Thursday Post: Freire vs. Stirner

In my EDF 300 course, we are reading a book called Wheels in the Head and in chapter 1 it talks about education and the authoritarian state. A philosopher named Max Stirner is brought up because he predicted how controlling students’ ideas in western schools would affect the way states are governed. Stirner believes education prevents people to be free. He thinks a free person is one who owns their ideas and if you are educated then you are owned by the ideas that are put in your head, so he tries to warn the people that education serves the purpose of control and domination similar to what Freire conveys in his text. Because Stirner was born before Freire’s time, I think Freire decided to dive deeper and analyze this issue of how education controls society, showing that this needs to be a topic of discussion.