Basics,
Part 1
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, attached and/or 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 ruling class 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 the political
education of the oppressed, if it was not to be patronising and therefore
counter-productive (because then it would reproduce and reinforce the
oppressive bourgeois state) would have to have a new and different method.
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 to make 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 all 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 readings from 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” (attached), here supplemented with a glossary of “critical pedagogy”
terms. This text provides an opportunity to reflect upon what you are trying to
do by learning and teaching.
You may
ask: 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 above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, C2, plus Glossary and Political Education.
