Malefic generosity

Critical-political discourses in the field of curriculum studies concern themselves with issues of power, privilege, and oppression with the aim of understanding how education functions to maintain unjust and unequal relations in a society. Malefic generosity is a concept from Freirean critical pedagogy that concerns the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed and suggests a contradiction between pedagogical intention and pedagogical effect. Understanding the concept of malefic generosity can help to clarify why teachers with purportedly the best of intentions fail to achieve successful academic results with students from marginalized or oppressed groups.

Paulo Freire, in his landmark book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, contrasts two forms of education. Hegemonic education functions to integrate students into the logic of an unjust system, fails to make existing structures of domination explicit, and does not provide conceptual tools to question, challenge, and overcome inequality and injustice. Its pedagogical method has been termed by Freire as banking educationa form of teaching and learning in which the student is considered an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge deposits by the teacher. This form of education promotes passivity and conformity. In contrast, emancipatory education is characterized by the examination and analysis of forms of domination in concrete situations, consciousness raising about ways to challenge structures of oppression, and solidarity between teacher and student. The aims of emancipatory education are freedom, autonomy, and the acquisition of conceptual tools to transform reality toward greater participation, justice, and equality.

Freire characterizes this emancipatory pedagogy as one of authentic, humanist generosity. However, the investment of oppressors, who hold political and intellectual power and resources, in the maintenance of their own privilege and power, precludes their authentic participation in the education of those who are oppressed. This preclusion raises the question of who will participate in the implementation of a liberating pedagogy. Certain members of the oppressor class do join in solidarity with members of the oppressed class and can fulfill the function of facilitators of conscientization, a term coined by Freire that signifies the exposition of social and political contradictions and the resultant learning that can lead to overcoming oppressive conditions. This role and function, however, is fraught with unanticipated or unintended consequences. People who shift allegiance to the side of the exploited or the oppressed carry with them many markers of class and privilege (e.g., speech patterns, body language, tastes), markers which if unexamined can result in conscious or unconscious bias, prejudice, feelings of superiority, condescension, and a failure to trust in their students' abilities to think and to know. Hence, although they have taken the side of the powerless and may truly desire to transform the existing unjust social order, [Page 555]they can end up reinforcing the status quo. Such generosity is considered to be as malefic as the generosity of the oppressors, who though they may dole out favors, rewards, wages, charity, and knowledge, have no interest in transforming the basic structures of exploitation and domination.

There are a number of methods designed to obviate malefic generosity, though no method can substitute for long-term, committed comradeship and communion with those whom one would help liberate. The educator who would engage in emancipatory education must have an abiding faith in the potential of themselves and their fellow humans to grow and develop in meaningful ways and to transform unjust conditions of existence. There must be a deep commitment to decenter dominant forms of discourse and theoretical suppositions and a willingness to learn from those who are culturally different from oneself. Educators need to develop a profound sense of trust in students, trust that can only be cultivated through authentic dialogue. He or she must be willing to equalize the role of teacher and student so that education becomes not something one does for or to someone, but with each other. Concrete strategies for authentic education include shared decision making about what is worth knowing, what will be studied, how learning will be expressed, and how the classroom or learning environment is structured. Perhaps most important is the mutual cultivation of critical thinking and a commitment to action on behalf of creating a more just world.

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