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 is not well designed
to educate learners in the true sense of the word “educate”, but is principally
and intentionally designed to help reproduce the class relations that suit the
bourgeoisie. Please read today’s text, attached,
and downloadable via the link at the bottom of this document.
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.
