The False Consciousness of “Consciousness Raising”

In the early 1960's, before the military coup, Paulo Freire and his collaborators experimented with a new method of literacy education in the Northeast of Brazil. The basic idea was simple: Teaching literacy was not to be an isolated activity but part of a larger broadening of die intellectual horizons of the previously illiterate. An important aspect was political. The illiterate were to learn reading and writing at the hand of topics (Freire called these “generative themes”) that concerned everyday experience. For the impoverished and rural proletariat of the Northeast this was to a high degree an experience of deprivation, exploitation, and oppression.