Learning by Decrease: Daoist Wu Wei and Freirean Critical Pedagogy in the English Language Classroom

Abstract

The rapid global shift of English language teaching (ELT) to online and blended platforms, significantly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has been celebrated as a modernisation, but the pedagogy applied to these platforms has been predominantly didactic. Internationally, English language learners acquired functional skills in mobilising, navigating, and submitting digital work, but received little instruction in the critical assessment, ethical engagement, and transformative use of digital and target-language expression. This article is a conversation between two traditions seldom brought together on this issue: Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy, itself rooted in adult literacy teaching, and the educational philosophy expressed in the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. The argument is that both traditions diagnose the same aspect — education, including language education, as mere accumulation and storage — and prescribe methods of unlearning. This includes Freire's problem-posing dialogue and conscientização, and Daoism's “daily decrease” (Daodejing 48), mental fasting (xinzhai), and cultivated scepticism toward instrumental devices as exemplified by Zhuangzi's “machine heart.” After examining the similarities and authentic differences between the two traditions, the article proposes a Daoist–Freirean model of critical digital literacy for the English language classroom, combining shared digital and language-learning practices — source evaluation, machine-translation and AI-writing-tool use, multimodal composition — with critical-pedagogical and Daoist interpretative perspectives, and describes classroom implementations in global ELT contexts. This article argues that Daoism offers a contemplative perspective on the language learner's engagement with technology that is absent in contemporary critical digital pedagogy and largely undertheorized in the CALL (computer-assisted language learning) literature.