Pedagogy
1
Pedagogy
According to Paulo Freire
The
Communist University has a tradition of starting every year with a reflection upon
our methodology, and on the theory of pedagogy (i.e. theory of learning and
teaching) in general, and on the way that practical pedagogy relates to
politics.
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, is not well designed to educate. Instead, its primary purpose is to
reproduce the class relations that suit the ruling class. Please read Paulo
Freire’s own words about this, in the attached file.
Education,
which should by nature liberate the student, is made by the ruling class into a
means of repression, said Freire.
How can revolutionaries
ensure that education ceases to reproduce oppressive landlord-dominated or bourgeois-dominated
class relations, and instead starts to generate socialism and communism?
Problematising
Education
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 the features of the
oppressive state, then the educational method for this revolutionary 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. Instead we recognise that the oppressor is around us and
even within us, while we strive to liberate ourselves through our mutual,
socialising 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, the
CU uses original authors, and not commentaries on their original texts. In that
spirit, text attached today 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.
There will
be one further preliminary posting. The first instalment of the course proper
will be sent out on Thursday, 12 January 2012.
- This introduction
only serves to introduce the original reading-text. In this case it is Chapter 2 of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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