The Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, in his world-renowned 1968 treatise Pedagogy of the Oppressed, argued that even revolutionary-minded instructors often fall into the same trap as conservative ones, in assuming that their students are only blank-slates to be passively indoctrinated via lecturing. He critiques how this top-down approach tends “to turn women and men into automatons—the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human” (74). Decades before the ascension of home computers, smart phones, and chatbots made his critique literal, Freire saw clearly how all of our formulaic, impersonal approaches to instruction invariably train students to behave like “automatons” and machines, which in turn only positions them to be replaced by machines.

Rather, Freire argues, if we are truly serious about promoting decolonial and liberational mindsets among our students, then we must treat them not as automatons but as human beings. We accomplish this, according to Freire, by actively validating and integrating the students’ own outside experiences, perspectives, and cultural backgrounds into our curriculums.  Rather than conceiving of the classroom as a strict binary between a lecturing-teacher and listening-students, we must reformulate the classroom as a constant and active dialogue between a “teacher-student” and “student-teachers,” wherein the instructor is as willing to learn from the students as the students are from the instructor, as both collaborate to battle ignorance together. (In K-12 parlance, that means instructors must cease to be the “sage on the stage” but instead the “guide on the side.”)

What is especially interesting is that, just on a practical level and irrespective of one’s personal politics, Freire has been repeatedly proven right: Since the turn of the 2000s, numerous studies across multiple disciplines have confirmed to the point of truism that mere lecturing is pretty much the least effective form of instruction. Even if one is a genuinely entertaining lecturer (and boy is there no guarantee of that), students are simply more likely to retain knowledge and information when they teach each other–in dialogue and in personal application–than if the instructor simply recites the information at them.

What is even more interesting to me personally, however, is that this approach isn’t even novel; the Book of Mormon of all things endorses it in Alma 1:26,

“And when the priests left their labor to impart the word of God unto the people, the people also left their labors to hear the word of God. And when the priest had imparted unto them the word of God they all returned again diligently unto their labors; and the priest, not esteeming himself above his hearers, for the preacher was no better than the hearer, neither was the teacher any better than the learner; and thus they were all equal, and they did all labor, every man according to his strength.”

I dare say that this passage would have met with Paulo Freire’s complete approbation: the preacher does not behave as though he were better than the hearer, they labor alongside their students in the fields, and all are made equal together. In this model, there are no elites, no rigid hierarchies, and therefore no oppressions. In Deleuzian terms, their preaching was rhizomatic, rather than aborescent—entangled together, rather than top-down hierarchical. All are alike before God, and therefore all are alike before each other.

(As a side-note: I imagine that if I time-traveled back to 1829 and informed Joseph Smith that this verse is in line with pedagogical best practices that would be confirmed via empirical research nearly two centuries later, he would have likely just said, “Cool!” or the 1820s equivalent. As both his defenders and his detractors have repeatedly emphasized, the man only had a third-grade education; I dare say he scarcely ever comprehended the full import of what he was translating, likely because he did not actually write it in the first place. But then, the most advanced educational researcher of the 19th century hadn’t written it yet either; it would still be well over a century before alternative models to lecturing could even be imagined, let alone put forward. These ideas came from elsewhere.)

One might here rightfully argue that the Church itself does not actually follow this model at all, that from our General Conferences down to our sacrament meetings we are nothing but lecturing and rigid hierarchies: we have a First Presidency over the Twelve, who are over the Seventy, who are over the Area Authorities, then stakes, wards, quorums, etc. In direct contrast to Freire, we have a thoroughly top-down approach that emphasizes indoctrination over empowerment. Likewise, all of our speakers in Church, from General Conference down to Sunday Sacrament talks, are almost by definition monologuing, not dialoguing.

But that’s not to say it couldn’t be otherwise. Our best Sunday School lessons have followed the model of in-class dialogue, for example (and our worst ones have always done the inverse). Likewise, in the Church’s early days, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young did not call themselves President Smith or President Young, but rather Brother Joseph and Brother Brigham, placing themselves rhetorically on an equal footing with the rest of the Saints. Perhaps not coincidentally, both those early leaders also sought to implement the United Order within their lifetimes, a system wherein the Saints would have “all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift” (4 Nephi 1:3), similar to the one practiced by the preachers and hearers in Alma 1:26.

Such implies not a top-down hierarchy, but a community of student-preachers and preacher-students all dialoging and collaborating and working and contributing together. (Such was also, if I recall correctly, Eugene England’s rationale for naming his own independent journal of Mormon thought Dialogue.) Our own D&C 28:13 reads, “For all things must be done in order, and by common consent in the church, by the prayer of faith”, affirming that in the earliest councils of the Faith, Church was understood to be a collaboration, a democratic dialogue amongst the membership, all cooperating together. It is not impossible to move back towards this model.

“Come, and let us reason together,” says the Lord in Isaiah 1:18, implying that even God Himself seeks to dialogue with us, not at us. Likewise Moroni, towards the end of Ether 12, reports that Christ himself spoke with him, “in plain humility, even as a man telleth another in mine own language.” Hence, if we are to be like Christ, we must go forth and do likewise, and speak in plain humility with others in their own language. In this, Freire was perhaps closer to the Kingdom than we generally realize.