discussion of pedagogy of the oppressed

Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paulo Freire

In his introduction to Freire's seminal work, Donaldo Macedo remarks upon the omission of Freire's work from the curricula of the majority of educational programs in United States institutions, charging that the omission is due to the "'academic selective selection' of bodies of knowledge" (16). The institution of higher education in the United States tends to promote the furthering of institutionalization, not the questioning of social institutions; as such, a work like Freire's is fundamentally antithetical to its purposes. Freire's argument is that education is either normative, acting to reinforce the social structure that maintains a state of oppressors and oppressed, or transformative, helping people come to the state of critical consciousness necessary to change the world. The majority of the book consists of his explanation of how revolutionary leaders (i.e., teachers) can appropriately engage with the people to help them reach critical consciousness.

If Freire's main points were Facebook statuses, I'd "like" them. A lot. I'd probably become a fan, if Facebook hadn't decided that liking something and being a fan of something were the same thing; as it is, I officially like Paulo Freire. Freire's explanation of the mindset of the oppressor is one of the clearest I have ever encountered: "Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to [the oppressors] like oppression…For them, to be is to have" and "the oppressors cannot perceive that if having is a condition of being, it is a necessary condition for all women and men" (57-58). While Freire was writing about conditions in Brazil, as he engaged in literacy work with Brazilian peasants, this explanation resonates in the contemporary United States, as the privileged argue against universal health care—indeed, as they argue against any measures designed to provide the oppressed any modicum of what they themselves would never agree to go without.

The denouncement Freire provides of the "banking model" of education, in which students are the passive recipients of knowledge who arrive empty-headed to be filled with facts imparted by the teacher, is integral to a concept of education as liberatory. Education in the United States seems to move further and further away from that concept; rather than perceiving education as helping students become able to engage in a process of critical inquiry about themselves, their society, and the very education they participate in, education becomes a way to train students how to take their place in the world. An example: "Tracking" students from kindergarten through high school, where based upon an "objective" evaluation of their abilities which is itself constructed by standards based upon the normalization of privilege and inequality, some students are encouraged to go to college while others are trained (rather than educated) to take up a role in the workforce. Standardized tests measure how well students are retaining the knowledge poured into their heads like Jell-o into a mold, with no consideration of whether they can apply that knowledge, much less whether they are able to assess the ideological biases of the information provided.

All this is in direct contradiction to Freire's argument that true education requires teacher and students to engage in dialogue, to learn from each other and together create meaning. And so, we have a population wherein the majority of people do not vote…while those same people distrust the government they are choosing not to participate in. We have an educational system wherein teachers bemoan their students' apathy and mistrust…while those same teachers would never trust their students enough to engage in a dialogue with them about what they want to learn. Some might object to Freire's argument on the grounds that it is unabashedly ideological: His goal is a revolution. To that objection, I would point out that everything is ideological; the idea that knowledge, education, or teaching can be without ideology is a myth perpetrated to support a system in which the doctrine of the status quo is without bias, while any challenges to that doctrine are fanatical, reactionary, irrational, unrealistic, and most likely immoral.*

And yet, I have some points of hesitation about Freire's work.

First: For all that Freire argues for theory/praxis and reflection/action being meaningless without each other, he provides little in the way of concrete examples of how one would go about applying this pedagogy. I spent 31 pages in Chapter 4 wondering exactly what "decoding" and "codification" meant until we finally encountered an example. In the introduction, Macedo claims that the "call for language clarity is an ideological issue, not merely a linguistic one" (23). To put it simply, I disagree. For those questioning the use of words like "oppression" or "revolution," I tend to think that Macedo's suggestion is correct, but at many points, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is simultaneously repetitive and unclear. Do I think that Freire's pedagogy can be applied to any and every form of education? Yes. Absolutely. Does he provide a clear explanation of how that can be done? Not so much.

Second: I am uncomfortable with the emphasis on humans-as-different-from-nature and its accompanying implication that part of being human is controlling nature, that "a decisive attitude towards the world" results in "separation from and objectification of the world in order to transform it" (100). In some ways, it seems almost as though Freire not only accepts but actively argues for replacing the domination of persons with the domination of nature. While I certainly am not advocating for seeing the world or nature as conscious, and as something that lacks consciousness, it does not require care and respect for personhood in the way that humanity must, I am reluctant to support any proposal for absolute objectification of that which is living, both on moral and on practical grounds (as the result of objectification of and control over the world has not been notably positive to date).

It is this second objection that is the stronger of my issues, because both that and the occasional implication that it is possible to guide others to a realization of objective reality make me somewhat dubious about whether the heart of Freire's theory is genuinely entirely oppositional. This may be more a problem of my interpretation or the translation from the original than a flaw in Freire's work, so to illustrate this, let me quote two passages which appear very close to each other.

Consider "If humankind produce social reality (which in the 'inversion of the praxis' turns back upon them and conditions them), then transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for humanity," versus, "Just as objective social reality exists not by chance, but as the product of human action, so it is not transformed by chance [emphasis mine]" (51). I have inverted the order of these sentences from Freire's text. The second sentence seems to me to be at best unclear and at worst directly contradictory to the first. If we produce social reality, then how can it be objective? It does not exist apart from us, and for each observer, it would appear different, would it not? It may be that "objective" is being used here in a sense that I am not correctly interpreting, but similar references to objectivity and reality appear several times in Freire's work, and each time, I wished that Freire would have chosen to explain in more depth what he means by "reality" in this context or how ideas of objective reality fit into his overall framework.

* Subsidizing farmers, corporations, and military contractors is capitalism. Ensuring that people don't starve is socialism. Maintaining highways and police departments is capitalism. Improving public transportation options is catering to those who are too lazy to work and get a car. White people are just people—they're the majority. Brown people are people of color, people with a race, people who need to be explained—they're the minority (even though there are far more brown people in the world than white people). "Men" means people. "Women" means women.