Swami Vivekananda and Paulo Freire as Transformative World Educators

This paper critically examines the educational thoughts of Swami Vivekananda and Paulo Freire as transformative forces in global education, exploring their relevance and limitations within their ideas for contemporary educational systems. Both thinkers can be seen as counter-hegemonic intellectuals, who challenged colonial and capitalist epistemologies, e.g. Vivekananda’s Vedantic universalism and Freire’s critical pedagogy. While the first is known for his enchantment with Vedantic philosophy, his thoughts are less explicit in terms of an educational theory. However, his ideas on moral, spiritual, and character development offer rich insights into transformative education for the downtrodden masses. Freire, on the other hand, is internationally well-known for his work on ‘critical pedagogy’, which highlights liberation of the oppressed masses through education. Despite their shared goal of emancipation of the masses, both thinkers’ reliance on universalist assumptions and foundationalist tendencies unwittingly may maintain the very power structures they seek to deconstruct. This paper proposes an innovative, additional (supplementary) pedagogical framework, called as ‘border pedagogy’, which, tries to synthesize the insights of Vivekananda and Freire to offer a transformative theoretical model for education for relevance in the contemporary global context.