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we are treading is leading. For Gabriel Marcel, therefore, the objective of hope ‘tran-
scends imagination’ and ‘every kind of representation’ so that in hoping ‘I do not
allow myself to imagine what I hope for’ (1962, pp. 45–46). This imperative to reject
the act of mental imaging means that ‘hope calls on us to walk in darkness’ (Tinder,
2001, p. 77). To claim, as Freire does, that utopian dreams are required to illuminate
and guide us along the path to ourselves is, on this understanding, to paralyse the
essence of ‘man-on-the-way’ and thus to commit ‘a sin against hope’ (Pieper, 1997,
p. 125). Indeed, it is common within Christian theology to dismiss the call for utopian
annunciation as symptomatic of a weak, cheap, desperate, diseased and delusional
hope (Gelwick, 1979; Macquarrie, 1978; Polkinghorne, 2002).
Freire, of course, was no friend of traditional Christian orthodoxy, nor was he
afraid to berate the Church for its ‘anaesthetic or aspirin practices’ (Freire, 1985,
p. 122). Aligning himself firmly with the theology of liberation, this was characterised
as ‘a prophetic, utopian theology, full of hope’ (Freire, 1985, p. 139). Freire’s influ-
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ence on this theology was not insignificant, Gustavo Gutiérrez himself acknowledging
that his insistence on the need for utopian annunciation was inspired by Freire
(Gutiérrez, 1971). Somewhat ironically, however, Gutiérrez was for more comfortable
than Freire in giving positive prescriptive content to his utopian annunciation and was
far more at ease in arguing that this utopian vision was a project to be realised in
history (Webb, 2008). Regarding the proper objective of hope, Freire’s position is
closer to the political theology of Jürgen Moltmann than the liberation theology of
Gutiérrez. Freire, like Moltmann, always remained sensitive to the notion that
attempting to define and attain a fixed utopian goal would ‘close’ the future and
‘cancel the wayfaring character of hope’ (Moltmann, 1967, p. 23). Freire thus empha-
sised ‘the inherent openness of the future’ (1998, p. 74) and, like Moltmann, stressed
that the hoping human could grasp the future, not in positive terms, but only as ‘the
negation of the negative’ (Moltmann, 1970, p. 114; Freire, 2007b, p. 88).
Understanding the tensions within Freire’s conceptualisation of human hope helps
to shed light on some of the tensions within his educational theory. Prime among these
is the need for liberating education to guide, direct, convince and even ‘convert’
(Freire & Shor, 1987, p. 45) while simultaneously being prohibited from prescribing.
For if it is human hope that makes education both possible and necessary, and yet hope
in its spontaneous form is ingenuous, unfocused and undisciplined, then it makes
perfect sense for Freire to argue that ‘directivity is, itself, part and parcel of the nature
of education’ (1993, p. 116). And if the objective of humanisation towards which hope
is, or should be, directed is under constant threat from the material and ideological
forces of dehumanisation – see the work of Henry Giroux for a powerful presentation
of the operation of these forces (e.g., Giroux, 2006) – then who can argue with the role
of the directive educator being one of annunciating a utopian ‘blueprint’ of the huma-
nised world for which we are striving (Freire, 1996, p. 187)? For Freire, it is hope that
impels us to seek and pursue the objective of humanisation, and yet, because hope can
err and be led astray, ‘the teacher’s role is more than simply opening up a way. It is
necessary, at times, that the educators have the courage to take responsibility for the
job of showing the way’ (Freire, 2007a, p. 37). As any student of Freire will recognise,
however, statements such as this sit at odds with others in which the notion of ‘show-
ing the way’ are condemned as acts of authoritarian imposition and closure (e.g.,
Freire, 1972b, p. 23). For if it is true, as Freire sometimes seems to suggest, that the
realisation of utopia ‘is unthinkable in history’ (Freire, 1985, p. 129), and that it is
hope that sustains us as we travel ceaselessly along the path to a future that is always