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

[Ron Kulp]

This reading is from: PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED by Paulo Freire. New York: Continuum Books, 1993.

CHAPTER 2

A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.

The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration -- contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.

The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. "Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem." The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of "capital" in the affirmation "the capital of Para is Belem," that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil.

Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated account. Worse yet, it turns them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teachers. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teachers she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.


> On Jun 22, 2014, at 10:02 PM, Ant McWatt <antmcwatt at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> ----------------------------------------
> 
> 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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