I think Vassar may be right. Quote from Freire:
The teachers thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.
From Fromm, The Heart of Man, quoted by Freire:
While life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional manner, the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things. ... Memory, rather than experience; having, rather than being, is what counts. The necrophilous person can relate to an object—a flower or a person—only if he possesses it; hence a threat to his possession is a threat to himself; if he loses possession he loses contact with the world. ... He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life.
I include the rest of the quote to add context, but I'm mostly interested in the dichotomy between memory and experience. Memory is justice—without it, we forget and thereby excuse crimes. If one is oppressed, they should be extremely interested in maintaining memory of the crimes committed by their oppressors. Erasing the past is an asymmetric weapon against justice and for coordination-for-theft. (I get the feeling that Friere would not approve of a legalistic metaphor for justice, or perhaps even the term "justice" itself.) That's, at least, my perspective, and I'm curious on why Fromm and others disagree. I haaven't yet read enough of them to be sure, but my current thesis comes from Michael Vassar.
Vassar claims that the project of critical theory is to teach one to behave properly in anti-inductive environments where justice cannot be expected. In such environments, we would in fact expect forgetting to be strongly incentivized. So, (a) it seems important to at least know this, and (b) it's possible that Fromm etc.'s world is in fact better, and the "necrophilous" approach is in fact flawed/anti-life.
It's quite interesting that Fromm is a German Jew; I would not have predicted that. How much of the Frankfurt school is Jewish? And...why? Of course we'll note that Vassar connects anti-intellectualism quite strongly with anti-Semitism, as explained in Anti-Semite and Jew by Sartre. Judaism as a religion is also focused on justice as a response to wrongdoing, rather than vengeance, forgiveness, or scapegoating.
Also see "Lifeboat Games and Backscratchers Clubs" by Scott Alexander for a discussion of the game theory of oppression and its effects on thought and communication.
There's a version of what Freire is saying which seems quite clearly correct, which I'll just point to with a few quotes. From Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, by Keith Johnstone:
Stirling believed that the art was 'in' the child, and that it wasn't something to be imposed by an adult. The teacher was not superior to the child, and should never demonstrate, and should not impose values: 'This is good, this is bad...'
[...]
I was determined that my classes shouldn't be dull, so I used to jump about and wave my arms, and generally stir things up— which is exciting, but bad for discipline. If you shove an inexperienced teacher into the toughest class, he either sinks or swims. However idealistic he is, he tends to clutch at traditional ways of enforcing discipline. My problem was to resist the pressures that would turn me into a conventional teacher. I had to establish a quite different relationship before I could hope to release the creativity that was so apparent in the children when they weren't thinking of themselves as 'being educated'.
I didn't see why Stirling's ideas shouldn't apply to all areas, and in particular to writing: literacy was clearly of great importance, and anyway writing interested me, and I wanted to infect the children with enthusiasm. I tried getting them to send secret notes to each other, and write rude comments about me, and so on, but the results were nil. One day I took my typewriter and my art books into the class, and said I'd type out anything they wanted to write about the pictures. As an afterthought, I said I'd also type out their dreams— and suddenly they were actually wanting to write. I typed out everything exactly as they wrote it, including the spelling mistakes, until they caught me. Typing out spelling mistakes was a weird idea in the early fifties (and probably now)— but it worked. The pressure to get things right was coming from the children, not the teacher. I was amazed at the intensity of feeling and outrage the children expressed, and their determination to be correct, because no one would have dreamt that they cared. Even the illiterates were getting their friends to spell out every word for them. I scrapped the time-table, and for a month they wrote for hours every day. I had to force them out of the classroom to take breaks. When I hear that children only have an attention span of ten minutes, or whatever, I'm amazed. Ten minutes is the attention span of bored children, which is what they usually are in school-hence the misbehaviour.
I was even more astounded by the quality of the things the children wrote. I'd never seen any examples of children's writing during my training; I thought it was a hoax (one of my colleagues must have smuggled a book of modern verse in!). By far the best work came from the 'ineducable' ten-year-olds. At the end of my first year the Divisional Officer refused to end my probation. He'd found my class doing arithmetic with masks over their faces— they'd made them in art class and I didn't see why they shouldn't wear them. There was a cardboard tunnel he was supposed to crawl through (because the classroom was doubling as an igloo), and an imaginary hole in the floor that he refused to walk around. I'd stuck all the art paper together and pinned it along the back wall, and when a child got bored he'd leave what he was doing and stick some more leaves on the burning forest.
Similarly, as an extreme example of the usual attitude of an oppressor who wishes to "teach", we have Junípero Serra:
He maintained a patriarchal or fatherly attitude towards the Native American population. He wrote, “That spiritual fathers should punish their sons, the Indians, with blows appears to be as old as the conquest of the Americas; so general in fact that the saints do not seem to be any exception to the rule.” Punishment made clear to the natives “that we, every one of us, came here for the single purpose of doing them good and their eternal salvation.”
Tinker argues that it is more appropriate to judge the beatings and whippings administered by Serra and others from the point of view of the Native Americans, who were the victims of the violence, and who did not punish their children with physical discipline.
Note that "patriarchal" and "fatherly" attitudes still exist with respect to children. (Aside: I very much don't know how to parent people well; freedom is obviously extremely important, but children also need help with keeping themselves away ("keeping themselves away", huh) from Goodharting of their reward functions (and perhaps similar things they will come to regret).)
American Indians during colonization also had relevant, interesting perspectives on Western education and society as a whole. It seems like they typically experienced it as ruthlessly oppressive, dominating, and suffering-filled, albeit granting great power. I don't have good references for that sentiment in particular, but "The Stanford Marshmallow Prison Experiment" and this podcast by Eigenrobot and Chaos Prime have similar perspectives.