Freire and Education

Antonia Darder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136268083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

One of the most influential educational philosophers of our times, Paulo Freire contributed to a revolutionary understanding of education as an empowering and democratizing force in the lives of the disenfranchised. In this deeply personal introduction to the man and his ideas, Antonia Darder reflects on how Freire's work has illuminated her own life practices and thinking as an educator and activist. Including both personal memories and a never-before published, powerful dialogue with Freire himself, Darder offers a unique "analysis of solidarity, " in mind and spirit. A heartfelt look at the ways Freire can still inspire a critically intellectual and socially democratic life, this book is certain to open up his theories in entirely new ways, both to those already familiar with his work and those coming to him for the first time.

1
Liberation: Our Historical Task

The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves …

—Paulo Freire (1970b)

More than 40 years after Pedagogy of the Oppressed was first released, the inequalities and injustices that Paulo Freire was addressing then continue to persist in the United States and around the world today. In many instances, these conditions have only worsened in the last two decades, with the steady infusion of neoliberal imperatives into education, focused on privatization, deregulation, and free-market enterprise. With this in mind, it is important to begin any discussion on the legacy of Freire here; in that, often, it has been precisely Freire’s revolutionary critique of capitalism and the relationship of schooling to class formation that have been systematically stripped away, resulting in diluted versions of his ideas.

As a scholar of color who was born in Puerto Rico, a colonized subject, and reared in the urban poverty of the United States, it is impossible to convince me, given my lived history, that oppression’s center of gravity for those of us deemed as “other” is simply the psychological aberration (or micro aggressions) perpetrated by White people toward our so-called race. Rather, I argue that the processes that reproduce racism at all levels of the society, including education, are intimately connected to the material domination and exploitation of our communities by the powerful elite—and enacted, for the most part, by those who are not themselves affluent, but answer daily its siren call.

Although seldom spoken or acknowledged in traditional discourses about Freire’s work, there are particular ways in which radical Black, Latino, Native American, and Asian-American working class communities of the 1960s and 1970s embraced his revolutionary ideas and pedagogical assertions. Freire’s observation, in contrast, acknowledged this phenomenon, when responding to those who deemed his work metaphysical, abstract, or dense: “Workers also understand my work, as well as those who have some experience of oppression. But I acknowledge there might be a problem of cross-cultural translation with [more privileged and mainstream] U.S. readers.”¹

For many of us, Freire (2002) was one of the few philosophical educational theorists of the time that inspired us to struggle: “[We] were on fire with the love of freedom, and had found a point of reference in Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (p. 184). The distinctiveness of his radical discourse spoke to a grounded understanding of our racialized oppression and powerfully linked us to a larger international anti-imperialist struggle taking place around the world. In other words, if we were to counter the impact of the historical and contemporary impact of genocide, slavery, and colonialism, we had to begin by engaging the manner in which racism is inextricably tied to imperatives of social class formation and material exclusion. Freire (2005) contended that although “one cannot reduce the analysis of racism to social class, one cannot understand racism fully without a class analysis, for to do one at the expense of the other is to fall prey into a sectarianist position, which is as despicable as the racism that we need to reject” (p. 15).

Freire’s work then was central to understanding movement strategies related to community struggles, educational politics, and theoretical formations, in that he specifically grounded his analysis in an understanding of poverty as oppression and capitalism as the root of domination. The struggle for radical activist of color was not foremost about “celebrating diversity,” identity politics, or cultural legitimacy, but rather, it was a larger struggle for our humanity and our survival, given that we had suffered, in the flesh, the violence of oppression at every level of our existence. Hence, the more radical arms of the civil rights era recognized that local political struggles for self-determination had to also be connected to a larger international political project of class struggle and an incisive critique of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. During that short-lived era, movement organizations of color came to understand their struggle within the context of a long history shaped by the violence of colonialism. Important links were made between the economic imperatives that led to the colonization of the land, exploitation of workers, and the enslavement of African-Americans. As such, we recognized that the purpose of our engagement with Freire’s work was as much about unveiling the structures of domination as it was about decolonizing our minds of hegemonic ideologies that made us complicit with our oppression.

Freire’s philosophical insights about the oppressor/oppressed contradiction and its internalization among oppressed populations was echoed by writers of color of the 20th century, who spoke to this phenomenon in their political articulations of the plights of impoverished racialized communities. Many authors of color also made references to a dual process of socialization, not found in ethnocentric theories of the dominant culture. In concert with Freire’s (1985) understanding, “without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle” (p. 186), theorists of color sought to better comprehend and posit theories of identity. These perspectives challenged Eurocentric epistemologies, notions of identity, and Western concepts of human development. Theorist of color, instead, spoke to the phenomenon of double consciousness, double vision, bicultural identity, diunital consciousness, multidimensional consciousness, duality, of our twin beings, and so on (Darder, 2012), referring to the collision of not only two cultures but of deep asymmetrical relations of powers, which led to the subordination and erasure of our histories and material oppression of our communities. Restoring the integrity of our voices and centering our cultural and historical knowledge of survival, in sync with Freire’s pedagogy, became an important political quest, in an era where our voices and participation remained relatively silent and absent from the spheres of power.

As a young woman, meeting Paulo Freire, hearing him speak, and reading his work truly changed the course of my life, as an educator and political activist. This was for many reasons, of course. However, what cannot be denied is that this was partly so because he looked and felt more like people from my own community—people exiled by colonialism from or within our own lands. At the time, he was exiled from Brazil for his emancipatory literacy efforts with poor populations from the Brazilian countryside—those whom he credited for much of his ideas for Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire often spoke of his work as a manifestation of what he had learned through his relationship with those who were the most dispossessed in his country. His writings generated in activists and educators of color, in the United States and other parts of the world, greater political clarity and commitment.

Freire’s writings also challenged educators to truly embody our commitment to political consciousness and social transformation, within the everyday relationships we forged with those within and outside our cultural communities. What we understood was that pedagogy of the oppressed was not pedagogy solely for the classroom, but rather a living pedagogy that has to be infused into all aspects of our lives, including our personal politics. This is to say that teaching to transgress had to constitute a moral stance, often belittled and diminished within mainstream political discourses, even on the left. So much so that it caused bell hooks (1994) to write, “It always astounds me when progressive people act as though it is somehow a naive moral position to believe that our lives must be a living example of our politics” (p. 48).

For communities betrayed by our schooling, Freire’s message promised the possibility of an educational project for our children tied to a larger political democratic vision—one that resonated with our anticolonial struggles for self-determination and political aspirations to become full subjects of our histories, as well as control our own destinies. Pedagogy of the oppressed also signaled a pedagogy of transgression—transgression of oppressive ideologies, attitudes, structures, conditions, and practices within education and society that debilitate our humanity. It is not surprising that Freire’s humanistic inclinations and political vision of education resonated deeply with movement demands of educators and activists of color who sought fundamental change to the process of schooling in this country and those societal structures that worked against the emancipatory interests of our children and our communities.

Through Freire’s (1970b) ideas, we came to acknowledge that education can serve as an important vehicle for the political formation of citizens within a democratic society. This pointed to a humanizing educational process that could prepare students from oppressed communities for voice, participation in civil society, and ethical decision making in all aspects of their life. A central political aim of such a humanizing process of education is to support the evolution of critical consciousness with an explicit aim toward the establishment of a more harmonious and peaceful world. Starting from the fundamental realization that we live in an unequal world, an emancipatory pedagogy had to encompass a collective “struggle for our humanization, for the emancipation of labor, and for the overcoming of our alienation” (p. 28), so that we might affirm ourselves as full political subjects of our lives.

Freire (1970b) articulated a vision that he considered “an indispensable condition for the quest for human completion” (p. 31)—a completion that although would remain ever unfinished, nevertheless could enliven our imagination, creativity, hope, and commitment to resist the forces of domination and exploitation within education and the larger society. For Freire, freedom encompassed our human capacity “to be” and to exist authentically. Moreover, our capacity to live free required a fundamental shift in how we defined ourselves and the conditions in which we exist. This entailed a humanizing process that could support and facilitate the ongoing development of critical consciousness, so that we might find the cognitive, emotional, psychological, and spiritual strength necessary to critique and denounce conditions of oppression, embrace a life of solidarity, and announce new possibilities for a more just world.

Toward this end, Freire (1970b) understood that our task as teachers and students is to embrace a historical understanding of our relationship with the world and transform our teaching and learning into revolutionary praxis—a sound political pedagogy of “reflection and action upon the world to transform it” (p. 36). He argued that it is imperative that we, as educators, work in our communities to unveil and challenge the contradictions of educational policies and practices that objectify and dehumanize us, preventing our expression as full subjects of history. Indeed such a vision of education entails an ongoing political process. One that can only be sustained through collective labor—a labor born of love, but deeply anchored in an unceasing commitment to know, through both theory and practice, the nature of the beast that preys on our humanity.

Education as a Political Act

Education is part and parcel of the very nature of education… It does not matter where or when it has taken place, whether it is more or less complex, education has always been a political act.

—Paulo Freire (1993)

Freire (1993) was clear and forthright about his belief in the political nature of education. Furthermore, he believed that our political definition of our pedagogical orientation in the classroom and communities had to be understood explicitly with respect to our political responsibility as social agents for change. This view rips apart assumptions of neutrality in education, in that it demands from educators that we clearly take on our labor as a political act, defining ourselves “either in favor of freedom, living it authentically, or against it” (p. 64). Freire’s personal enactment of this important principle in his work was made obvious when he wrote,

In the name of the respect I should have for my students, I do not see why I should omit or hide my political stance by proclaiming a neutral position that does not exist. On the contrary, my role as teacher is to assent the student’s right to compare, to choose, to rupture, to decide.

(p. 68)

Thus, within the context of education, whether we are conscious of it or not, Freire recognized that all educators perpetuate political values, beliefs, myths, and meanings about the world. As such, education has to be understood as a politicizing (or depoliticizing) institutional process that conditions students to ascribe to the dominant ideological norms and epistemological assumptions of the prevailing social order. In addition, Freire helped us to understand how the hegemonic culture of schooling socializes students to accept their particular role or place within the material order—a role or place that historically has been determined by the colonizing forces of the dominant society, based on the political economy and its sorted structures of oppression. What Freire’s writings made clear to educators and activists was that schools are enmeshed in the political economy of the society and at its service. As such, schools are political sites involved in the construction, control, and containment of oppressed cultural populations, through their legitimating function, with respect to discourse, meaning, and subjectivity. And, furthermore, “the more [we] deny the political dimension of education, the more [we] assume the moral potential to blame the victims” (Freire & Macedo, 1987, p. 123).

Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed courageously discarded an uncritical acceptance of the prevailing social order and its structures of capitalist exploitation, embracing the empowerment of dispossessed populations as the primary purpose of liberatory education. In essence, his revolutionary praxis turned the traditional purpose of public education on its proverbial head, to unveil its contradictions. Instead of educating students to become simply reliable workers, complacent citizens, and avid consumers, Freire called upon educators to engage students in a critical understanding of the world in order to consider emancipatory possibilities, born from the lived histories and material conditions that shaped their daily lives. Freire’s (1993) common use of “the world” here is important to grasp, in that its meaning was both material and ideological, not merely poetic metaphor. Rather he explained:

When I speak of the world, I am not speaking exclusively about the trees and the animals that I love very much, and the mountains and rivers. I am not speaking exclusively of nature which I am a part, but I am speaking also of the social structures, politics, culture, history, of which I am also a part.

(p. 103)

This perspective of classroom and community life helped us to understand how historically, as a consequence of cultural and linguistic colonization and economic subjugation, populations of color in this country and abroad have been systematically oppressed. For more than 40 years, this knowledge has helped to support radical educators in unveiling those hidden ideological values and beliefs that inform standardized curricula, materials, textbooks, testing and assessment, promotion criteria, and institutional relationships, in an effort to support and better infuse our teaching with an emancipatory political vision of schools and community life. In so doing, we came to recognize that the task at hand is not to reproduce the traditional social arrangements that support and perpetuate inequality and injustice, but rather, to work toward the transformation of these conditions, within the context of our vocation as human beings and our daily efforts as educators and community activists committed to social change.

For Freire (1970b), schools are inextricably linked to the hegemonic process of cultural, political, and economic life. He theorized that it is precisely these processes of domination that reinforce and give legitimacy to the reproduction of a “banking” system of education. The reflection of the dominant class and culture is inscribed in the educational policies and practices that shape hegemonic schooling. One of the most pervasive aspects of this approach has been the instrumentalizing practice of teaching-to-the-test. This sterile and enfeebling pedagogical approach functions to “minimize or annul students’ creative power and stimulate their credulity” (p. 60) so as to reinforce intellectual submissiveness and conformity to the state’s prescribed ideological definition of legitimate knowledge and academic measures of achievement.

Freire (1970b) denounced instrumentalizing forms of pedagogy, given that these perpetuate cultural values of domination by teaching students they exist “abstract, isolated, independent and unattached to the world, that the world exists as a reality apart” (p. 69) from their control or influence. This deceptively and effectively works to structure the silences of students of color by relegating them to objects of their learning. Furthermore, this bankrupt logic of standardization adheres to a political message of conformity, which renders suspect social critique, particularly from those deemed deficient and unworthy to speak.

In powerful ways, Freire’s pedagogical project assisted us to expose how most teachers are simply not prepared to critique the destructive impacts of disabling practices in schools nor able to support students in their political formation. Hence, alienated and powerless to challenge the oppressive apparatus of schooling that mythologizes the authoritarianism of standardized knowledge and curricula, teachers become complicit in concealing the class formation and colonizing role of schools. Over the years, “scientific” myths attached to the need for high-stakes testing, standardized knowledge, and meritocracy have only solidified in the popular imagination. Seasonal publication of test scores in local newspapers has been used to rank the achievement status of teachers and schools. This public exposition has placed increasing federal and state pressure on school districts; pressure that sch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• SERIES EDITOR INTRODUCTION
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 Liberation: Our Historical Task
• 2 Pedagogy of Love: Embodying Our Humanity
• 3 Conscientizaçao: Awakening Critical Consciousness
• 4 Problematizing Diversity: A Dialogue with Paulo Freire
• Epilogue Our Struggle Continues
• REFERENCES
• INDEX