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scholars in the field as ‘magical hope’ (Davies, 1979), ‘wishful hope’ (McGreer,
2004) or ‘world-orchestrated hope’ (Waterworth, 2004). For Freire, not only is this
magical hope the spontaneous orientation of the human being, but it is also ripe for
exploitation. He thus shares the widely-expressed concern that the search for
completeness that characterises hope can all too easily be commodified, manipulated,
abused, managed and politically neutralised (Drahos, 2004; Rycroft, 1979; Hage,
2002; Tiger, 1999). For Freire, hope has been captured by individualism and its objec-
tive has been privatised. Instead of humanisation as a utopian project, hope under the
reign of neo-liberalism is directed toward self-improvement, striking it rich and
‘private notions of getting ahead’ (Freire & Shor, 1987, p. 110).
Hence the need for a kind of education in hope. There are clear affinities here
between Freire and Ernst Bloch. For Bloch, hope left to itself is undisciplined and
‘easily led astray’, taking the form of wishful, magical ‘meaningless hope’ or, when
manipulated by the bourgeoisie, a domesticated privatised ‘fraudulent hope’ (Bloch,
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1995, p. 144, p. 352, p. 5). Education is therefore required in order to provide ‘contact
with the real forward tendency into what is better’ (Bloch, 1995, pp. 144–145). By
means of utopian guiding images, hope can be educated, taught, ‘trained unerringly,
usefully, on what is right’ (Bloch, 1995, p. 3). Freire, too, argued that undisciplined,
naïve, spontaneous hope needed educating in order to connect it firmly to the project
of humanisation – to sharpen, clarify and illuminate its utopian objective. The need
for utopian, humanising education is rendered all the more important because of the
continual operation of dehumanising forces. Because the dominators ‘have nothing to
announce but the preservation of the status quo’, they continually strive to domesti-
cate the future and render it merely ‘a repetition of the present’ (Freire, 1972a, p. 41,
p. 72). In this context, ‘the struggle for the restoration of utopia [is] all the more
necessary. Educational practice itself, as an experience in humanization, must be
impregnated with this ideal’ (Freire, 1998a, p. 103).

The pedagogy of annunciation
Given the importance attached by Freire to the pedagogical task of utopian annuncia-
tion, the annunciation of ‘a certain societal design’ to guide the hope and inspire the
action of purposive human beings (1993, p. 140), it is surprising to find so little annun-
ciation in Freire’s own work. Aside from elastic phrases such as ‘radical democracy’
(Freire et al., 1994, p. 75) and ‘truly democratic socialism’ (Freire, 2007b, p. 49), it is
difficult indeed to find any concrete positive articulation of Freire’s design for a better,
humanised world. His vision comprises instead the rejection of ‘some conditions that
appear to me as obviously against the beauty of being human’ (Freire, 2007a, p. 131).
Thus ‘the dream of a new society’ is the dream of a society that is less ugly, less
perverse, less evil, less discriminatory, less racist, less machista; a society without
inhumanity, wickedness, alienation and degradation. While one could certainly char-
acterise this as a dream, it is highly questionable whether it constitutes a positive
utopian vision in the sense of the imaginary reconstitution of society (Levitas, 2007).
The tension here stems in large part from a tension in Freire’s understanding of
human hope. It is worth reminding ourselves that Freire’s philosophy was rooted
deeply in his Christian faith (Freire, 2007b, p. 104) and his ‘love for Christ and hope
that He is the light’ (Freire, 1996, p. 87). As traditionally understood within Christian
philosophy, to hope in Christ is to trust that being en route makes sense and has mean-
ing. As finite erring creatures, we can neither comprehend nor imagine where the path