Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education Is Being Taken Over by
the Mega Rich
by: Henry A. Giroux,
t r u t h o u t : 23 November 2010
(This is an expanded version of "Lessons From Paulo Freire," which
appeared in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.)
At a time when memory is being erased and the political relevance of
education is dismissed in the language of measurement and quantification, it
is all the more important to remember the legacy and work of Paulo Freire.
Freire is one of the most important educators of the 20th century and is
considered one of the most important theorists of "critical pedagogy" - the
educational movement guided by both passion and principle to help students
develop a consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies,
empower the imagination, connect knowledge and truth to power and learn to
read both the word and the world as part of a broader struggle for agency,
justice and democracy. His groundbreaking book, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed,"
has sold more than a million copies and is deservedly being commemorated
this year - the 40th anniversary of its appearance in English translation -
after having exerted its influence over generations of teachers and
intellectuals in the Americas and abroad.
Since the 1980s, there have been too few intellectuals on the North American
educational scene who have matched Freire's theoretical rigor, civic courage
and sense of moral responsibility. And his example is more important now
than ever before: with institutions of public and higher education
increasingly under siege by a host of neoliberal and conservative forces, it
is imperative for educators to acknowledge Freire's understanding of the
empowering and democratic potential of education. Critical pedagogy
currently offers the very best, perhaps the only, chance for young people to
develop and assert a sense of their rights and responsibilities to
participate in governing, and not simply being governed by prevailing
ideological and material forces.
When we survey the current state of education in the United States, we see
that most universities are now dominated by instrumentalist and conservative
ideologies, hooked on methods, slavishly wedded to accountability measures
and run by administrators who often lack a broader vision of education as a
force for strengthening civic imagination and expanding democratic public
life. One consequence is that a concern with excellence has been removed
from matters of equity, while higher education - once conceptualized as a
fundamental public good - has been reduced to a private good, now available
almost exclusively to those with the financial means. Universities are
increasingly defined through the corporate demand to provide the skills,
knowledge and credentials in building a workforce that will enable the
United States to compete against blockbuster growth in China and other
southeast Asian markets, while maintaining its role as the major global
economic and military power. There is little interest in understanding the
pedagogical foundation of higher education as a deeply civic and political
project that provides the conditions for individual autonomy and takes
liberation and the practice of freedom as a collective goal.
Public education fares even worse. Dominated by pedagogies that are utterly
instrumental, geared toward memorization, conformity and high-stakes test
taking, public schools have become intellectual dead zones and punishment
centers as far removed from teaching civic values and expanding the
imaginations of students as one can imagine. The profound disdain for public
education is evident not only in Obama's test-driven, privatized and charter
school reform movement, but also in the hostile takeover of public education
now taking place among the ultra-rich and hedge fund zombies, who get
massive tax breaks from gaining control of charter schools. The public in
education has now become the enemy of educational reform. How else can one
explain the shameful appointment by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of Cathleen
Black, the president of Hearst Magazine, as the next chancellor of the New
York City public school system? Not only does she not have any experience in
education and is totally unqualified for the job, but her background mimics
the worst of elite arrogance and unaccountable power. Surely, one has to
take note of the background of someone who should be a model for young
people when such a background includes, as reported in The New York Times:
"riding horses at a country club where blacks and Jews were not allowed ....
lending a $47,000 bracelet to a Manhattan museum ... and [refusing]
interviews since her appointment."(1) With friends like Rupert Murduch, it
should come as no surprise that she once worked as a chief lobbyist for the
newspaper industry in the 1990s "fighting a ban on tobacco advertising,"(2)
which is often targeted toward the young. It seems that, when it comes to
the elite of business culture, ignorance about education now ranks as a
virtue. Then, of course, there is the sticky question of whether such a
candidate qualifies as a model of civic integrity and courage for the many
teachers and children under her leadership. Public values and public
education surely take a nose dive in this appointment, but this is also
symptomatic of what is happening to public education throughout the country.
Against the regime of "banking education," stripped of all critical elements
of teaching and learning, Freire believed that education, in the broadest
sense, was eminently political because it offered students the conditions
for self-reflection, a self-managed life and critical agency. For Freire,
pedagogy was central to a formative culture that makes both critical
consciousness and social action possible. Pedagogy in this sense connected
learning to social change; it was a project and provocation that challenged
students to critically engage with the world so they could act on it. As the
sociologist Stanley Aronowitz has noted, Freire's pedagogy helped learners
"become aware of the forces that have hitherto ruled their lives and
especially shaped their consciousness."(3) What Freire made clear is that
pedagogy at its best is not about training in techniques and methods, nor
does it involve coercion or political indoctrination. Indeed, far from a
mere method or an a priori technique to be imposed on all students,
education is a political and moral practice that provides the knowledge,
skills and social relations that enable students to explore for themselves
the possibilities of what it means to be engaged citizens, while expanding
and deepening their participation in the promise of a substantive democracy.
According to Freire, critical pedagogy afforded students the opportunity to
read, write and learn from a position of agency - to engage in a culture of
questioning that demands far more than competency in rote learning and the
application of acquired skills. For Freire, pedagogy had to be meaningful in
order to be critical and transformative. This meant that personal experience
became a valuable resource that gave students the opportunity to relate
their own narratives, social relations and histories to what was being
taught. It also signified a resource to help students locate themselves in
the concrete conditions of their daily lives, while furthering their
understanding of the limits often imposed by such conditions. Under such
circumstances, experience became a starting point, an object of inquiry that
could be affirmed, critically interrogated and used as resource to engage
broader modes of knowledge and understanding. Rather than taking the place
of theory, experience worked in tandem with theory in order to dispel the
notion that experience provided some form of unambiguous truth or political
guarantee. Experience was crucial, but it had to take a detour through
theory, self-reflection and critique to become a meaningful pedagogical
resource.
Critical pedagogy, for Freire, meant imagining literacy as not simply the
mastering of specific skills, but also as a mode of intervention, a way of
learning about and reading the word as a basis for intervening in the world.
Critical thinking was not reducible to an object lesson in test taking. It
was not about the task of memorizing so-called facts, decontextualized and
unrelated to present conditions. To the contrary, it was about offering a
way of thinking beyond the seeming naturalness or inevitability of the
current state of things, challenging assumptions validated by "common
sense," soaring beyond the immediate confines of one's experiences, entering
into a dialogue with history and imagining a future that would not merely
reproduce the present.
By way of illustration, Freirean pedagogy might stage the dynamic interplay
of audio, visual and print texts as part of a broader examination of history
itself as a site of struggle, one that might offer some insights into
students' own experiences and lives in the contemporary moment. For example,
a history class might involve reading and watching films about school
desegregation in the 1950s and '60s as part of a broader pedagogical
engagement with the civil rights movement and the massive protests that
developed over educational access and student rights to literacy. It would
also open up opportunities to talk about why these struggles are still part
of the experience of many North American youth today, particularly poor
black and brown youth who are denied equality of opportunity by virtue of
market-based rather than legal segregation. Students could be asked to write
short papers that speculate on the meaning and the power of literacy and why
it was so central to the civil rights movement. These may be read by the
entire class, with each student elaborating his or her position and offering
commentary as a way of entering into a critical discussion of the history of
racial exclusion, reflecting on how its ideologies and formations still
haunt American society in spite of the triumphal dawn of an allegedly
post-racial Obama era. In this pedagogical context, students learn how to
expand their own sense of agency, while recognizing that to be voiceless is
to be powerless. Central to such a pedagogy is shifting the emphasis from
teachers to students, and making visible the relationships among knowledge,
authority and power. Giving students the opportunity to be problem posers
and engage in a culture of questioning in the classroom foregrounds the
crucial issue of who has control over the conditions of learning, and how
specific modes of knowledge, identities and authority are constructed within
particular sets of classroom relations. Under such circumstances, knowledge
is not simply received by students, but actively transformed, open to be
challenged and related to the self as an essential step toward agency,
self-representation and learning how to govern rather than simply be
governed. At the same time, students also learn how to engage others in
critical dialogue and be held accountable for their views.
Thus, critical pedagogy insists that one of the fundamental tasks of
educators is to make sure that the future points the way to a more socially
just world, a world in which critique and possibility - in conjunction with
the values of reason, freedom and equality - function to alter the grounds
upon which life is lived. Though it rejects a notion of literacy as the
transmission of facts or skills tied to the latest market trends, critical
pedagogy is hardly a prescription for political indoctrination as the
advocates of standardization and testing often insist. It offers students
new ways to think and act creatively and independently, while making clear
that the educator's task, as Aronowitz points out, "is to encourage human
agency, not mold it in the manner of Pygmalion."(4) What critical pedagogy
does insist upon is that education cannot be neutral. It is always directive
in its attempt to enable students to understand the larger world and their
role in it. Moreover, it is inevitably a deliberate attempt to influence how
and what knowledge, values, desires and identities are produced within
particular sets of class and social relations. For Freire, pedagogy always
presupposes some notion of a more equal and just future; and as such, it
should always function in part as a provocation that takes students beyond
the world they know in order to expand the range of human possibilities and
democratic values. Central to critical pedagogy is the recognition that the
way we educate our youth is related to the future that we hope for and that
such a future should offer students a life that leads to the deepening of
freedom and social justice. Even within the privileged precincts of higher
education, Freire said that educators should nourish those pedagogical
practices that promote "a concern with keeping the forever unexhausted and
unfulfilled human potential open, fighting back all attempts to foreclose
and pre-empt the further unraveling of human possibilities, prodding human
society to go on questioning itself and preventing that questioning from
ever stalling or being declared finished."(5) The notion of the unfinished
human being resonated with Zygmunt Bauman notion that society never reached
the limits of justice, thus, rejecting any notion of the end of history,
ideology or how we imagine the future. This language of critique and
educated hope was his legacy, one that is increasingly absent from many
liberal and conservative discourses about current educational problems and
appropriate avenues of reform.
When I began teaching, Freire became an essential influence in helping me to
understand the broad contours of my ethical responsibilities as a teacher.
Later, his work would help me come to terms with the complexities of my
relationship to universities as powerful and privileged institutions that
seemed far removed from the daily life of the working-class communities in
which I had grown up. I first met Paulo in the early 1980s, just after my
tenure as a professor at Boston University had been opposed by its President
John Silber. Paulo was giving a talk at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, and he came to my house in Boston for dinner. Given Paulo's
reputation as a powerful intellectual, I recall initially being astounded by
his profound humility. I remember being greeted with such warmth and
sincerity that I felt completely at ease with him. We talked for a long time
that night about his exile, how I had been attacked by a right-wing
university administration, what it meant to be a working-class intellectual
and the risks one had to take to make a difference. I was in a very bad
place after being denied tenure and had no idea what the future would hold.
On that night, a friendship was forged that would last until Paulo's death.
I am convinced that had it not been for Paulo and Donaldo Macedo - a
linguist, translator and a friend of Paulo's and mine - I might not have
stayed in the field of education. Their passion for education and their
profound humanity convinced me that teaching was not a job like any other,
but a crucial site of struggle, and that, ultimately, whatever risks had to
be taken were well worth it.
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