Paulo Freire Could the way you are educated be ‘oppressing’ you?
Key Concepts: Liberation Education, Praxis, The Banking Concept Key Work: Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Pedagogy of Hope (1993)
The efforts of teachers must be “imbued with a profound trust in people and their creative power.” Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter 2.
Conscientization: (Critical Consciousness) The process of gaining an in-depth understanding of the world around you. For Marxists, it involved becoming aware of the ‘oppressive’ structures which limit your liberation, which you can then learn to act against rather than remaining passive. Post-Colonialism
The Banking Concept: Turns students into ‘containers’ or ‘receptacles’ to be filled by the teacher, which prevents students from developing skills that make themselves fair-minded “critical thinkers” and continues long-standing biases within society. The student’s only job is to absorb the information given by the instructor and recall (regurgitate) it when asked. Education basically becomes ‘training’ where students are moulded to fit into the world as it is, rather than empowered to change it. “The more completely a teacher fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is”
The ‘Banking Concept’ DEHUMANIZES because in that process: (a) The teacher teachers and the students are taught; (b) The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; (c) The teacher thinks and the students are thought about; (d) The teacher talks and the students listen – meekly; (e) The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined; (f) The teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; (g) The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the (h) (i) (j)
teacher; The teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it; The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students The teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere object.
Freire argues that this views men as “adaptable” and “manageable” beings
Praxis: In ancient Greece this word meant ‘something done by free people’. For Freire, it means a combination of thought/reflection and action. He describes it by saying “reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed”. Think about the Japanese Proverb: “Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare”. This encapsulates the idea perfectly.
Key Definitions: 1. Pedagogy – The process of teaching (both teaching methods and the practice of doing it); how knowledge and skills are exchanged in an educational context. 2. Oppression – Being subject to cruel or unjust treatment, usually under the authority of another. Being held down or denied power.
Although the term is sometimes disputed in relation to Brazil, Freire was writing (in a sense) as a ‘PostColonial Brazilian’. This basically means that he is at least partly concerned with the long-term consequences of the Portuguese colonization of Brazil (which ended in the 1820s). ‘Postcolonialism’ tries to deal with the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism, by focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonised people and their lands. It ends up being very concerned with lasting ‘oppression’ left over by the colonial system. This concern with ‘oppression’ means that it has overlaps a little with Marxism. This overlap might help us to understand the writings of Freire. Can you see how his approach to ‘liberation’ could be seen as very attractive to other countries that have been through this decolonization process, like Ireland?
Liberating Education: “Liberating education consists in acts of cognition (thinking), not transferrals of information.” It requires a ‘problem-posing’ approach where the boundaries that usually define the studentteacher relationship are broken down. “The teacher is no longer merely the one-whoteaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach.” IT’S A DIALOGUE!