Pedagogy
According to Paulo Freire
For the
purpose of this set of studies called Basics, designed for study circles without a
lecturer, it helps to have an overt theory of “pedagogy” - a simple theory of
learning and teaching - as a starting point.
The great
20th-century theoretician of liberation pedagogy was Paolo Freire. It was Freire who gave
us the word “conscientise”. It was Paulo Freire, more than any other, who
showed how the bourgeois education system, with its “banking” theory of
pedagogy (see today’s text, downloadable via the link at the bottom of this
document), is not well designed to educate, in the fullest sense, but rather
tends to reproduce the class relations that suit the bourgeoisie. Education,
which should by nature liberate the student, is made by the bourgeoisie into a
means of repression, said Freire.
How can we
make sure that education is part of the building of socialism and communism? To
ask such a question is to “problematise” education. To ask such a question is
to begin a “dialogue” about education. Freire thought that for the political
education of the oppressed, if it was not to be patronising and therefore
counter-productive, by reproducing and reinforcing features of the oppressive
bourgeois state, then the method for this purpose would have to be different
and new.
In the
dialogical method that Paulo Freire devised and called the Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
or otherwise Critical Pedagogy, there is
no elementary, junior, senior, matriculation, undergraduate, post-graduate,
doctorate or professor level. Teachers are learners and learners are teachers;
yet all are free-willing “subjects”, having “agency”, capable of leadership.
As much as
there may be a room and a gathering of individuals, each known by name,
and a “codification” which is the text or other object for the occasion, yet
the dialogue admits no limits. The Freirean gathering is not sheltered. It is
one of the essentials of Freirean Pedagogy that we refuse the fiction of the
sheltered classroom, and instead recognise that the oppressor is around us and
even within us, while we strive to liberate ourselves through our mutual
pedagogical dialogue.
In Freirean
practice, there is no such thing as a basic level, or an advanced level. All
that we can do is to begin a process of “problematising”, beginning with
education itself.
As a rule,
we will use original authors, and not commentaries on their original texts. In
that spirit, the first of the chosen building blocks is the second chapter of
Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, here supplemented with a glossary of
“critical pedagogy” terms (the link to the download is below). This text
provides an opportunity to reflect upon what you are trying to do by learning
and teaching. You may ask each other: What is political education for?
For the
late Freire (pictured above), and for the Freireans of today, all education is
a political act and a social act; an act of liberation and of self-liberation.
The link
given here is to the MS-Word download of the main text for this week. On this
occasion, three supplementary (optional) reading texts will be given.
Please download and read this text via the
following link:
Further reading:
Liu Shaoqi, How to be a good
Communist, 1939 (2549
words)
Tony Buzan, Use Your Head, 1974 (4174 words)
Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, Chapter 1, Paulo Freire (9382 words)
Fab. I love Paulo. The book was exactly what I needed to start understanding what was going on with me and to me.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your time and effort