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

[proud2BlibKansan]

Sunday 03 January 2010

Paulo Freire is one of the most important critical educators of the 20th century.<1> Not only is he considered one of the founders of critical pedagogy, but he also played a crucial role in developing a highly successful literacy campaign in Brazil before the onslaught of the junta in 1964. Once the military took over the government, Freire was imprisoned for a short time for his efforts. He eventually was released and went into exile, primarily in Chile and later in Geneva, Switzerland, for a number of years. Once a semblance of democracy returned to Brazil, he went back to his country in 1980 and played a significant role in shaping its educational policies until his untimely death in 1997. His book, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," is considered one of the classic texts of critical pedagogy, and has sold over a million copies, influencing generations of teachers and intellectuals both in the United States and abroad. Since the 1980s, there has been no intellectual on the North American educational scene who has matched either his theoretical rigor or his moral courage. Most schools and colleges of education are now dominated by conservative ideologies, hooked on methods, slavishly wedded to instrumentalized accountability measures and run by administrators who lack either a broader vision or critical understanding of education as a force for strengthening the imagination and expanding democratic public life.

As the market-driven logic of neoliberal capitalism continues to devalue all aspects of the public good, one consequence has been that the educational concern with excellence has been removed from matters of equity, while the notion of schooling as a public good has largely been reduced to a private good. Both public and higher education are largely defined through the corporate demand that they provide the skills, knowledge and credentials that will provide the workforce necessary for the United States to compete and maintain its role as the major global economic and military power. Consequently, there is little interest in both public and higher education, and most importantly in many schools of education, for understanding pedagogy as a deeply civic, political and moral practice - that is, pedagogy as a practice for freedom. As schooling is increasingly subordinated to a corporate order, any vestige of critical education is replaced by training and the promise of economic security. Similarly, pedagogy is now subordinated to the narrow regime of teaching to the test coupled with an often harsh system of disciplinary control, both of which mutually reinforce each other. In addition, teachers are increasingly reduced to the status of technicians and deskilled as they are removed from having any control over their classrooms or school governance structures. Teaching to the test and the corporatization of education becomes a way of "taming" students and invoking modes of corporate governance in which public school teachers become deskilled and an increasing number of higher education faculty are reduced to part-time positions, constituting the new subaltern class of academic labor.

But there is more at stake here than a crisis of authority and the repression of critical thought. Too many classrooms at all levels of schooling now resemble a "dead zone," where any vestige of critical thinking, self-reflection and imagination quickly migrate to sites outside of the school only to be mediated and corrupted by a corporate-driven media culture. The major issue now driving public schooling is how to teach for the test, while disciplining those students who because of their class and race undermine a school district's ranking in the ethically sterile and bloodless world of high stakes testing and empirical score cards.<2> Higher education mimics this logic by reducing its public vision to the interests of capital and redefining itself largely as a credentializing factory for students and a Petri dish for downsizing academic labor. Under such circumstances, rarely do educators ask questions about how schools can prepare students to be informed citizens, nurture a civic imagination or teach them to be self-reflective about public issues and the world in which they live. As Stanley Aronowitz puts it:

"Few of even the so-called educators ask the question: What matters beyond the reading, writing, and numeracy that are presumably taught in the elementary and secondary grades? The old question of what a kid needs to become an informed 'citizen' capable of participating in making the large and small public decisions that affect the larger world as well as everyday life receives honorable mention but not serious consideration. These unasked questions are symptoms of a new regime of educational expectations that privileges job readiness above any other educational values."<3>

more . . . http://www.truthout.org/10309_Giroux_Freire

[maryf]

1. Paolo Friere's

"Pedogogy of the Oppressed" is a book all teachers or those working with people should read, I think.

[proud2BlibKansan]

3. I plan to check it out

Never heard of this guy before today and thought this piece was just outstanding.

[maryf]

10. I don't agree with all he says...

but he's pretty right most of the time...pretty cogent writer.

[LWolf]

2. Points out the very crisis our public education system is facing.

Thank you for posting this. It's a long piece, and well worth reading ALL of it.

Thus, for Freire literacy was not a means to prepare students for the world of subordinated labor or "careers," but a preparation for a self-managed life. And self-management could only occur when people have fulfilled three goals of education: self-reflection, that is, realizing the famous poetic phrase, "know thyself," which is an understanding of the world in which they live, in its economic, political and, equally important, its psychological dimensions. Specifically "critical" pedagogy helps the learner become aware of the forces that have hitherto ruled their lives and especially shaped their consciousness. The third goal is to help set the conditions for producing a new life, a new set of arrangements where power has been, at least in tendency, transferred to those who literally make the social world by transforming nature and themselves.<4>

What Paulo made clear in "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," his most influential work, is that pedagogy at its best is about neither training, teaching methods nor political indoctrination. For Freire, pedagogy is not a method or an a priori technique to be imposed on all students, but a political and moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills and social relations that enable students to expand the possibilities of what it means to be critical citizens, while expanding and deepening their participation in the promise of a substantive democracy. Critical thinking for Freire was not an object lesson in test taking, but a tool for self-determination and civic engagement. For Freire, critical thinking was not about the task of simply reproducing the past and understanding the present. On the contrary, it offered a way of thinking beyond the present, soaring beyond the immediate confines of one's experiences, entering into a critical dialogue with history and imagining a future that did not merely reproduce the present. Theodor Adorno captures the spirit of Freire's notion of critical thinking by insisting that "Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway. As long as it doesn't break off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility. Its insatiable aspect, its aversion to being quickly and easily satisfied, refuses the foolish wisdom of resignation.... Open thinking points beyond itself."<5>

Freire rejected those regimes of educational degradation organized around the demands of the market, instrumentalized knowledge and the priority of training over the pursuit of the imagination, critical thinking and the teaching of freedom and social responsibility. Rather than assume the mantle of a false impartiality, Freire believed that critical pedagogy involves both the recognition that human life is conditioned not determined, and the crucial necessity of not only reading the world critically, but also intervening in the larger social order as part of the responsibility of an informed citizenry. According to Freire, the political and moral demands of pedagogy amount to more than the school and classroom being merely the instrument of official power or assuming the role of an apologist for the existing order, as the Obama administration seems to believe - given its willingness to give Bush's reactionary educational policies a new name and a new lease on life. Freire rejected those modes of pedagogy that supported economic models and modes of agency in which freedom is reduced to consumerism and economic activity is freed from any criterion except profitability and the reproduction of a rapidly expanding mass of wasted humans. Critical pedagogy attempts to understand how power works through the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge within particular institutional contexts and seeks to constitute students as informed subjects and social agents. In this instance, the issue of how identities, values and desires are shaped in the classroom is the grounds of politics. Critical pedagogy is thus invested in both the practice of self-criticism about the values that inform teaching and a critical self-consciousness regarding what it means to equip students with analytical skills to be self-reflective about the knowledge and values they confront in classrooms. Moreover, such a pedagogy attempts not only to provide the conditions for students to understand texts and different modes of intelligibility, but also opens up new avenues for them to make better moral judgments that will enable them to assume some sense of responsibility to the other in light of those judgments.

Freire was acutely aware that what makes critical pedagogy so dangerous to ideological fundamentalists, the ruling elites, religious extremists and right-wing nationalists all over the world is that, central to its very definition, is the task of educating students to become critical agents who actively question and negotiate the relationships between theory and practice, critical analysis and common sense and learning and social change. Critical pedagogy opens up a space where students should be able to come to terms with their own power as critically engaged citizens; it provides a sphere where the unconditional freedom to question and assert is central to the purpose of public schooling and higher education, if not democracy itself. And as a political and moral practice, way of knowing and literate engagement, pedagogy attempts to "make evident the multiplicity and complexity of history."<6> History in this sense is engaged as a narrative open to critical dialogue rather than predefined text to be memorized and accepted unquestioningly. Pedagogy in this instance provides the conditions to cultivate in students a healthy skepticism about power, a "willingness to temper any reverence for authority with a sense of critical awareness."<7> As a performative practice, pedagogy takes as one of its goals the opportunity for students to be able to reflectively frame their own relationship to the ongoing project of an unfinished democracy. It is precisely this relationship between democracy and pedagogy that is so threatening to so many of our educational leaders and spokespersons today and it is also the reason why Freire's work on critical pedagogy and literacy are more relevant today than when they were first published.

And reading all of it must point out the degradation of education currently underway in the U.S..

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. Yes it is just perfect, isn't it?

Hopefully it will convince those in denial here that we do indeed face a crisis in public education.

[LWolf]

5. I'd like to think it would.

Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that even our adult populations prefer soundbites and "talking points" to an in-depth study of an issue.

Even the language in the article you posted required me to slow down, digest, and think about the content more fully than most articles read by much of the population.

A pleasure, for me, but perhaps not for the impatient. I have to put F.'s book on my "to read" list now. ;)

[proud2BlibKansan]

7. IMO, our biggest problem is we can't seem to agree (as a society) on solutions

But we also need to examine the reason we are where we are. This article does that brilliantly.

[LWolf]

9. It does examine the purposes of education brilliantly.

I think that teachers can agree on some solutions. If those with the power to enact solutions actually listened to us.

[kevinbgoode]

13. I am a fan of his. . .

. . .but it can be frustrating trying to institute some of the practices, even on the college level. I am constantly amazed at how suspicious college students are of trusting their own self-direction, how programmed they are to trying to "figure out what the teacher believes" and how many times a few of them whine about wanting more "structure" - meaning - just "tell us exactly what we need to know" rather than take concepts and think about them. Some have been so well-trained at "playing the game" that they panic at the thought of having to produce original thought, and they are overly concerned about getting an "A" even if they know they haven't shown any excellence.

I probably spend half a semester just gaining enough trust for them to start trusting their own thoughts and foundation - about enough time for them to actually apply some information to their thinking processes and come up with their own ideas. Some actually resent having to think - they've been so trained at spitting back what they are told that they've got the game down and don't want to rock their boat at all.

This might work for certain levels of math or science, but in the liberal arts, it is disheartening.

Still, when it clicks in some students, they do shine. . .and surprise themselves at some of the different ways they can approach an idea and think about what they believe.

[LWolf]

14. I'm a firm believer in starting young.

If we don't put kids into situations where the norm is to think for themselves and be active, independent learners from the very beginning, they are conditioned to be passive recipients.

I taught for several years in the IB "Primary Years" Program, and found it incredibly powerful. Why? Because the focus is one of inquiry...teaching students from Kindergarten on to be inquirers, thinkers, and active learners.

When I left the state to teach in my current position, I found that my 6th - 8th graders had fewer skills, and were poorer thinkers, than the 2nd and 3rd graders I'd taught 6 years before.

We don't have to subscribe to the IBO to teach students to be active, rather than passive, learners. We DO need a whole restructuring of the system, though.

[mzmolly]

6. K n R

:kick:

[madrchsod]

8. thom hartman has several books about education

[struggle4progress]

11. Is "education" intended to empower people or to dispower them? It could do either. Freire

took a decisive stand on precisely this question, when teaching the poor and disenfranchised in Brazil how to read and write. His idea was simple: reading and writing were coupled with observing and thinking and reobserving and rethinking, in a process where the thoughts can be written down for reflection and reconsideration and reworking. This required sensitivity to the real circumstances in the real lives of real people; the illiterate adult frankly doesn't give a damn if Jane saw spot run: that adult, though illiterate, is already confronting serious issues, and this fact itself must be taken seriously in education. Of course, a project that empowers the poor and disenfranchised is by definition subversive to the privileged: it threatens the status quo that produced such powerlessness and poverty

[LWolf]

12. Our current system

is not empowering anyone.

Teachers would like it to be different. If we had the support of the populace, we could make it happen.

Which is why anti-education, and anti-teacher, propaganda is rampant in the U.S..

[struggle4progress]

16. If you know how to pressure school districts to teach kids how to question authority and think for

themselves, I'd love to hear about it. Schools are governed by the same political forces that dominate our other institutions

[LWolf]

17. I don't know how to pressure districts,

except for this:

I worked in an alternative school that operated differently from the rest of my district for many, many years. There were constant efforts to bring us in line, doing away with everything we did that was "different" and standardizing us.

When parents got into the act, we were given a new focus: An IB PYP school. Sounds lofty. Pacifies the parents.

Except that the PYP is all about active, independent thinking. Inquiry. You can't become an official, approved PYP school without it.

And our test scores routinely outpaced the rest of the district every time.

So I'd start with the PYP in elementary schools. It's expensive, and the training for teachers is pretty rigorous. Worth it, though; I grew tremendously.

Of course, you don't need the IB PYP to create active, independent thinkers and learners. It just gives a framework to do so. Once it catches on in enough places, others will follow, with or without IB status.

It's hard, though, to present inquiry-based teaching and learning as a foundation, when it isn't "standards based."

[jtuck004]

15. We need so much more

Our educational system was, and is, primarily set up to make controllable people to be funneled into a college or a factory job, not leaders and thinkers, and certainly not thoughtful citizens who could reasonably critique how power is used against struggling people. Freire is among those who tried to illuminuate and change that, and the potential cost to people who try.

Interested people should also read about Myles Horton and the early Highlander School's efforts with adults (though it seems to have lost it's way since his death). Jerry Farber's old essay The Student As Nigger, used that analogy to explore the Master\Slave relationship. The idea is that certain practices of schools constrain the student and the intellect to further their goals of control. Worth reading especially if you can put yourself in the mindset of those trying to break out of the controlling systems that existed in the 50's and 60's (and perhaps today, in different clothes). Old it may be, but many school system (don't forget they are systems) do not seem to have moved much beyond the old models. These are standard fare in any good adult education program, operating under the thought that you have to educate the adults before you can educate the children. But try talking about those ideas when you get to a school, secondary or even post-secondary, and you may get to experience a little of what Friere did.

Thank you for that post.