Now that you understand Freire’s work, create a new blog in your online portfolio and discuss the following:
- In your career as a scholar through school and university, can you identify teachers in your life who taught in a way that was oppositional to Freire’s work? Are their teachers who aligned themselves with Freire’s methods? Which did you find beneficial or meaningful? What are the pros and cons of each?
I don’t yet understand Freire’s work, at least not wholly, given how new I am to his thought and the complexity of his social analysis (only dog on the left 2020). At the same time, I can distil what I do understand of Freire’s thought into a single point: if carried to its conclusion, there ought not to be any teachers (Wikipedia 2023).
The current educational institution is the symbol and house of authority, the seat of power and privilege, and a bastion of class division and inequality (all school puns aside). Referring to Dawkins again in The God Delusion, segregated education (in this case due to religion) is a remarkable case for education’s ability to suppress and divide people (Dawkins 2007), though this is an isolated example.
Married as it is with business and government, education becomes the modern factory wherein workers enter to be formed into units of extremely specialised mental labour. Moreover, it (education, i.e., the political education system) is intimately and inextricably linked with business, amassing capital for a select number of corporations and organisations, chiefly in the interest of national preservation and expanding capitalism (wealth for wealth’s sake). Indeed, it cannot be anything else with money as its ultimate concern (Tillich, cited in The Philosophical Research Society 2018).
In a socialist (non-hierarchical) system of modern education, education becomes the end in itself, the process of knowledge in development (Wikipedia 2023). In this system, it is the teacher who refuses to teach who does completely what Freire has articulated partially: acts as a proxy for the developing child’s autodidactic world.
References
Dawkins, R 2007, The God Delusion, Black Swan edition, Black Swan, Transworld Publishers, Great Britain.
only dog on the left 2018, Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Paulo Freire ^ Intro to Critical Pedagogy, YouTube video, viewed 1 February 2023, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcEKvBTyMCU>.
The Philosophical Research Society 2018, From Intuition to Insight: James Fowler, YouTube video, viewed 1 February 2023, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5BaG2ba_Kw&t=1202s>.
Wikipedia 2023, Paulo Freire, Wikimedia, San Francisco, California, viewed 1 February 2023, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire>.
