Page 3 - Webb_(2010)

328 D. Webb

The experience of hope, its educability and mistaken forms are important contem-
porary questions. At a time when sources of hope increasingly appear foreclosed,
educators are being urged to resist the temptation to clutch at hope in its simplistic or
naïve forms and to direct their efforts toward nurturing and sustaining ‘complex’ or
‘critical’ hope (Duncan-Andrade, 2009; Halpin, 2001b). It is here that a detailed
exploration of Freire’s understanding of human hope may prove instructive, for he too
warned of the dangers associated with naïve, unsophisticated, undisciplined hope, and
always insisted that his was not the ‘vain hope’ of ‘an inveterate dreamer’ (Freire,
1998a, p. 26) or ‘the false hope of one who hopes for the sake of hoping’
(Freire, 1978, p. 60). Placing human hope at the heart of his educational philosophy,
Freire claimed to be articulating a true and well-founded ‘critical hope’ that served to
counter the crippling fatalism of neoliberalism (Freire, 1998a, p. 70).
This article explores two key questions. First, if hope is regarded as a constant
search then towards what should the search be directed? What, in other words, is the
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proper objective of ‘critical hope’? Second, if every care must be taken not to experi-
ence hope in a mistaken form, then how exactly is a true and well-founded hope to be
experienced? What are its cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions? Freire
was never a systematic thinker, and it is unsurprising, therefore, that he never offered
a systematic philosophy of hope. Like other areas of his thought, his reading of hope
contained tensions and contradictions, and I want to explore these by locating Freire’s
thought in the wider context of the philosophy of hope. The aim is thus to further our
understanding of a crucial aspect of Freire’s work and in so doing to raise issues of
relevance to contemporary debates concerning the kind of hope that educators should
be striving to nurture.

Hope, education and the ‘unfinishedness’ of the human condition
What is hope? Is it an emotion, a cognitive process, a disposition, a state of mind, an
instinct, a basic need, a mystery? Is it biologically rooted or socially constructed,
hotwired into the genome or learned during childhood, a chemical reaction in a neural
circuit or a divine gift awaiting a response? The position one takes on these questions
has profound implications for one’s understanding of the relationship between hope
and education (Webb, 2007). Rick Snyder, a pioneer in the field of hope psychology,
was convinced that hope is a cognitive process that is learned. Defining hope as ‘a
type of goal-directed thinking in which the protagonists perceive themselves as being
capable of producing routes to desired goals, along with the motivations to initiate and
sustain usage of those routes’ (Snyder, 2000, p. 25), Snyder argued that this type of
thinking was established and developed in children by the age of 12. Snyder thus
emphasised the role of education in helping to instil hope in children, and focused in
particular on the key role of early years education. If hope is a learned cognitive
process then it can also, of course, fail to be learned, and Snyder talked in this context
of people who are quite literally hopeless, those lacking hope ‘because they were not
taught to think in this manner’ (Snyder, 2002, p. 253). Identifying the ‘low hopers’
and ‘no hopers’ using a questionnaire-based individual–differences measure, Snyder
recommended individual hope therapy as an educative tool for instilling goal-directed
thinking in adults (Lopez et al., 2000).
This is far removed from Paulo Freire, who begins his Pedagogy of hope by declar-
ing that ‘Hope is an ontological need… I am hopeful, not out of mere stubbornness,
but out of an existential concrete imperative’ (1994, p. 2). In contrast to Snyder, Freire