In Pedagogy of the Oppressor in City Journal, Sol Stern takes on Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which has become a staple in teacher-training programs. It’s not actually about education, Stern writes. There’s no mention of “testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students.”
This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies.
. . . His idiosyncratic theory of schooling refers only to the growing self-awareness of exploited workers and peasants who are “unveiling the world of oppression.”
A Marxist professor in Brazil, Freire “organized adult-literacy campaigns for disenfranchised peasants” to get them to elect radical candidates. After the 1964 military coup and a stint in jail, Freire was exiled to Chile.
Freire believed that all education is political and that teaching academic subject matter “serves to rationalize inequality within capitalist society,” writes Stern.
One of Freire’s most widely quoted metaphors dismisses teacher-directed instruction as a misguided “banking concept,” in which “the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing and storing the deposits.” Freire proposes instead that teachers partner with their coequals, the students, in a “dialogic” and “problem-solving” process until the roles of teacher and student merge into “teacher-students” and “student-teachers.”
Progressive educators in the U.S. loved it.
Freire’s rejection of teaching content knowledge seemed to buttress what was already the ed schools’ most popular theory of learning, which argued that students should work collaboratively in constructing their own knowledge and that the teacher should be a “guide on the side,” not a “sage on the stage.”
But political, content-free education hasn’t proven liberating for poor and minority students learn, writes Stern. The “pedagogy of the oppressed” keeps them poor, uneducated and easily oppressed.
Check out the debate in Core Knowledge’s comments about whether Freire is still influential.
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For information and links on Friere (none are provided in the article, naturally), see http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm
I think the fact that the people worried about (what they call) ‘core knowledge’ are attacking Friere in itself demonstrates the relevance of his work.
When they say “there’s no mention of “testing, standards, curriculum…” etc., then so much the worse for here’s no mention of testing, standards and curriculum.
The point of Friere’s work is to encourage and empower people to find out what they actually need to learn (insyead of what they are told to learn) and to learn it for themselves, working together.
The message remains relevant today. If you are a passive learner, and learn only what your educators teach you, then you will play a passive role in society, at the sway of those who would lead you, unable to make your own way when conditions change.
A people, if it wishes to be successful, will inculcate values of self-reliance and personal direction in its citizens. Rather than fostering an educational system based on the maxim “learn what you are told,” as the core knowledge people would have it, you foster a system where people build their own education.
It is no surprise that Friere was jailed by Brazil’s military dictatorship. Authoritarians tell you what you need to learn. Authoritarians prefer people who are quietly obedient. Authoritarians prefer people who do what they are told, and who do not rock the boat with unauthorized and unsanctioned learning.
The red-baiting tactics being used to discredit Friere are typical of those who wish to obscure the core of his message, that a people free themselves from oppression only when they take control of what they learn and who they are.
<<< a people free themselves from oppression only when they take control of what they learn and who they are.
Well said! (How’s that working out for America’s oppressed underclass, by the way?)
The point of Friere’s work is to encourage and empower people to find out what they actually need to learn (insyead of what they are told to learn) and to learn it for themselves, working together.
What a pathetic doctrine that only looks at what you actually need to learn. Perhaps I would be alive today if I didn’t know half of what I now know, but what sort of life would I have? Sitting on a sofa, collecting the dole, casting my vote at random, who wants such a narrow world as that?
Furthermore, it is possible that if I was left to find out what I actually need to learn, I would not be alive today. I have visited northern Queensland, where I was warned about crocodiles, who are very good at camouflage and incredibly fast-moving, so you should be incredibly careful near river banks and the like if you want to avoid being munched. However the problem with finding this out for yourself is that the crocodile might kill you in the process, rather ruining the learning process. Even if you survive the attack, it’s painful and bloody and might leave you limp for ages. In this case it makes far more sense for someone to tell you what you need to learn about crocodiles. Of course, perhaps if no one had told me what to learn I would never have gotten to northern Queensland, so I never would have needed to learn about crocodiles, but this again goes to the point of narrowing education.
Returning to my earlier point, I am far more ambitious for education, I think education should be about opening doors for people, not merely the minimum necessary that you need to learn.
Some examples:
I had several friends at university who had to drop their preferred courses of study because they hadn’t done sufficient mathematics at high school to prepare them for the university maths they needed to learn (in areas from engineering to chemistry) and didn’t have the time to go back and do it. I had no such problem because I had done every maths course going at high school. Mathematics can’t be learnt only when you “need” to learn it. Telling kids to learn mathematics opens up doors for them years down the line, doors they may not even know yet that they exist, let alone that they want to open them.
At various times in my life I have drawn emotional strength, or even simply an appreciation of beauty, from the works of English literature I have been exposed to – most blatantly in poetry, I have recited Masefield’s Sea Fever to myself while sitting on a boat crossing between Tongan Islands watching a grey dawn breaking, I have recited Dylan Thomas’s “do not go gently into that dark night” to myself frantically, I have remembered snatches of Kipling’s “If”. When I learnt those poems I had no idea what they would come to mean to me. Friere would probably dismiss this as stuff that I didn’t actually need to learn, but if so he can go stuff himself.
In other cases time is missing in a very short-term way. If you come across your husband grasping an electric wire and no sign of breathing you don’t have the time to trot down to the library and start studying up on first aid and safety around electricity – you need to have already learnt it.
Other people can also tell you what you might not want to learn, for example the other side’s point of view, such as in the Israel-Palestine history, or the dark side of your own country’s or people’s history. Perhaps you could live without ever knowing anything that might make you uncomfortable, but surely you are better for knowing the truth?
Other people can also tell you things that you might never have thought of that would in the way of learning new things, for example how capable we are of fooling ourselves, a reason for skepticism about our own thinking. Clearly people have managed to live entire lives without any awareness of their own faliability, so it may not be something that you *need* to learn, but I still think it’s valuable to learn it.
It is no surprise that Friere was jailed by Brazil’s military dictatorship. Authoritarians tell you what you need to learn. Authoritarians prefer people who are quietly obedient. Authoritarians prefer people who do what they are told, and who do not rock the boat with unauthorized and unsanctioned learning.
I’m actually really surprised that Brazil’s military dicatorships jailed Friere. I thought both dictatorships and military were inclined to be on the side of people only knowing what they need to know.
The red-baiting tactics being used to discredit Friere are typical of those who wish to obscure the core of his message, that a people free themselves from oppression only when they take control of what they learn and who they are.
But we can’t control what we learn and who we are. We can affect what we learn and who we are, but we can’t control it. Sometimes life just happens to us. Sometimes I read ideas that surprise and shock and change me even though I had no such intention of being changed. Sometimes things happen to me, such as an infection that got out of control that taught me a great deal about pain, sometimes we fall in love. And I can’t control who I am, I can’t for example suddenly decide to be an 18th century shepherdess, or Queen of the Entire World Worshipped By Everyone. An illness such as swine flu or cancer might kill me despite the best modern medical science can do. A random meteor could wipe out all life on this planet. We are not under our control.
If we try to read this word “control” in a way that makes sense, well I agree that a people free themselves from oppression only when they take control of what they are, that sound like a tautology. But I can’t see that a people free themselves from oppression only when they take control of what they learn. For example Gandhi only became a lawyer because of his family demands, he studied at the University College London where I understand he was told what to learn, but I would hardly call him oppressed.
Nelson Mandela also attended an Wesleyan mission school, which I suspect also took the approach of “learn what you’re told”, but he was hardly oppressed.
Martin Luther King attended Booker T. Washington Comprehensive High School, which was full of things that students were told to learn, but that hardly stopped him from fighting to throw off oppression.
These people’s lives support the core knowledge thesis – that telling people what to learn supports the student learning to think for themselves. Admittedly my failure to think of any examples for Friere’s sides doesn’t mean that they don’t exist, but you cite no examples in favour of Friere’s hypothesis and the existance of counterexamples means that the word “only” in Friere’s message is unsupportable.
Robert:
In order to reply to your rather flippant remark, one would have to first locate someone working with America’s oppressed underclass who have both read and applied Friere. I don’t think you will find many examples in American public education today (despite Stern’s claims). You might, however, consider reading Kozol’s Illiteracy in America. He recounted working with adults of the oppressed underclass. One key that he identified as significant in teaching reading and writing skills (I know, skills, not knowledge) to low income adults was to work with them to identify their immediate needs for both of those things. It turned out that in his instance his students created meaning for the learning in developing an ability to communicate with landlords, or other authorities in their lives, in instances in which they needed to advocate for themselves.
One might also want to learn from history–such as the Catholic Worker movement, or much of the Settlement House movement of the early part of the 20th Century. While there were certainly pressures aplenty to “Americanize” the immigrant classes, not only teaching them English, but also to reject cultural norms with regard to nutrition, child-rearing, family, etc., many in the Settlement movement made great progress instead in listening to and providing forums for the “meaning-making” of these groups. Lest one think these efforts meaniningless in the history of the United States, one might want to consider the things that such listeners provided, on the basis of their enlarged understandings of the needs of such peoples. Such fields as public health–with a focus on preventive efforts and seeing individuals within the context of their living situation (at-home, in their communities), social work–with an early focus on efforts to bring communities together to speak for such needs as public parks and playgrounds, untainted milk, sewage systems, fair working conditions; grew out of this movement that placed an enormous emphasis on understanding the lives of the oppressed.
While short-lived for many reasons (including such official acts of Government oppression as Cointelpro), one might want to look at the Black Panther Party’s schools.
By the way–I don’t know where this supposed fascination with Friere is being carried out. I got my bachelor’s in education back in the 70s. My introduction to Friere came somewhat later–from a professor of Social Work. Although my kids have gone to school through the 80′s, 90′s and currently in an urban district working largely with the oppressed underclass, I have never encountered a single teacher who gave any evidence of being conversant with Freire–and certainly none who appeared to be applying any ideas of meaning making (which are certainly not unique to Freire, by the way) on the part of their students to any degree at all, let alone a degree that would warrant Stern’s concerns.
Margo/Mom – another history is Frederick Douglass. Born a slave in the USA, taught to read by his owner’s wife and from that went on to construct his own meaning, escape to the northern USA and freedom, and became a leader in the fight against slavery. Frederick Douglass’ owner said, in Douglass’ hearing, that teaching a slave to read would teach the slave to be dissatisfied and desire freedom, and Frederick Douglass life is at least one example in support of this hypothesis. Any education appears to support people in making their own meanings, not merely education that has the express aim of doing so.
I don’t have any objection to teaching skills that are directly useful, and means something in the life that the learner is living at the moment, and I don’t think that anyone does. What I disagree with, and I think Robert Pondiscio was mocking, is the idea that only education which is under the control of the learner supports intellectual freedom. I also disagree with the idea that education should stop with teaching only what is necessary or immediately useful.
Such fields as public health–… grew out of this movement that placed an enormous emphasis on understanding the lives of the oppressed.
To me from your description this sounds like the researchers were prepared to let other people tell them what they should learn, and to listen with an open-mind, rather than insisting on being in control of their own learning.
<<< to first locate someone working with America’s oppressed underclass who have both read and applied Friere….consider reading Kozol’s Illiteracy in America…One might also want to learn from history–such as the Settlement House movement.
At the risk of over-personalizing things, Margo, I was trained in the NYC Teaching Fellows, where Friere was held up as a model of how we should understand and work with our students. The elementary school where I taught for several years was precisely in the neighborhood chronicled extensively by Kozol, three blocks from St. Ann’s church, immortalized in his book Amazing Grace. Learn from the history of settlement houses? I have nearly 20 years experience in the same South Bronx neighborhood as a director of one of NYC’s oldest settlement houses. Your characterization of their role does not reflect either the history or current practice as I understand and have experienced it.
My “flippant remark” is therefore borne of direct experience and pragmatism, not theory or philosophy. I have little patience, I’m afraid, for those whose idea of education–however noble and well-intentioned–amounts to patronizing the urban poor with platitudes, and self-satisfaction with their deep and abiding solidarity with the oppressed.
Robert:
You are right–few Settlement Houses are currently operating out of any sense of liberating oppressed peoples. There is some history to this as well, including changes around the 1940s in which many transformed to something far more like recreation centers. In the 1960s many were challenged for their “lack of relevance” by various newcomers–particularly those hungry for Community Action Program dollars. Those who continued in accord with their historical roots were more likely to be involved in such things as voter registration, mobilization of groups to advocate for changes in public housing, welfare, food stamps, public health (or took a stand with regard to conscription of youth in the war effort). Some became lightening rods for this reason and lost funding or had funding challenged by the local community chest-type funding sources that they had been instrumental in founding.
What remains today is a mixed bag. Most are beholden to the rules of whatever funders they rely on. In New York, you might look into what Goddard-Riverside or Henry Street are currently doing, as I have know them to be more involved than others in recent decades–but it has been awhile since I have been up on their work.
But, I would again suggest reading Illiteracy in America. It seems to be quite relevant to the current discussion. Amazing Grace was very interesting and enjoyable–but not really on point with this discussion.
Freire’s ideas of deciding for yourself what to learn coincide with the rubric teachers must use in NYC for self-evaluation, the “Continuum of Teacher Development.” The “levels” run from “Beginning” to “Innovating.” In the category “Engaging and Supporting All Students in Learning,” subcategory “Facilitating learning experiences that promote autonomy, interaction, and choice,” the “innovating” level reads, “Integrates a variety of challenging learning experiences that develop students’ independent learning, collaboration, and choice.”
I would consider a teacher more innovative who gave me somethign compelling to read and challenged me to think more carefully and deeply about it; who gave me specific math problems and demanded that I solve them correctly, with clear reasoning; who gave interesting history lectures and demanded that I learn the facts; etc. That, to me, is innovation, not this “let them chooose” stuff. Of course, a degree of choice and autonomy is good; but this rubric goes much too far.
Diana Senechal
Freire was also the paragon of education in a class I was required to take. It’s easy to see through his “pedagogy” and see where it leads. It leads to the same place all such class warfare and communist ideologies do, and that’s not a place I choose to go.
I like to think that education should teach kids about things beyond their immediate experiences. I never read Freire teaching such things. He thought students should be taught, in a political manner, about their own communities. There’s so much more to the world than your own community. And would you really want to live in a world governed the way children would want it governed? I love kids to pieces, but there’s a reason *they* are the students.
“Freire believed that all education is political and that teaching academic subject matter serves to rationalize inequality within capitalist society”
I have not read Freire’s work, but from the discussion thread I understand that he’s talking about not much else than a modern incarnation of the US Progressive education ideals of the 1920′s. Progressive education started with the same good intentions, to ‘liberate the oppressed’ by teaching students the minimum they were perceived to need. Freire sounds like a modern William Heard Kilpatrick – influential, well intended, but in the end just an advocate against a curriculum of academic quality.
Why can’t you learn what others show you, AND learn for yourself? Who said this was a mutually exclusive choice?
I have no problems with “don’t be afraid to learn for yourself, and not just blindly accept what others tell you” but Freire takes that idea and runs with it to an extreme. He seems pretty paranoid, full of hatred of Western civilization in general, and a die hard Communist.
Why is he important in education circles again?
Tracy W, you do a great job explaining why it’s folly to let kids determine what they’ll learn. Doing so creates slaves of kids, not free men and women. If you just let them elaborate on their current kid interests (or their radical teachers’ political interests), they’ll end up ignorant of whole domains of knowledge that are useful to adults. At that point, they’ll have to rely on other, better educated adults to provide them with opinions about adult matters and to do knowledge-intensive tasks (like write grammatically) for them. How is that empowering? It’s debilitating. A traditional liberal arts education is the anthithesis of indoctrination. It’s about stocking a brain with the knowledge an adult can use to build his own well-founded opinions, and accomplish things on his own. It ALONE can liberate young minds. Here’s some proof: Voltaire, Bayle, Descartes –men whose ideas shook the foundations of Christianity –were products of rigorous Jesuit schools. The liberal arts freed these men’s minds despite the ardent Catholicism of their teachers. The liberal arts is not a shallow ideology; it’s a mass of knowledge about humanity too rich and complex to fit into an ideological straightjacket, left or right.
I think that’s what Freire wanted – mental slaves. Ironic, don’t you think, considering what he preaches? But it’s HOW he preaches it that reveals his true nature.
In his perfect world, either you submit to his doctrine, or you’re evil and to be isolated from society. When I read Freire’s works I can’t help but think of “1984″ and “Brave New World”…
Sounds like this guy is all for teaching kids anything other than stuff that gets them out of the “oppressed class”.
I’m sure Obama’s “English professor” buddy Ayers is a huge fan.
Who’s the “oppressor”?
A traditional liberal arts education is the anthithesis of indoctrination. It’s about stocking a brain with the knowledge an adult can use to build his own well-founded opinions, and accomplish things on his own. It ALONE can liberate young minds.
Can you support this word “ALONE”? Did Socrates have a traditional liberal arts education? Leonardo da Vinci? Jane Austen?
The examples you gave are proof that a rigorous education can lead to free-thinkers, but they’re not proof that *only* a rigorous education can lead to free-thinkers.
Funny thing…
If I were out to overthrow a social order, I would start with learning about it, inside and out. Exploring it, seeing what and why it worked. Only then can weakness be found.
From The Art of War:
Combine that with the reality that “you don’t know what you don’t know”, and the pedagogy put forth by Freire and restated by Mr. Downes would be just about the *worst* way to overthrow a social order.
Of course. If the masses had the ability to overthrow a social order, the Marxists would never be secure—indeed, might wind up on the outside from the start, because people who can think for themselves don’t need Marxist “leadership”. Thus the tight controls over “education” in Marxist societies.
Quincy:
I think that you are right on point. But, I am not certain that Freire would disagree with you. The word that introduced me to Freire was “praxis,” which (and I am restating very poorly) links something like learning and action. And by action, he is not talking about making posters or projects. He is talking about a link between knowledge and using knowledge (I think). He also talks a lot about the importance of dialogue. This is very different from moving the central spotlight from the teacher (obscuring the learner) and placing it on the learner (obscuring the teacher). If fact he talks about teacher-students and student-teachers–acknowledging a profound give and take. I believe that he also acknowledges something more of a parent-type role initially (that is the teacher takes a leadership role), which then devolves to something which allows growth of both teacher and learner.
He is not writing “how-to” books on instruction, so I find his writing to be very dense, but thought-provoking, things to be chewed on over time, and returned to over the course of experience. This is one reason I don’t see a lot of danger that Freire’s thinking is going to overtake American classrooms. I don’t observe that we are very big on deep thinking. In the same way, we have picked up bits and pieces of Montessori (every kindergarten has small chairs and tables–they used to all have “housekeeping areas,” although I suspect these are not considered “content” oriented enough today), but I would say that few have studied deeply–and many more have used some thin replication to excuse classrooms in which there is a lot of aimless wandering.
Reading through this thread, I am disheartened by the number of posters who–without having read Friere–have matched him (based on someone else’s description) with some movement or other (he’s a Marxist, he’s a progressive, he’s like the NYC Dept of Ed) that they have already codified and rejected. This raises for me two questions. One has to do with our approach to knowledge. Do we approach knowledge in the way that Quincy cites, with an attempt to know both self and other on a deep level, or do we settle for superficial categorizations that fit with (and don’t disturb) previous structures? The second, which I throw out for any deep thinkers who might be interested, has to do with the source of those previous categorizations. And this is where I see the danger in the “anti-Freirian” camp. Is public education providing glib explanations of history that serve primarily to support current decision makers? I believe it was Brecht who said “to say that art is not political is in itself a political statement.” I think that Freire is pretty clear in applying the same thing to education. I believe that he would fall somewhere along the line of all education being political. Can’t be avoided. So, then the question becomes whose politics are served?
There is no question in my mind that Freire was a revolutionary (and I think he would not disagree either). We in the United States don’t have (or ought not have)a problem with revolutionaries per se, having been born of a revolution ourselves (and a revolution born of philosophers as much as unfair taxes). Revolution may or may not be the appropriate path of classes in the United States systemically denied, through generations, access to the full fruits of democracy. But, let’s be clear. Freire was talking about something far more meaningful than allowing eight year olds to wander in a classroom hoping to alight on something relevant to their lives. He is also not talking about a leaned-down manual curriculum “more appropriate” for the working classes. As I understand Freire, he talks about education as a life-long process of exploring meaning–involving both the teacher and the student in acquiring new understandings.
I appreciate this discussion–it motivated me to pull out and read a few pages of “Pedagogy” yesterday. Like I said–it’s dense stuff. But I cannot imagine an ed school not including Freire in the curriculum.
One has to do with our approach to knowledge. Do we approach knowledge in the way that Quincy cites, with an attempt to know both self and other on a deep level, or do we settle for superficial categorizations that fit with (and don’t disturb) previous structures?
I think this is dependent on our attitude to criticism and how open we are to debate, especially attack-motivated debate. The bruising approach of defending ideas against well-motivated attackers is what I think drives really quality work in the end, at least for most of humanity. Without this, it is so easy to take the path of not asking ourselves the difficult questions and not checking our own statements.
The second, which I throw out for any deep thinkers who might be interested, has to do with the source of those previous categorizations. And this is where I see the danger in the “anti-Freirian” camp.
Why only the “anti-Freirian” camp?
I believe that he would fall somewhere along the line of all education being political. Can’t be avoided. So, then the question becomes whose politics are served?
This misses an important preliminary question – can education be made to serve a particular politics? Just because education is political doesn’t mean that the end outcome will be one that the political masters like. The law of unintended consequences hurts dictators as well as democracies.
Did Gandhi’s law teachers at that London university intend for him to become a committed pacifist who led a movement to overthrow the British Empire?
Martin Luther King’s teachers at Booker T. Washington Comprehensive High School may have meant for their students to become leaders in the fight for civil rights, but I don’t think the original Martin Luther’s teachers meant for him to challenge the Catholic church.
As far as I can tell, once you teach someone to read and provide them with access to books you drastically lower your control of their education, no matter what your intent in deciding to educate them was. If you can’t even censor their reading, you’re really stuffed when it comes to control.
A lot of political theory about education appears to be based on glib explanations of society where the theorist never really looked for any disconfirming evidence.
Tracy W,
I’m glad you challenged my “ALONE”. Quick response: do you know of any other way to free a mind? Socrates, no doubt, was well-versed in the canon of the time. He certainly knew his Homer. I don’t see how someone with just his innate gifts can resist dangerous brain-viruses. Wide-ranging learning provides anitbodies.
I believe teaching anything, even the abhorrent, in a substantive manner makes it impossible to bend that teaching to a political end. This seems to be an alien idea to both sides of the political debate, who believe it better to keep “bad” ideas out of the minds of impressionable youth.
The problem, though, is people who want to make sure people believe they know everything they need to when they really don’t. That’s what’s so dangerous about this formulation:
Now, I don’t know Freire’s work well enough to judge whether the above is a misstatement or oversimplification of it, but the idea as stated is a sure way to keep people oppressed, not free them from it.
“The point of Friere’s work is to encourage and empower people to find out what they actually need to learn (instead of what they are told to learn) and to learn it for themselves, working together.”
Kind of sounds like homeschooling. But, generally speaking, those who promote Friere’s educational philosophy are the type who denigrate homeschooling. Not saying that’s 100% so, just generally so.
Quick response: do you know of any other way to free a mind?
A non-liberal arts education? Or a non-traditonal liberal arts education?
Socrates, no doubt, was well-versed in the canon of the time. He certainly knew his Homer.
But that is not the same as him having had a traditional liberal arts education. (Note that you haven’t defined it yet, but I doubt that the field of study in Ancient Athens was the same as in the medieval monasteries that produced Erasmus or the same as in Booker T. Washington Comprehensive High School.)
Jane Austen as a girl in the 18th century didn’t receive a traditional liberal arts education, Mary Wollstonecraft didn’t either as far as I can tell, and in particular their knowledge of science and mathematics would have been limited compared with boys from an equivalent background. China has produced its own array of internally famous philosophers within a different education system too.
Obviously it is difficult to make a major contribution to say political science, philosophy, etc without ever having studied at least some of these areas, and without the ability to make your contributions in a way that others can understand. If that’s what you mean by “traditional liberal arts education” then I can agree with you.