Abstract This contribution explores the parallel thought processes of the Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin (1842–1921), and the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921–1997) concerning radical reform to educational practice, asking whether the former deserves space in academic study of liberation-oriented pedagogies. Specifically, it examines Kropotkin’s advocacy of fostering critical consciousness, albeit not in the same terms, in his 1885 article, What Geography Ought to Be, and demonstrates the ways that this renowned anarchist laid the theoretical foundations for Freire and others to build on some eight decades prior to Freire’s (1968) most celebrated text, known in English as Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Although centred on geography, Kropotkin (1885, p. 940) posits the field as core to broader ‘hard’ and ‘social’ science (‘Biology, Climatology, Anthropology, and Comparative Ethnography’ among them), stating that by engaging in critical praxis of any kind, a given actor ‘shows their mutual action and consequences with regard to the superficies of the globe’. Whether the intended outcome or not, by interacting with the world, he believed that none of us ‘could … remain an outsider to the general scientific movement’ (ibid.). Consequently, geography in its breadth permits what he believed to be an accessible entry point to a deep dialogue on pedagogy, wider educational discourse, critical reflection on the purpose of learning, and exploration of the socio-political systems that govern our lives when we permit them to.
Ray Di Marco Campbell (2026) studied this question.