ellis (2002: 1) puts it:

‘The prodigious volume of initiatives, frameworks, standards,audits, skills tests, performance indicators and all the othermonstrous paraphernalia of a technocratic, accountability-obsessed bureaucracy have truly destructive effects; they sapteachers’ creative energies, they regard the teaching of readingand writing as a science (in which we can guarantee exactlywhat effect X or Y will have on children) and they disengageindividual teachers from a community of shared knowledge andvalues … that gives us a sense of purpose and an identity’.

The authoritarian nature of many schools, it seems to me, is increasinglyapparent, and damagingly felt by teachers, non-teaching staff, and pupils, thussharpening the need for a critical and principled response.

In this context, the dynamic combination of practice and theory is, for me,critical, in all senses of that word: the one informs the other in what I hopemay be a genuinely creative enterprise. My purpose here is to formulate anddemonstrate positive theoretical responses to the current climate, building ondiverse but complementary approaches to the arts of English teaching and witha particular focus on the help that Paulo Freire’s thought may offer in such aproject: transcending the numbing dichotomy between unquestioning (andunquestioned) teaching busy-ness on the one hand, and the equallydebilitating submersion under the weight of theoretical complexity that cancharacterise the academy on the other. The key here is the notion of praxis, asdeveloped by Freire and others (Freire 1970; Giroux 2001) and neatly

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encapsulated in Freire’s own words: ‘A Reading of the world and a reading ofthe word… both together, in dialectical solidarity’ (Freire 1992: 90). But weneed first to consider the nature of the potential relationship between suchpraxis and the pedagogical traditions of English.

The Romantic Tradition of English and Critical Pedagogy‘The significance of Romanticism for the development of English is wellunderstood’ (Peel 2000: 60); maybe, but what are the possible implications ofsuch a tradition in terms of the critical context outlined above? The inescapabletension between social and individual aspects of life and culture, theprestigious place of the imagination, the nature of creativity and (looselydefined) spiritual growth, the credibility of all experience and feeling –including the darker side: all have direct and continuing relevance for English.There is not space here to examine in critical detail the nature of Romanticismin the English pedagogical tradition (please see fuller discussions in Stevens2011 and Stevens and Mcguinn 2004 – especially Chapter Six); nevertheless,some appraisal of the impact of Romanticism is required in the presentcontext. Considering (and countering) the sense that what he saw as theRomantically conceived subject English had developed as a pale substitute forreligious faith, Holbrook pointed out that ‘It is not a ‘‘religion’’: but it is adiscipline in which we use language, to grope beyond language, at thepossible meaning that life may have’ (Holbrook 1979: 237). It is in this spiritthat I work, but with a critical edge (as indeed did Holbrook, of course),drawing especially on Critical Pedagogy (CP) in its helpful radical distinctionbetween ‘‘banking’’ and holistic concepts towards the core educational‘vocation of becoming more fully human’ (Freire 1970: 26) – thus, incidentally,relating pertinently to a version of ‘personal growth’ so central to the RomanticEnglish pedagogical tradition. Appropriately enough, Coleridge offers insighthere, distinguishing between the ‘unsatisfactory profession’ of teaching (in histime, of course, but the relevance remains), and the balancing potential for asubversive alternative: fostering a ‘buoyancy of spirit’ through exploration ofwords as ‘living powers’ (Coleridge [1830] 1977: 315). There is inescapablecontradiction here, in that schooling is founded on compulsion, whereas‘buoyancy of spirit’ tends towards its libertarian opposite; as Harber writes:

‘The problem about most discussions about education is that theessential coercive and indoctrinational cultures of mass schoolingare overlooked. In blunt terms, based on the current model of thecompulsory day-detention centre, the school itself is a bullyinstitution. When you take the free will out of education, thatturns it into schooling’. (Harber 2004: 21.)

There is, I think, truth in this observation, and yet even in compulsoryeducation – in schools, effectively – there are many hopeful signs: the playingout of freedom and compulsion may perhaps be seen rather more dialectically,and thus more optimistically (Giroux 2001). If English as a subject is to take



the lead in formulating and enacting a pedagogy of liberation, and I believethe potential is there, we need to take this dialectic seriously, and explore itsimplications critically.

Returning for a moment to the critique of Freire’s relevance with which Ibegan this paper, why indeed should his life or thought be relevant to us,living as we do in the ‘developed’ first world where universal education is agiven? And even if relevant, how does Freire’s work sit with the Romantictradition? For me, Freire’s lifelong commitment to education as liberation –‘…working against the myths that deform us’ (Freire 1997: 41) – is acutely aptin a social context damagingly obsessed with the mundane and merelyinstrumental. There is the hard edge of criticality there, but to read Freireattentively is also to witness a Romantic spirit at work:

‘Born of a critical matrix, dialogue creates a critical attitude. Itis nourished by love, humility, hope, faith, and trust. When thetwo ‘poles’ of the dialogue are thus linked by love, hope andmutual trust, they can join in a critical search for something.Only dialogue truly communicates’ (Freire 1974: 40).

In striking contrast, today’s educational legislators talk in terms of ‘delivering’ acurriculum and aiming at pre-ordained ‘targets’, or, for teacher education atleast, uniform and rigid ‘standards’. By society’s metaphors so shall you knowit. Freire, on the other hand, posed questions addressing the ultimate purposesof education itself. In particular, he criticised what he aptly termed the‘banking’ model of teaching and learning: the unquestioning transmission ofwhatever goes for ‘knowledge’. Instead, he recommended actively democraticinteraction, constructive criticality, acknowledgement of varied models ofknowledge and insight, and, ultimately, the radical transformation of the worldaway from the debilitating profit motive. Of course this vision is political; asFreire himself maintained:

§’we are necessarily working against myths that deform us. As weconfront such myths, we also face the dominant power becausethose myths are nothing but the expression of this power, of itsideology’ (1997: 41).

The radical, subversive relevance to our own classrooms should be clear, thisphilosophy relating the ‘language of critique’ to the ‘language of possibility’(Freire 1974). It is precisely this combination that is vital: either one withoutthe other would be severely deficient – wholly negative, or purely idealistic.The teacher’s role is to balance these elements, managing the necessarydialectical tension between them. Seeing the word and the world (Freire’stelling fusion) as new, open to critical insight and a sense of wonder, tocritical distance and informed engagement, is absolutely fundamental here,and is at the heart of what Freire and his followers commend.



The dynamic role of the imaginationThe role of the imagination in making the necessary leap is vital in thiscontext. Coleridge’s celebrated distinction between fancy and imaginationmay be crucial, as is its centrality to Blake and other exponents ofRomanticism. However, from a rather different direction, Marcuse traces thepotentially boundary-bursting significance of the imagination at least back toKant:

‘The great conception which animates Kant’s critical philosophyshatters the philosophical framework in which he kept it. Theimagination, unifying sensibility and reason, becomes‘productive’ as it becomes practical: a guiding force in thereconstruction of reality – reconstruction with the help of a gayascienza, a science and technology released from their service todestruction and exploitation, and thus free for the liberatingexigencies of the imagination’. (Marcuse 1969: 38.)

Noticeable here is Marcuse’s insistence on the synthesising power of theimagination, in a radically critical context: ‘a rupture with the vocabulary ofdomination’ (ibid.: 40). The power of his prose itself reflects and animates itsmessage, suggesting the catalystic function of imagination as engine of praxis:potentially, the kernel of my thesis here. We find a similar kind of impact inthe words of Paulo Freire, developing the radical, essentially liberatingmessage of synthesis:

‘…the relations between human beings and the world mustconstitute the starting point for our reflections on thatundertaking [ie education]. These relations do not constitute amere annunciation, a simple sentence. They involve a dialecticalsituation in which one of the poles is the person and the other theobjective world – a world in creation as it were. If this historical-cultural world were a created, finished world, it would no longerbe susceptible to transformation. The human being exists as such,and the world is a historical-cultural one, because the two cometogether as unfinished products in a permanent relationship, inwhich human beings transform the world and undergo theeffects of their transformation’. (Freire 1974: 131.)

Freire’s language derives its impact from an essentially Marxist interpretation ofhuman action and thought: dialectical materialism, in humane form (as indeedmay be found in much of Marx’s own writing). Elsewhere, Freire the Romanticcomes across more vividly, both in the medium of his prose and in itsidealistic message:

‘My dream is the dream of having a society that is less ugly andless unjust; a society in which it would be easier to love, and



therefore easier to live, easier to dream…’ (Interview with PauloFreire, in Rossatto 2005: 19).

Freire’s Romanticism seems to me inescapable here, as in the inspiringopening section of Pedagogy of the Heart (1997), an autobiographical accountredolent of Wordsworth, entitled ‘Under the Shade of the Mango Tree’. Freireargues lucidly for ‘an education of question’ as opposed to ‘an education ofanswers’, an argument for radical criticality but in the context of hope: ‘withouta vision for tomorrow, hope is impossible’ (Freire 1997: 45). Rossatto, indeed,makes a distinctly Wordsworthian observation in the preamble to his interviewwith Freire (Rossatto 2005: 11):

‘Humankind’s desire to construct hopeful experiences that propelmeaningful action and performance is often easily fulfilled bynature. When one is able to perceive oneself as a part of thenatural world, and not separate from it, and see nature as thesource of one’s life, how can one not be inspired or optimistic?’

I hope that something of the liberating sense of the potential relationshipbetween Romanticism and critical radicalism is beginning to accrue around thewords and thoughts of the dramatis personae of the dialogue.

That a sense of wonder at the nature of existence may be combined with astrongly critical and reflective standpoint, and that both these ‘distanced’positions may complement active, engaged immersion in social and culturalactivity (including teaching and learning), are key ideas here. The tension isthat between engaged involvement on the one hand, and critical, reflectivedistance on the other. This tension may lie at the heart of any creative act,including English (or indeed any) teaching. Involvement is here the motivatingforce, balanced by a sense of critical distance to give contextual understanding.The subject English has special significance in its sharp focus on language –how it both expresses and conceals meaning, often simultaneously. However,such notions seem a far cry from the concerns and preoccupations of mostEnglish classrooms. Indeed, the dominant official educational discourseassumes an alienation from the ultimate purposes in any philosophical sense(Alexander 2007). Gibson has characterised this alienation as fundamentally ‘astructure of feeling’, echoing perhaps Blake’s ‘mind forg’d manacles’ inLondon. Gibson analyses this tendency (following Habermas and others) as‘instrumental rationality’, signifying:

‘a preoccupation with ‘‘How to do it?’’ questions rather than withquestions of ‘‘Why do it?’’ or ‘‘Where are we going?’’. It is thusconcerned with means rather than ends, with efficiency more thanwith consideration of purposes. In schools one manifestation is astress on management and organisation at the expense ofconsideration of ‘‘What is education for?’’ (Gibson 1984: 83).



All this amounts to a potentially disastrous, alienating and dichotomousseparation of means and ends, of activity and purpose, with the processspawning its own dubious justification and particular – often impenetrable –rationality. But there could be something far more positive at stake here: anawakened appreciation of the possibility of a new synthesis between celebratoryand critical aspects of English pedagogy based precisely on conscious awarenessof the nature of alienating thought and practice. As Dewey had it, ‘Everyexperience is a moving force. Its value can be judged only on the ground ofwhat it moves toward and into’. (Dewey [1938] 1997: 38.)

Questions of cultureUnavoidable in this context, as they determine the real possibilities of teachingand learning, are notions of the culture of the classroom. As for other forms ofculture, the term is complex and contentious, but its manifestations lie at theheart of English teaching. As Eagleton has pointed out (2000), the term is oftenconsidered in opposition to an equally complex, slippery term – ‘nature’. Inthe educational context, this binary opposition suggests that the raw materialof the classroom – pupils in their ‘untaught’ state, in effect – correspond to‘nature’, to be modified (taught, in other words) by those representing, insome form or other, ‘culture’. Eagleton, though, cuts into this all too familiarnotion of culture, noting that:

‘If culture means the active tending of natural growth, then itsuggests a dialectic between the artificial and the natural, whatwe do to the world and what the world does to us. …So it is lessa matter of deconstructing the opposition between culture andnature than of recognising that the term ‘‘culture’’ is alreadysuch a deconstruction’. (Eagleton 2000: 2).

I hear in this an echo of Freire’s ‘world’ and ‘word’ interplay, and as far as theEnglish classroom is concerned, the matter is significant. This sort offormulation of the complex relationship between culture and nature, ratherthan a mistakenly conceived simplistic opposition, implies the centrallyRomantic and democratic notion of the validity of all experience, not simplythat which is officially sanctioned. Abbs, too, is helpful here, urging ‘ademocratic and radical re-appropriation’ of the Romantic traditions of Englishpedagogy (Abbs 1996: 25) in favour of ‘new narratives, resonant with the pastbut oppositional in meaning’ (ibid: 27). His emphasis on the arts is especiallyapt in the context of my exploration here, calling as he does for:

‘An alternative conception of the arts as an indispensable vehiclefor the development of consciousness without which any conceptof the good society would be impossible’ (ibid: 29).

We find a similar, if broader, appraisal of the critically Romantic tradition inHolbrook:



‘The fallacy of our inherited traditions of thought has been theexclusion of the subjective, and its failure to recognise theelement of personal participation, the essential participation ofthe knower in the known. There is no ‘‘objective’’ body ofknowledge, known once and for all … all knowledge iscontingent’ (Holbrook 1979: 81).

Again the similarity to CP’s concerns (Giroux 2001) is powerful, and helpful interms of developing the vital synthesis between traditions; Freire again:

‘Knowing, whatever its level, is not the act by which a Subjecttransformed into an object docilely and passively accepts thecontents others give or impose on him or her. Knowledge, on thecontrary, necessitates the curious presence of Subjects confrontedwith the world. It requires their transforming action on reality.… It is as a subject, and only as such, that a man or a womancan really know’ (1974: 93).

This is an essential tenet of my argument here, suggestive of a certain tensionwith which English teachers have to grapple, especially as we seek to extendthe nature of the subject precisely through the kind of participation Holbrookalludes to.

The radical possibilities of empowermentSo much depends on how successfully we may oppose as teachers thecrippling, disempowering determinism so prevalent in the current climate. Weneed instead to foster a sense of purpose, and an underlying sense that humanbeings may work together to bring about change for the better. Blake againoffers assistance here, in his insistence on a clear, all-encompassing sense ofdirection: such a sense informed his entire life’s work and addressedfundamental concerns about our future and its values. In this sense anyanswers – even tentative ones – are essentially prophetic:

‘Every honest man is a prophet; he utters his opinion both ofprivate and public matters. Thus: if you go on so, the result is so.He never says, such a thing shall happen let you do what youwill. A prophet is a seer, not an arbitrary dictator’. (Blake [ed.Keynes] 1967: 660).

This sense of participatory prophecy accords powerfully, as Blake’s insightsfrequently do, with Freire, who endorsed a view of praxis encapsulated in ‘theunderstanding of history as opportunity and not determinism’ (Freire 1992: 77),maintaining elsewhere that,

‘Education is thus constantly remade in the praxis. In order tobe, it must become. … Problem-posing education is



revolutionary futurity. Hence it is prophetic (and, as such,hopeful). Hence, it corresponds to the historical nature ofhumankind. Hence, it affirms women and men as beings whotranscend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, forwhom immobility represents a fatal threat…’ (Freire 1970: 65).

Or, as Blake expressed it even more succinctly in his Proverbs of Hell, ‘ExpectPoison from Standing Water’ (Blake 1995: 107).

Another of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell, ‘One law for the lion and the ox isoppression’, addresses directly the issues of difference, of respect forsubjectivity and autonomy. In this Blake prefigures radical educationalcommentators grouped around the notion of CP, building on Freire’spioneering work. In particular, the nature of difference as potentiallyliberating has powerfully come to the fore, replacing the modernist proposalthat insistence on uniform standards for schools will automatically result inacademic or social equality of opportunity: an ‘inclusive discourse ofdifference that views formal education as perpetuating pedagogical practicesand which impede academic growth of certain groups of students in waysthat most people do not seem to recognise’ (Gale and Densmore 2000:123).

Precisely in order to achieve this elusive recognition, English may play adecisive role. Diverse textual readings and the creation of wide-rangingartefacts, fostering simultaneous breadth and depth in meaning-making, arefundamental to successful and adventurous English teaching. The centrality ofliterature in the English curriculum is, for me, crucial here – certainly not inopposition, or as hierarchically superior, to other aspects of English teaching,but rather in dynamic relationship with them. John Dewey, celebrating theliberating power of literature, lucidly stated what many English teachers stillstrongly feel, that:

‘Art breaks through barriers that divide human beings, which areimpermeable in ordinary association. This force of art, commonto all the arts, is most fully manifested in literature. Its medium isalready formed by communication…’ (Dewey 1934: 244).

The uses of literature in teaching are at once profoundly intense andenormously wide-ranging. As the novelist Aidan Chambers maintains:

‘I would go as far as to say that it is this particular use oflanguage – the literary use that some have called ‘storying’ – thatdefines humanity and makes us human. …this particular formof language and our skill in using it empower us in being whatwe are, and make it possible for us to conceive of being morethan we are’ (Chambers 1985: 2–3).



The possibilities for inter-textual, social and aesthetic combinations ofexperience and insight are exciting – indeed they characterise much of thebest English teaching in practice, along the lines of C.S.Lewis’s dictum:‘through literature I become a thousand people and yet remain myself’ (inChambers 1985: 5). And it’s not just for English teachers that poetic insights areapt; Griffiths reminds us, from a socially critical standpoint, that:

‘A metaphor is what it does. A metaphor, because of the way itbrings together things that are unalike, re-orients consciousness,which customarily connects things that are alike. Poetry,obviously, is made of metaphors. I keep asking teachers to thinkmore metaphorically, not go straight ahead’ (2002: 130).

There may indeed be a means here of creating, through the conscious use ofcrafted language, both meaning (critical, questioning) and celebration (magical,convivial) out of everyday experience. Elsewhere, I have tried to illustrate inmore vivid detail what such a classroom may look like and how it may even gosome way to confront and counter the prevailing curricular agenda: in particular,I have explored the use of the ‘Martian’ conceit (as developed by Craig Raine,Heathcote Williams and others) in poetry-based lessons to occasion bothwondrous celebration of life’s mystery and a Freirean critique of society’s all tooeasily accepted norms (Stevens and McGuinn 2004: 124–138).

The challengePerhaps we are beginning now to form a tentative answer to the challenge asprovocatively stated by radical commentators such as Hoyles, a generation ago:

‘Most of the time we don’t question the purpose of literacy. Inschool its function so often seems simply one of social control. Ifit is to be liberating, the problem is how to change the context. …The problem is how to revolutionise the total context’.

(Hoyles 1977: 30.)

In order to offer some sort of working resolution of this question, there needsto be genuine pedagogical reflection in the sense that Dewey first suggested asthe basis of his theory of democratic education:

‘… reflective thinking, in distinction from other operations towhich we apply the name of thought, involves (1) a state ofdoubt, hesitation, perplexity, mental difficulty, in which thinkingoriginates, and (2) an act of searching, hunting, inquiring, tofind material that will resolve the doubt, settle and dispose of theperplexity’ (1933: 12).

Again the similarity to Romantic thought is striking, and particularly relevant tothe teaching of English, frequently alone among the core curricular subjects in



its emphasis on the processes of perception in learning, the world as it entersexperience through language, as opposed to the acquisition of a vast body ofinformation in the guise of ‘knowledge’ (Medway 2002).

Dewey himself emphasised the dynamic triangular nature of learning in thesense outlined here, involving knowledge-as-perception, experience, andreflective thinking, in the context of a wider democratic project that linkededucation and society (Freire 1974, Guilherme 2002). Dewey, indeed, wasconcerned to stress a libertarian dimension of education, an absolute insistenceon freedom as its basis, but an educated freedom, ‘not the illusion of freedom’(Dewey 1938). Subsequent radicalisation and extension of Dewey’s arguments,to encompass political and social as well as pedagogical dimensions ofstruggle, by Freire and his followers (broadly conceived), have furtherstrengthened their validity in the educational context. We need, I think, toengage critically in what Giroux, following Freire, terms

‘…concrete utopianism. It is a call for alternative modes ofexperience, public spheres that affirm one’s faith in the possibilityof creative risk-taking, of engaging life so as to enrich it…’(2001: 242).

Finally, to return to Blake and the ‘mind forged manacles’ he hears sooppressively in alienated London. Manacles they are, to all intents andpurposes, but in seeing their ‘mind-forged’ nature the poet suggests the subtleconnection between social reality and consciousness, objectivity andsubjectivity, cause and effect. In effect this is a vivid evocation of whatHabermas (1970) called the ‘intersubjectively recognised subject’, transcendingthe false, and unhelpful, dichotomy between ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ worlds andwords, and between such traditions as the Romantic and the radically critical.The teaching of English could have as its central aim the liberation of thismanacled world, and the starting point may well be the Blakean ‘minuteparticulars’ of the classroom, including the manacles, mind-forged orotherwise, to be found there.

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