Philosophy
and Religion, Part 8a
Down with the Banking
Theory!
It was
Paolo 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 (please download and read today’s text, linked at the bottom of this
document), is not well designed to educate learners in the true sense of the
word “educate”, but is principally and intentionally designed 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 becomes 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; all are free-willing
subjects, capable of leadership at any moment.
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 prepared for the occasion, yet
the dialogue admits no imaginary 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 practice a common process of “problematising”, beginning
with education itself.
For the
late Freire (pictured here and at the top), and for the Freireans of today, all
education is a political act and a social act, an act of liberation and an act of
self-liberation.
In Freire’s
work, philosophy, politics and education are considered together without any
sharp borders between them.
Chapter two
is the shortest and the easiest of the four chapters of Freire’s “Pedagogy of
the Oppressed”. Please download it and read it.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Pedagogy of The Oppressed, Chapter 2, 1970, Freire.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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