Critical Pedagogy

What does Freire’s approach to teaching and learning emphasize and why?
Freire’s approach emphasizes the importance of dialog between teachers and students where both are learning and developing as opposed to the teacher dumping information on the students. Additionally, he poses the need for “Problem-posing” education, an education where the problems of human beings and their relations with the world are brought into question. Instead of using a what he refers to as a traditional “Banking” education where students are empty bins that teachers fill with information.

How does Freire define dialogic engagement?
Freire strongly believes that dialogue is not present when the Banking method is used where teachers’ poor information into the students’ bins in hopes that some amount of the information is retained so that the students can pass the exams and get through the class. What does Freire think should happen when dialogue in the classroom occurs? He thinks that the terms “teacher-of-the-students” and “students-of-the-teacher” will not exist and will instead be replaced with the terms “teacher-student” and “students-teacher”. Trying to digest this in my own words… It sounds that when dialogic engagement occurs there will no long be a teacher that teaches students, but instead students that become teachers and a teacher that becomes a student. Both the teacher and the students will learn and grow all the while the teacher is able to direct the dialogue and ‘add fuel to the fire’ to keep the dialogue going and to help educate the students.

What would a critical pedagogical praxis look like in your disciple?
I feel that a large majority of engineering courses follow the “banking” education format almost exactly. Therefore, I have become so use to this educational format that it is hard for me to envision a pedagogical praxis in engineering. BUT, I’m going to try and explain what I envision when I think of critical pedagogy in a ME classroom. So, what would a critical pedagogical praxis look like in mechanical engineering? I envision a class where the professor doesn’t come in with a prepared PowerPoint presentation, but instead has little details written down that he wants to make sure to cover during class (maybe something like equations, illustrations, example problems, etc.). Therefore, the professor can guide the discussion in the necessary route, but still allow the students to contribute and add to the discussion.

What is the difference, for Freire, between being “authority” vs. being “authoritarian”?
Teachers sometimes let their professional authority get in the way of their teaching. When this type of thing happens, it opposes the freedom of the students. This type of teaching would fall under authoritarian because it is strict and at the expense of the educational freedom of the students. When a teacher instead steps back and uses authority he/she is taking more of a director position. They do not oppose the freedom of the students but ensure that proper dialogue is carried out and that arguments based on “authority” are not occurring.

“No, I don’t think that is necessary”

Our readings about the sociocultural role of schooling makes me think about who decides who gets to go to college.

In community college, open enrollment makes higher education available to almost everyone, at least in theory. Inadequate preparation from grade school can be overcome, to some extent. In a community college engineering program, students typically begin their math with intermediate algebra. An extra year of math before Calculus I allows students who were not on the engineering track in high school to catch up. This was not always the case, and even now, it’s not a perfect solution.

Here’s my story. In the sixth grade, I transferred to public school. Coming from outside the public school system, my placement was determined by testing, and I was assigned to “6-1,” the top academically ranked sixth-grade class. The other nine sixth-grade classes were numbered “6-2” through “6-10,” in descending order of academic ranking from college-bound to remedial instruction.

The middle school had three or four elementary feeder schools. That’s why I was surprised and confused to find that every member of my “6-1” class, except me, not only already knew one another, but had been in the same fifth grade class together. I also found it odd that every student in our class was white. Through three years of middle school, there was some limited mixing between the top two classes. Halfway through the seventh grade, the two top math classes re-mixed, with one group preparing for 8th grade algebra and the other taking regular 8th grade math. The former would be favorably positioned for 12th grade calculus. Students who missed 8th grade algebra could catch up to the calculus class by doubling up on 10th grade math. A few students from the original “6-1” dropped down to lower ranked placements, but no students from “6-3” or below ever rose to the upper academic rankings.

Many years later, it dawned on me that “6-1” was simply the top fifth grade class from the whitest elementary feeder school selected wholesale, without evidence to support placement. The “6-2” class came from the largely Hispanic elementary school, which would have been my school had I attended public school in fifth grade.

There were many black students at my middle school, probably a majority of the school, but almost none were in the college-bound classes. I did not take classes with black students until high school. Even then, with only one public high school in a racially diverse community, black students were a small minority in the college-bound classes.

At that time, community college was not a realistic path for engineering students. To be accepted into an engineering program, one needed to at least be ready for Calculus I as a college freshman. This means that the person or policy responsible for selecting “6-1” from the most privileged effectively chose who would and who would not have a chance to become an engineer seven years before those students finished high school.

Thirty years later, I advocated for my son to be in the algebra-bound seventh grade math class, to no avail. There was no justification for my son’s placement on the non-algebra track except convenience for school administration, apparently. I was told that the first week of school was “too busy” a time to reconsider placements, then in the second week, it was “too late to change.” My son got a lucky break by getting transferred to a small special education school, where his placements were determined by testing. Halfway through the 8th grade, my son was told that he should rightly be placed in algebra, and he was given an opportunity to join an online class and complete the course in half a year, which he did. He did not become an engineer, but he had the opportunity to do so, and more importantly, his school helped instill in him an attitude and expectation that he could achieve academic success, which he did in high school and college. Unfortunately, the hundreds of students in the mainstream middle school did not all have this advantage.

The most shocking example of “power related dynamics” that “undermine social mobility” (as described in Critical Pedagogy in School) happened to me in high school. My parents went through the process of requesting my high school principal for permission for me to enroll in a single elective course at the community college in summer school, just to give me something to do. The principal’s response: “No, I don’t think that is necessary.” Obviously to me, the principal was threatened by the idea that I was not getting all the education I needed from public school and felt it necessary to supplement. At the time, I did not actually know what engineering was or that I should want to study it. The community college course that my parents suggested for me would have exposed me to engineering. So it was not really “elective” but an important part of my development. I am fortunate that I happened to find engineering another way, in time to matriculate into a university engineering program upon high school graduation.

From my perspective, it appears that little has changed in public schools since my school days. We in higher education are left to correct deficiencies through catch-up programs in community colleges, for a price which is largely borne by the students. Remedial classes tend to have heavy billable hours and may not get the same financial aid coverage as regular academic courses. The presence of these courses on the transcript may not be well regarded by the transfer schools that engineering students must get accepted into to become graduate engineers. It’s no wonder that the engineering profession has suffered from the same lack of diversity for decades. Selection, or non-selection, of who gets to go to college is built into the primary education system, and students are potentially crippled by arbitrary decisions made by others years before. They may never realize the impact upon their own lives; being unaware is part of the lack of agency promoted by the system.

For more information:
Critical Pedagogy in School. (2005). Critical Pedagogy Primer, 97-114.

Student as Subject, Student as Object–Take 2*

Middle-class parents are insatiable in their appetite for confirmation that they are doing a good job. (This may be a phenomenon which crosses class boundaries, but because I have no experience outside my own middle-class life, I refrain from a wider claim.) The fuel in those helicopters is anxiety. Where do parents look for evidence to confirm their self- worth? To their children’s performance—in sports, in school, in the arts, in entrepreneurship. For this essay, I will concentrate on school performance because it relates to the nature of schooling and Paolo Friere’s pedagogy and, in my experience, is the most acceptable visible measure of success or failure in the middle-class parent community. I know that Friere writes about the moral obligation of education to educate the oppressed such that they will be empowered to work against oppression and injustice. I do not envision most middle-class children being greatly oppressed in my society. They inherit a certain level of power from their middle-class parents. However, I am a scientist and an educator, not a philosopher. I do not have the tools to dig into Friere at a deep level. Therefore, I will reflect on how his writings relate to the world I know.

As a teacher and a parent, I have participated in many discussions of parent worth and child success. What does it mean to be successful in school? For most parents, this means earning A’s. A-student = A-parent. (High test scores and prestigious college are also acceptable markers of success, but only if they are in addition to high grades.) There is little thought for the lasting meaning of education. For me, the lasting meaning of education is in the knowledge you take with you, the ways of thinking about the world that you develop from that knowledge, the understanding that there are multiple ways in which you can understand the world. True education enables you to don different models of understanding to solve different problems. For Friere, education which neglects to develop “epistemological curiosity”—a well-developed method for learning and communicating more about a topic through critical questioning, thinking and speaking– is no education at all. (This picture is from the blog Mom Stories** in which a parent is boasting about her daughter’s kindergarten report card. Yes,kindergarten!)

This parent/student/cultural focus on making A’s has contributed to a school subculture that fails to value critical thinking or curiosity—what I call a conservative education. In most classes, curiosity is not rewarded with good grades although in some it is rewarded with engagement. I have developed a vocabulary for this. I call students who make good grades “good students” and students who love to learn “curious”. One would hope that curiosity is a requisite skill for being a good student, but it is not. Being good at school may not require curiosity at all. Sadly, good students are not always curious and sometimes do not even recognize the value of curiosity. Yet, parents are happy and colleges are happy to accept and promote good students. Tragically, there are practicing educators for whom the same is true. These are the educators who answer curious questions with, ”That is not on our syllabus” or “We don’t have time for that.” They fail to recognize that teaching students how to learn and that learning is not dead are much more important than teaching them a list of facts or procedures. They are either not interested in or not able to open themselves to the possibility of their own evolution through teaching. They fail to recognize the situations in which their students know more than they do. They fail to ask what lasting effects their interactions have on their student’s lives. To be fair, most educators probably lapse into these traits occasionally, but do not display them habitually.

Having no recollection of reading Friere in the past, I was surprised to find how, at least in my superficial understanding, I agree with him. For Friere, education is a social interaction between teacher-student and students-teachers with trust as an integral piece. While this practice requires critical skepticism of one’s own understanding, it does not advocate for teachers to simply let students learn on their own. “Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught.” Educators (teacher-students) promote learner’s curiosity while teaching them how to learn—how to frame questions and communicate and support answers. Students-teachers (and teacher-students) construct and reconstruct ideas that are new to them. While teachers have authority due to their understanding of the dominant syntax of the subject, they are not authoritarian. They value their students’ experiences and voices through which they continually learn to recreate their own knowledge of the world.

 

How does this relate back to parents? I believe in educating communities about the value of a liberal education. This is the kind of education in which students and teachers practice thinking critically about knowledge, how that knowledge relates to their world, and how knowledge can empower them to recognize and (if they choose) work against injustice. It is through dialogue with parents, students, and colleagues that the possibility of a reversal of values in which learning is valued over grades can be realized.

 

*Last semester I wrote a blog post about college mission statements titled: “Student as Subject, Student as Object”.

**https://blogs.babycenter.com/mom_stories/rewards-for-good-report-cards/

Public Education: Opportunity or Oppression?

This week’s discussion on Critical Pedagogy comes at a very tumultuous time — the election of a new President and his appointed governmental  leaders means significant changes are upon us. The American Education System is one of the first sectors facing serious reform. Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos, looks to overhaul the current public education system by shifting to a more privatized system. Devos reform plan is being met with plenty of opposition from politicians, teachers, and parents alike despite evidence that many public schools are failing and Federal attempts to improve them have yielded no meaningful success. Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you Devos’s plan is will completely fix all the problems with our education system, but I want to look at the situation with regards to critical pedagogy and how the American Education System came to be in its current state.

Critical pedagogy has been defined as a philosophy of education (and social movement) that has developed and applied concepts of critical theory and related traditions to the filed of education. Critical pedagogy advocates view teaching as inherently political, rejecting the neutrality of knowledge, and believe issues of social justice and democracy are related to the teaching/learning process. The concept of critical pedagogy can be traced back to Paulo Freire’s best-known 1968 work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which Freire provides a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized as it pertains to education.

Let’s take a quick look at the American Education System. Government-supported and free public schools for all began to be established after the American Revolution. However education was optional and mostly offered at private local institutions or performed at home. This meant that education was not standardized nor was quality education available to everyone. In 1852, Massachusetts was the first U.S. state to pass a contemporary universal public education law requiring every town to create and operate a grammar school. Fines were imposed on parents who did not send their children to school, and the government took the power to take children away from their parents and apprentice them to others if government officials decided that the parents were “unfit to have the children educated properly”. Laws requiring compulsory education spread and now, virtually all states have mandates for when children must begin school and how old they must be before dropping out. Compulsory education laws require children to attend a public or state-accredited private school for a certain period of time with certain exceptions, most notably homeschooling.

Now that we’ve gotten some of the important background information out of the way, let’s discuss how America’s compulsory education laws have created this colonizer-colonized relationship Freire outlines in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. By mandating that all children be educated, the Federal government was now responsible for providing a national educational system that was accessible to everyone. This meant that they now have control over the quality and type of content being disseminated to students. Though the public education system was meant to provide everyone with the same educational opportunities, it has furthur exacerbated the educational gap between people of different racial and socio-economic backgrounds.

The is a growing body of evidence showing that the U.S. public education system does not provide the same quality of education to all students. Additionally, similar research shows that U.S. student academic achievement is falling behind that of other countries.  Much of this is attributed to the poor quality of education provided by the public school system. Now, there are many quality public schools that provide high-quality education but, unfortunately, they are normally found in areas of economic prosperity. Areas of economic disparity, arguably areas where quality education is most desperately needed,  tend to have poor public school systems whose students often fail to meet Federally set academic standards. A factor that furthers this issue is the fact citizens are required to pay taxes supporting the local public schools. For low-income citizens, this means the portion of their income that could have been spent on sending their children to a private or charter school is forcibly invested in public schools. By forcing parents to send their students to school, as well as pay taxes to local public schools, the Federal government is essentially dictating how certain populations will be educated. In the case of those living in low-income areas, they are forced to send their children to the affordable, yet poorer quality, public schools instead of sending them to private or charter schools that may offer a better educational experience.

As it stands, it appears the American Educational System promotes this “colonizer-colonized” relationship, outlined by Freire, which oppresses students via banking education. If we are to free students from this oppression with respect to critical pedagogy, maybe Devos’s reform plan holds some promise? By expanding the options available to families seeking a better education for their kids, parents will have the opportunity send their children to schools offering the best education. Ideally, this will create competition among schools, encouraging them to improve the quality of education they offer. It doesn’t necessarily force students out of public schools, but stimulates the schools to improve while at the same time giving families options if they don’t. It really raises the question on whether continued support of public schools creates opportunity or fosters oppression.


Overly critical of ‘different’?

I am so glad that I ain’t the only one who had an issue with plagiarism in America. And I am exceedingly glad that Kinchloe is American. I vividly recollect the expression on a teaching assistant’s face in my first semester here as a Master’s student. She was trying to tell me that the essay she had reviewed was too good to be something I could come up with on my own. She told me that plagiarism was a serious offense in America and that she was doing me a favor by giving me half the marks for that work and to make this my final plagiarized work before she reports me. I just looked at her, unable to find meaning in what she had said and too surprised to form words to respond.

I had only just come to the country and I was trying to build my ego up after realizing that being the best student in my English class does not necessarily mean that Americans will hear me when I speak. I had become a shell of my usual chirpy self and couldn’t participate in class discussions. To me, that meant, I would have to do my assignments well which included making sure my essays were on point. So imagine my shock when the teaching assistant thought me incapable of writing that essay. Hey, did I say I was the best English student in my class?

This brings me to Kinchloe’s inference to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital. I definitely identify with this sentence ‘In the same way that money is a form of “economic capital,” membership in the dominant culture affords individuals ways of knowing, acting, and being (cultural capital) that can be “cashed in” in order to get ahead in the lived world.’ When I was in my country, I will usually be the first to raise my hands to share my opinions. I don’t know whether this changed as I became older or it is because I am uncomfortable to share my opinion here in an accent. The former might be so if I behaved in a similar way when I go to my country but I don’t. I actually talk more then and act vastly different from when I am here. Not fully understanding the codes of the dominant cultural capital, definitely has an effect on how I talk and act here.

As teachers, I think it is important to key in on those that might be marginalized in any way, and try to be inclusive of them in the classroom. If care is not taken, this might lead to picking on these students. So, it takes considerable effort and creative thinking to do that. I hope I am able to achieve that feat with time.

Willing to Accept Critical Feedback to Produce and Construct Knowledge

One of the quotes that really hit the spot for me in this week’s reading is, “To teach is not to transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge.” I find that this quote really defines what it means to be a teacher. The current educational system is based on the “Banking Concept of Education.” The teacher has a list of things that they want the student to “memorized” and the students are then tested on how well they retained that information. A great teacher not only knows how to “deposit” information to the students, but they also know how to teach the student how to produce and construct their own knowledge.

I know that most of my engineering course are based on the Banking Concept of Education. The teacher stands in front of the classroom lecturing about a particular topic, and the students try to reproduce that information for the classwork, homework, and tests. For me personally, I am able to develop a “bank” of the available types of questions that could be asked on the test. Sometime it comes down to a bank of memorized facts rather than true understanding of the material. I found that I only understand something if I have experience and struggle through the nitty gritty details.

Some of the best teachers have taught me how to ask effective questions about topics that I have little knowledge of. I find that part is the hardest thing about teaching and learning. Most of the time when I am learning a new concept, I do not have enough background to truly understand what I do know and what I do not know. I frivolously try to write down everything that the professor is saying rather than understanding. I am not able to come up with questions until I take the time to sit down and really try to digest the notes. Once I have a basic understanding, then I am able to ask effective questions.

This is Spartahttps://media.tenor.co/images/a1fdde5e73a2bed6ac04fff952c94b94/raw 

One of my mentors from the industry has done a great job in teaching me how to develop effective questions. I remember when I first started working, I brought a problem to one of my senior technical engineers without truly understanding the questions that I wanted to ask him. He was extremely harsh to me, and he grilled me in ways that made me felt inadequate as an employee of the company. After this experience, I was determined to never let that happen again. I went back into my office and reworked the solution to incorporate his critical feedback in my new design. Before I went back to my senior technical, I sat there at my desk for an hour thinking of all of the critical questions that he could ask me. I asked myself, “What would Bruce grill me on today.” To my astonishment, I developed over 30 questions and answers to what I could be potentially asked by my senior technical. I walked confidently back to his office with my new proposed design and prepared answers. He started asking away, and I started to defend. After about ten minutes, he realized that I have come much more prepared than last time. He took it up a notch, and asked me questions that I have never would have thought of at my experience level. I paused for a minute to think about his questions, and responded to the best of my ability. This continued on for a while, and his feedback were as critical as ever. As the conversation is coming to an end, he grinned at me and said, “Good work.” I was stunned when I heard that compliment from him. He just spent the past hour kicking me down a pit, and started throwing rocks at me when I was at the bottom. After working with him some more, I began to understand the merits of his teaching style. He wasn’t interested in just transferring 30 years of experience to me. He was interested in teaching me how to ask effective questions. He was teaching me how to produce and construct knowledge.


Critical Pedagogy.

Shelli Fowler’s  “Paulo Freire and Critical Pedagogy” had an opening quote that immediately grabbed my attention. It stated,  “Education can function to control and contain students and maintain the status quo . . .Or, it empowers students to be critically engaged and active participants in society”.  Might I add I must admit that I am enjoying these sociological-based readings and topics, now that I have some time to reflect pedagogy and interaction between students and instructors are sociological situations. Especially if the goal is to create an environment where you want the student is able to gain and absorb as much knowledge as possible. This invites my next thought as Fowler’s also discussed critical consciousness, Fowler states that “The formation of a critical consciousness (which allows students to question the nature of their historical and social situation and to effect change in their society)”. Helping students develop and critical conscious also reminds me of another teaching strategy that I watched an instructor use heavily during a graduate teaching assistantship I had here at Tech. It is called Inquiry based learning, or Inquiring By Design, it is basically the practice of instructors leading students with questions and also answering with questions so the students are learning through experience and answering their own questions and teaching their selves for a greater educational experience. The idea of teaching and communicating with students and not at students is also a  component and take away from this teaching strategy. It is also a student-centered teaching strategy. Social sciences use alot of critical pedagogy techniques to teach and create a learning environment and beneficial discussions for students. I see critical pedagogy and critical consciousness overlapping, as far as fostering the idea of “raising awareness of critical issues in society (e.g., environment), and encourage students’sense of themselves as active agents with the ability to shape the world in which they live”. That is the thing i enjoy about sociology is that everyone “studies” or encounters sociology on a daily basis and it can be taught and understood a million different ways.  As I was anxious about having to teach something that is so routine is that everyone has different experiences and perspectives that everyone can learn from -such an interdisciplinary subject, I am grateful that this class is laying a great foundation for my future pedagogical ideas

Critical Pedagogy and Liberation

With the strong emphasis on liberation, I find Paulo Freire’s work, pardon the bad joke, critically important to thinking about how we as educators risk reproducing oppressive structures of society even as we attempt to teach our students to recognize and resist those structures. Power and domination implicit in the teacher/student relationship unconsciously train students to accept hierarchy, power, and domination in their lives, in their workplaces, and in their politics.

In chapter 2 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire makes the import point that teacher-student relationships are often “fundamentally narrative” in character. The teacher/professor/instructor is a “narrating Subject” while students are “patient listening objects.” In this conception, education can be thought of through the metaphor of “banking,” where instructors deposit knowledge into passive student receptacles. Freire makes the point that we cannot liberate ourselves if we maintain this type of education.

In the alternative, as Dr. Shelli Fowler aptly summarizes, rather a critical pedagogy recognizes the importance of “dialogic exchange” between teachers and students. No longer is education a one-way transmission of knowledge from instructor to student but rather a relationship in which both learn, question, reflect, and participate in meaning-making. As Freire writes in Pedagogy of Freedom, an educator with a “democratic vision… cannot avoid in [their] teaching praxis insisting on the critical capacity, curiosity, and autonomy of the learner.”

Such a critical pedagogy seeks to bring students into subjectivity along with instructors. Students then move from passive objects to agentic subjects. But, and this is an essential insight to remember, the oppressed (a position occupied by students in banking education) are not “outside” or “marginal” to society (in this case the social/economic/political space of the university). They are already “inside” of the structures which oppress them. The oppressor and oppressed are co-constitutive of structures of hierarchy and domination; one cannot exist without the other.

Therefore, it is not simply a matter of “integrating” the oppressed into structures of oppression. Liberation requires -demands- a fundamental transformation of those structures. By way of example, we might take what I will call the “Lean In” ethos. This form of essentially neoliberal feminism sees the solution to oppression of women in (U.S.) society as bringing more women into corporate board rooms and perhaps making small concessions that will allow more women to occupy positions of power. This is integrating women into the structures that have thus far oppressed them. By contrast, a liberatory feminism might advocate dismantling corporations altogether and working to build alternative economic structures that are non-hierarchical, democratic, ecologically sound, and so forth.

This sort of liberatory/emanicaptory approach is deeply threatening to existing power structures, which is why to return to Freire, the banking concept of education remains a tool to suppress the threat that students will raise their consciousnesses of their oppression. The “humanist revolutionary educator” (something I aspire to unreservedly) does not -cannot- passively wait for such a consciousness to materialize. Such an educator actively works with their students to “engage in critical thinking and [seeks] mutual humanization.” Such an educator is a partner of their students and maintains a “profound trust” in their creative power.

I try to carry this with me as I teach and as I interact in the world more broadly. The demands Freire’s work makes upon us are stringent. It is not easy to remain conscious of the ways in which we reproduce power imbalances at the same time we attempt to overcome them. But, this is a central challenge of a critical pedagogy and, truly, of all social change.

Paulo Freire’s Advice

It is important to read more about the successful educators who influenced many generations. It was the first time I read about Paulo Freire, and I must say he seems to be one of the reasons critical pedagogy has improved. After the loss of his father, he lived a challenging life going through poverty and hunger, which pushed him to learn and dedicate his life to helping people.

After familiarizing myself with his life story, I looked at his literature and quotes. Many of his approaches were solutions to many of the problems we’re facing in the 21st century education. I picked a couple of them which I found most useful to my teaching experiences and can possibly try to implement them in my teaching journey. Those are:

  • “Be a tolerant teacher”

Being tolerant will allow you to learn new things with different people. It will give you the patience and democracy to understand the different students’ opinions and concerns, so everyone can be comfortable together.

  • “I was a curious boy, and now I’m a curious old man – my curiosity never stops”

Paulo was a curious being. I believe that being curious will give you the opportunity to continuously learn, improve yourself and better understand others.

  • “Their way of speaking is as beautiful as our way of speaking”

Encouraging students to participate to speak their voices and describe how they feel is crucial in their learning process. Nobody is perfect and everyone has better skills than others. So, mistakes are welcomed as long as they are corrected, hence encourages critical teaching environment.

 

References:

Paulo Freire, “The Banking Concept of Education,” Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Ch. 2, pp. 71-86

Paulo Freire, Short Video on Curiosity

June Jordon, Report from the Bahamas, 1982

 

On Pedagogy of the Oppressed

There were many things I enjoyed about Paulo Freiere’s teaching philosophy. I too despise what he terms banking-education, however, in a review of what Freiere offers as an alternative, I find myself asking a number of questions about what seem to me to be some gross assumptions. For this blog I have responded to some quotations from his writing:

“Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.”

Absolutely. Education has, perhaps, always been about indoctrinating subjects with only the option to adapt and assimilate into a “world of oppression.” Virginia Woolf lays this out in A Room of One’s Own. Peiere doesn’t mention capitalism, but why not replace the term “world of oppression” with it? This brings the institution into the manifold of oppression. ALL major universities in the US harbor enormous hedge funds. The word university never appears in this sample of writing.

“Because banking education begins with a false understanding of men and women as objects, it cannot promote the development of what Fromm calls “biophily,” but instead produces its opposite: “necrophily.”

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. (Fromm)

What Fromm is doing here is reducing a thing to its effects, to the ways in which a thing externalizes itself. As Graham Harmon puts it in Immaterialism, Fromm, “rather than treating objects as superficial compared with their ultimate tiniest pieces, one treats them as needlessly deep or spooky hypotheses by comparison with their tangible properties or effects.” For Harmon, not thinking in objects runs the risk of either reducing a thing to its internal relations or parts (my DNA, cells, bacteria, what material tissues of which I am made) or to its effects, its externalizations, how I act on the world.

“The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own.”

Jacques Ranciere’s theory on universal education is a bit more radical. He tells the story of Joseph Jacotot, who was confronted with the dilemma of teaching students a language foreign to them without having a common language between himself and his students with which to begin. He spoke French, and they spoke Flemish. Jacotot gave his Flemish students a book in French, and with no explication they began to learn to write in French. Over time the sentences got better with no superfluous guidance from the professor! Ranciere’s theory replaces teacher with father, and communication with mother tongue. He refers to the way babies learn mother tongues with absolutely no explanation. Friere’s theory leaves intact the institutional position of the teacher, the explicator.

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