What this article seeks to do is to examine the views of Freire and Illich on technology in education, to attempt to see if these can be reconciled in order to provide a framework to guide the use of technology by radical educators.

Freire and Illich have not tended to be seen as very compatible by education theorists. Freire spawned the tradition of Critical Pedagogy. While he saw education as one of the cultural tools used by the dominant power structure to give itself legitimation and to indoctrinate citizens into compliance, it could also act as a site of possible consciousness-raising, where oppressed people and classes could be given the critical skills to understand and to resist the power structures which dominate them, while also being given the more technical skills to make their way in the world. Freire’s view of the use of technology was an outgrowth of such a view. For Freire, technology tended to operate on behalf of the ruling capitalist class, and served as a bulwark of capitalism against socialism and to intensify social inequality. Still, he believed, like Marx, that in itself, technology was essentially politically neutral. It could be put to any use – for the ruling class or for the people – depending on how it was used. As a consequence, technology itself could have some emancipatory potential, if this last could be properly harnessed. The goal of teaching about technology, therefore, is to give students a critical understanding of how technology works, in order to give them the ability to resist the manipulation and propaganda to which technology is often put. Students in the radical classroom, moreover, should be made to see the emancipatory potential of technology and how it could be used to create a more just society.

Though Freire and Illich began their careers as colleagues and friends in the 1970s, they eventually fell out over their differing views of education. While Freire gave rise to an entire lineage of educational theory, Illich’s work was not taken up by educators. This has to do with the anarchistic and idiosyncratic elements in Illich’s educational thought. Illich was basically opposed to formal schooling. He believed that education only served to indoctrinate students into compliance with the power structure. He believed that the imperative to continuous education (a by-product of modern society) was itself essentially bad, and that humans could live perfectly good lives without much education, simply reacting to the natural world. Illich’s view of technology was similarly sceptical. He believed that technology constituted another set of human tools, but that often, these tools, rather than serving human beings, actually became their masters. Humans ended up serving the tools as ends in themselves and these introduced another complicating factor in the relation between humans and nature. But Illich was not completely technophobic, he also felt that individuals should learn to use the tools of technology, in order to avoid being completely dominated by them.

The article finds, therefore, that the views of Freire and Illich on technology in education are not that incompatible. Though technology has a tendency, inasmuch as it is introduced in a class society riven with inequality and exploitation, to simply work to further this inequality and exploitation, entrenching and protecting the interests of the ruling class against the rest of society, there is little choice but to teach students to use technology. Critical knowledge about the latter will help them to protect themselves against some of the dangers of technology, such as manipulation and propaganda that is diffused through it. Moreover, by learning technology, students are given the tools to survive economically in world dominated by technology. Finally, since, at root, technology itself is politically neutral, it is also bound to contain some emancipatory potential. The other goal of technology education, therefore, is to teach students to detect this potential and to use technology in the pursuit of social justice.   

Article:

https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/doi/pdf/10.2304/pfie.2007.5.4.431