Needing ‘Tomorrow as Fish Need Water’: Dystopia, Utopia, and Freire’s Pedagogy

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the philosophical-educational attention to Freire’s utopian pedagogy of the future and I argue that equal attention should be due to Freire’s dystopian account of the present. To this end, Freire’s utopia and dystopia are associated with the interplay of his notions of annunciation and denunciation. The role of dystopian denunciation for conscientization is then investigated and the ethico-political key characteristic of Freire’s utopianism is concomitantly emphasized. It is shown that, if we are to avoid lopsided interpretations of Freire that blunt the transformative-critical edge of his utopianism, we must supplement epistemological curiosity and radical hope with the ethico-political utopian aspect and recuperate the dialectical unity of denunciation and annunciation. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.