[MD] Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy

[Ant McWatt]

Ron,

I haven't read "The pedagogy of Oppression" but judging from the article that you linked here, Paulo Freire - as an American "working class intellectual" - seemed to know what he was talking about; especially in regards to (social) justice and the role that education has in this:

"For Freire, intellectuals must match their call for making the 
pedagogical more political with an ongoing effort to build those 
coalitions, affiliations and social movements capable of mobilizing real
 power and promoting substantive social change. Freire understood quite 
keenly that democracy was threatened by a powerful military-industrial 
complex and the increased power of the warfare state, but he also 
recognized the pedagogical force of a corporate and militarized culture 
that eroded the moral and civic capacities of citizens to think beyond 
the common sense of official power and its legitimating ideologies. 
Freire never lost sight of Robert Hass' claim that the job of education,
 its political job, 'is to refresh the idea of justice going dead in us 
all the time.'
 At a time when education has become one of the official sites of 
conformity, disempowerment and uncompromising modes of punishment, the 
legacy of Paulo Freire's work is more important than ever before."

http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/87456:rethinking-education-as-the-practice-of-freedom-paulo-freire-and-the-promise-of-critical-pedagogy

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Ron Kulp asked June 22nd 2014:

Has anyone here read Paulo Freire? Has anyone linked his ideas of critical pedagogy with RMPs Work?  I am reading "the pedagogy of oppression " and it seems to sync with Dewey and Pirsig, I'm still at the discovery stage so a lot could change. But it seems like a very important work.


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