Pedagogy According to Paulo Freire
Introducing this group
This group, currently called LJ-SACP-JHB, is intended to:
- Collect e-mail addresses of SACP members in the former Linda Jabane (Johannesburg) District
- Serve the SACP interim District structure for Johannnesburg
- Assist the reorganisation into Voting District Branches
- Provide a stream of political education material for use in study circles
In addition, the interim SACP Johannesburg District structure has decided that at roughly 3-monthly intervals, a large-auditorium event will be organised in Johannesburg for SACP members and guests to debate a suitable point based on the political education that will be sent out on this forum.
Please assist in growing the membership of this group. It is currently just over 300, but it needs to be more like 3 000 in the near future, and about 10 000 in three years or so from now. This is based on the knowledge that there are 130 Wards in Johannesburg, each with approximately five Voting Districts.
If three Voting District Branches per Ward turns out to be the saturation point, then we will have something close to 400 branches in our area. That might mean 20 000 members, half of whom may have e-mail. Hence 10 000 at maturity. Of course this is a rough calculation, but it also roughly corresponds to the requirement that the SACP grows to a size that equals one per cent of the population country-wide.
In short, we need thousands of e-mail addresses subscribed to this Google-Group forum. Please assist if you can.
We begin today, with the Communist University “Basics” course.
Basics, Part 1
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. We therefore offer the "pedagogy of the oppressed".
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 also be given.
Please download and read this text via the following link:
Further reading:
