Pedagogy of Commitment

Paulo Freire

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317254454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This first English translation of Pedagogy of Commitment takes readers deep into the acts and meaning of living a life of community and social commitment. Paulo Friere discusses how, for teachers specifically, this commitment is not only to students, to the underprivileged, or to the education of those who speak a different language, but to the transformation of the self to become more deeply responsive to the needs of social transformations. More than any other Freire book, this speaks directly and plainly to the lives of individuals and to teachers. It is an inspiring and passionate call from a global giant of progressive education.

PART I

ARGENTINA

PAULO FREIRE’S PRESENCE
AT THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
OF SAN LUÍS

Speech

I Feel Happy and Challenged¹

MY FIRST WORDS, FILLED with gratitude, are directed at Nélida Esther Picco, the university president; at Germán Arias, dean of the faculty of Human Sciences; and above all, at Professor “Tato” (Roberto Iglesias), whom I learned to like well many years ago, since his stay in São Paulo, when we saw each other almost every day—we talked and worked together. Since then, it has always given me joy to get word from him, as I felt stimulated by his perseverance and his will. We joined together in the dream of changing the world.

First of all, I would like to apologize since it has been some time since I spoke my Portunhol [a rule-governed mixture of Portuguese and Spanish], and I am having a little difficulty re-encountering the exercise of a language other than my own. Some think that Spanish is poorly spoken Portuguese, and that Portuguese is poorly spoken Spanish. However, that is not so; they are different languages. I became convinced of that in Chile, when after seeing me teach a class, my younger son said to me, “Wow, Dad, you continue to speak Spanish really badly.” And he was right. Nevertheless, now, little by little, I am returning to my Portunhol-speaking experience.

How can I thank you all, who have gathered here for this festive occasion of tender friendship and homage? One possibility that I will rule out from the outset is taking advantage of this fraternal gathering to burden you with an academic lecture, to pick up the microphone and speak for an hour and a half about the values of education. That would be terrible, even if academic classes are necessary, fundamental. Were it not for academic conversations, we would not be here.

My position is not one to refute academia, because in some way we are academic. What we are not is academistic. All things have their time and their opportunity, and I believe this is not the time for an academic class, even though this conversation of ours is a serious conversation, as those conversations we had heard previously were serious. Another possibility would be to grab the microphone, say, “Thank you very much; I am flattered,” and leave.

That, in addition to being poor manners, would be an aggressive, pretentious, and arrogant attitude that I, obviously, refuse as well. That being the case, I shall prefer to say a few words of thanks, of acknowledgment of what a celebration such as this one means to Nita and myself: a challenge, while a responsibility.

I would also like to say that events such as this fill me with joy. I like that. A person must be ill or a liar to say they feel badly about parties like this. I always say that I consider myself an intensely needy person, and I believe one of my best virtues is this feeling of need, a necessity for the other man, the other woman. I have never felt that I was complete in and of myself. I need others. And that might be why I can understand that others also need me. This celebration, all these people, the words I have heard, all this does not entitle me to arrogance. Quite the opposite, I feel happy and pleased. I would actually say, “May other doctoral degrees come!”

I say that with simplicity and without embarrassment because I feel challenged. The more honors such as this one I receive, the more I feel a duty to be responsible. The honoris causa doctoral degree is not given to just anyone. It is given for a reason. It is necessary to know if it is justified from the standpoint of respect for truth, for history, for science, from the standpoint of ethics. In a world where there is little shame left, it is necessary to know that the university awarding a doctoral degree is not making a mistake. I am convinced that this university is not making an error by honoring me so. I say that because I cannot stand for false modesty. To me, false modesty is worse than immodesty. When I was young, I would listen to orators who would start out saying, “I should not have been the one to receive this award, but rather someone more competent than me.” I would always ask myself, “Why doesn’t he leave, then? Why did he agree to come?” I understand this party as a call to responsibility. The same way the university acknowledges today what I have been saying and doing for many years, it can just as well symbolically take the doctoral degree away tomorrow, should I betray my past, my present, and recant myself. I seek strength more in the recognition granted me by the university than in myself. I look to you for the strength I need not to betray the principles that caused the University of San Luís to honor me.

When I say, “May other doctoral degrees come,” I do so because however many more degrees I shall have, the more humbly responsible I will feel. For all that, I thank you. I am very appreciative of the reference someone made to Pedagogy of Hope.² I am seventy-five years old, facing some difficulties from the point of view of the body. I am undergoing some sort of separation between mind and body, as if my mind were twenty-five years old, when I know that my body is seventy-five, and can know by anticipation that the body won’t be able to follow the mind. You do not know what it means to wish to do something and not to have the means to do it. For example, to work at night: I just about cannot do it any longer.

To sum up, I would like to say that as a political educator, as a man who thinks about the educational practice, I remain profoundly hopeful. I reject immobility, apathy, and silence. I say in my last book, Pedagogy of Autonomy,³ that I am not hopeful on a whim, but rather out of conditioning dictated by my human nature. It is not possible to live fully as a human being without hope. Hold on to hope. Thank you very much!

Notes

All annotations were contributed by Ana Maria Araújo Freire.

1. Speech delivered at the Universidad de San Luís–Argentina, following the award of the doctor honoris causa degree, on August 16, 1996.

2. Editora Paz e Terra, 12th edition (São Paulo, 2005), preface by Leonardo Boff, notes by Ana Maria Araújo Freire.

3. Editora Paz e Terra, 36th edition (São Paulo, 2007). Commemorative edition celebrating the printing of one million copies in September 2007.

Seminars on Critical Pedagogy

Critical Pedagogy Practice¹

First of all, I would like to thank you for this demonstration of affection, the folks who came from far away and traveled for hours, even while knowing that the time we have available would be scarce. The second thing I would like to thank you for is this silence. It helps me to be able to speak.

This afternoon, we are going to address the topic of “educative practice,” and how we have been understanding or trying to comprehend this practice as our commitment to life and the world.

First of all, it is not possible to exercise the educative task without asking ourselves, as male and female educators, what our concept of man and of woman is. All educative practice implies the questioning, “What do I think of myself and of others?” It has been a while, since Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that I analyzed what I then termed the quest for Being More. In that book, I defined man and woman as historical beings that make and remake themselves socially. And that social experience ultimately makes us, constitutes us, as we are being. I would like to insist on this point: men and women, while historical beings, are incomplete, unfinished, unconcluded beings. This nonconclusion of being is not, however, restricted to the human species. It reaches every vital species. The world of life is a permanently unfinished world in motion. Nevertheless, at a given moment in our historical experience, we, women and men, manage to make our existence into something more than just living. In a certain sense, men and women invent what we call human existence: we got ourselves up on our feet, freed our hands, and that freeing of our hands is, in large part, responsible for what we are.

The invention of ourselves as men and women was made possible by the fact that we freed our hands to use them for other things. We do not have a date for this event, which is lost in the depths of history. We did this wonderful thing that was the invention of society and the development of language. And it was then, at that precise moment, in the midst of that and other “leaps” we accomplished, that we, women and men, attained this formidable moment, the realization that we are unfinished, unconcluded, incomplete. The trees and the other animals are also incomplete, even though they do not know themselves as incomplete. Human beings are at an advantage in that: we know we are unfinished. It is precisely there, in this radical form of human experience, in which the possibility of education resides. Conscious awareness of our incompleteness created what we call the “educability of being.” Education is, thus, a human specificity.

Our self-aware unfinishedness is what will allow us to notice the non-I. The world is the first non-I. You, for example, are a non-I to me. It is the presence of the natural world as a non-I that will act as a stimulus to develop the I. And in that sense, it is awareness of the world that creates my awareness. I come to know what is different from me, and in that act, I come to know myself. Obviously, the relationships that start to become established between the we and objective reality opened up a host of question marks, and those questions led to a search, the intent to comprehend the world and to comprehend our position within it. It is in that sense that I use the expression reading of the world as preceding the reading of the word. Many centuries before knowing how to read and write, men and women had been intellectualizing the world, taking it in, understanding it, reading it. This capacity for taking in the objectiveness of the world stems from a characteristic of the vital experience that we call curiosity.

Were it not for curiosity, for example, we would not be here today. Curiosity is, alongside conscious awareness of incompleteness, the essential engine of discovery, knowledge. Were it not for curiosity, we would not learn. Curiosity pushes us forward, motivates us; it causes us to unveil reality through action. Curiosity and action enter into a relationship to produce different moments or levels of curiosity. What I am trying to say is that at a given moment, pushed on by their own curiosity, man and woman in process, under development, come to recognize themselves as unfinished, and the first consequence of that is that the being that feels unfinished goes into a permanent process of searching. I am unfinished, and so is a tree, but I am more unfinished than a tree because I know I am. As an almost unavoidable consequence of knowing I am unfinished, I insert myself in a constant movement of searching, not in a punctual search for this or that, but rather an absolute search, which could lead to the very search for my origin, which might lead to a search for the transcendental, to a religious search that is as legitimate as a nonreligious search. If there is something that goes against the nature of human beings, it is the nonsearch and, thus, immobility. When I say immobility, I am referring to that which exists within mobility. A person can be profoundly mobile and dynamic even while being physically immobile or static. Therefore, when I speak about this, I am not referring to physical mobility or immobility; I am speaking about an intellectual search, about my curiosity around something, about the fact that I can seek even if I may not find. For example, I may spend my life in searches that apparently do not result in much, and all the while, the fact that I am in search results fundamentally from my nature as a researcher, being in search of something.

Now, there cannot be search without hope, and that is so because a condition for this human search is that it is undertaken with hope. For that reason, I maintain that men and women are hopeful not due to being obstinate, but rather because they are beings that are always searching. That is the human condition for searching: doing it with hope. Searching and hope make up part of human nature. Searching without hope would be a tremendous contradiction. For this reason, your presence in the world, and mine, is the presence of someone who moves along, and not of someone who is simply there. And it is not possible to move along without hope of arriving. Therefore, it is impossible to find a human being devoid of hope. What we can indeed conceive of are moments of hopelessness. During the process of the search, there are moments when we detain ourselves and say to ourselves, “There is nothing to be done.” That is understandable; I can understand that one might come down to that position. What I cannot share is the notion that one should remain in that position. It would be like a betrayal of our very nature, our hopeful and disquietedly searchful nature.

These reflections we are engaging in aim to signal essential issues to our educative practice. How can I educate without being involved in a critical understanding of my own search and without respecting the students’? This has to do with the dailiness of our educative practice as men and women. I always say “men and women” because I learned many years ago, while working with women, that it is immoral to say only “men.” That is what ideology is all about! From the time I was a boy, in school, I learned something else: I learned that when we say “man,” that includes women as well. I learned that in grammar, the masculine gender prevails. That is to say that if all the people gathered here were women, but if one single man were to turn up, I would have to say “todos” [masculine “all”], not “todas” [feminine “all”], when referring to all of you. What seems to be a matter of grammar is obviously not. It is ideology, and it took me a long time to understand it. I had already written Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Read the early editions of that book, and you will see that it was written in sexist language. North American women made me see that I had been deformed by sexist ideology.

Getting back to our topic: it is impossible, except for when one falls into hopelessness, to stop searching and, therefore, to stop having hope. I was telling you that another fundamental issue pertaining to educative practice is nonconclusion, given that it is within his/her nonconclusion that it becomes possible for a human being to be educated. Every learner, every teacher, discovers him-/herself as a curious being, as a seeker, a researcher, an inquirer, an unfinished being—thus, capable of picking up on and getting across the meaning of reality. It is in this very process of developing intelligence on reality that communication on what was apprehended becomes possible. For example, at the very moment when I understand, when I can reason about, how a microphone works, I will be able to communicate about it, to explain it. Comprehension implies the ability to pass it on. In more academic language I would say intelligibility subsumes the communicability of its object.

One of the most beautiful and gratifying tasks we have as teachers is to help learners constitute an intelligibility of things, to help them learn to comprehend and to communicate that comprehension to others. That allows us to attempt a theory of the intelligibility of objects. That does not mean this is an easy task. A teacher does not have the right to engage in an incomprehensible sort of discourse in the name of academic theory and then say, “They should handle it!” Nevertheless, he or she should not make cheap concessions, either. His or her task is not to create simplism, because simplism is disrespectful to the learners. The simplistic teacher believes that the learners will never rise up to being able to understand him or her and, thus, reduces the truth to a half truth; that is, a false truth. The duty of educators is not to fall into simplism, because simplism hides the truth, but rather to be simple. What we have to do is adopt a simplicity that does not minimize the seriousness of our object of study, but rather highlights it.

Simplicity makes for the intelligibility of the world, and that intelligibility of the world brings within it the ability to communicate it. It is thanks to that possibility that we are social, cultural, historic, and communicative beings. For this reason, a breakaway from a dialogic relationship is not only the violation of a democratic principle, but also a violation of human nature itself. Democratic teachers intervene in the world through the cultivation of curiosity and of hopeful intelligence, which unfolds into a communicating comprehension of the world. And we do that in different ways. We intervene in the world through our concrete practice; we intervene in the world through responsibility, through an aesthetic intervention, every time we are able to express the beauty of the world.

When early humans drew images of animals on rocks, they were already intervening aesthetically upon the world, and since they surely already made moral decisions, they were also intervening in an ethical sense. Precisely to the extent that we become able to intervene, able to change the world, to transform it, to make it more beautiful or uglier, we become ethical beings. To date, it has never been known, for example, that a group of African lions had thrown bombs over the cities of Asian lions. We have not to date learned of the existence of some lion that had killed in premeditated fashion. It is we, humans, who have the possibility of taking up an ethical position, who do those types of things. We are the ones who kill and assassinate men like Mauricio López,² whom I knew and whose absence I feel deeply, for whom I have great respect and admiration, and whom I miss. It was not elephants that made Mauricio and so many others vanish; it was the men of this country who probably acted with the complicity of some gringo presence. Only beings who ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Ana Maria Araüjo Freire
• Preface by Pedro Pontual
• Part I Argentina: Paulo Freire’s Presence at the National University of San Luís
• Part II Chile
• Part III Nicaragua
• Part IV Paraguay
• Part V Uruguay
• Index
• About the Author