EDUCATION
Pedagogy of social liberation
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SHELLEY WALIA profiles Paulo Freire, whose theoretical innovations spurred notions of dialogical exchange between the teacher and the student.
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K.B.JAWAHARR
PEDAGOGY and liberation are much ignored areas in the drive towards our understanding of civil society, community and democracy. Theoretical innovations in the field of pedagogy put forward by the Brazilian intellectual, Paulo Freire, one of the most significant thinkers on problems of education in the 20th Century, spurred the notion of dialogical exchange between the teacher and the student so necessary for the culture of libratory practise and the denouncing of a culture of silence and oppression. "Dialectics", "empowerment" and "praxis", therefore became fundamental to his work. His concern with conversation, encounter, and ethical education has strong similarities with Martin Bauber's approach. Interrogation of the nature of one's social and historical situation or the critical examination of social construction, according to these two thinkers, is the single most important task for a student in whom the critical faculties are allowed to freely develop.
Education as lived experience
Classroom teaching in Freire's hands became an exercise in the development of critical consciousness (a process known in Portuguese as conscientização) that, apart from reflecting on important issues, gears students to take action; the teacher and the taught "both learn, both question, both reflect and both participate in meaning-making". Education, in Freire's hands becomes a lived experience capable of "naming" or using a vocabulary that dismantles received notions and stirs the student towards more innovative thinking. Using the image from Easter, he argues that the "educator for liberation has to die as the unilateral educator of the educatees, in order to be born again as the educator-educatee of the educatees-educators". Through an informal education, wholly conversational in methodology, the transference of information becomes an "act of knowing". An adherence to a strict curriculum regime only hinders the dialogical process as well as the appropriate introduction of innovative pedagogical techniques.
Teaching means working together, not talking down to the students. Implicit in this approach is an emphasis on dialogue that comes from respect for the other's point of view. Excessive education, Paulo Freire argues, involves unilateralism or "banking" — the teacher making "deposits" in the taught. Dialogue in the academe becomes a civilising and a humanising agency of beneficial social consciousness, thereby enhancing the idea of community and justice with wider social concerns and effects. But this does not mean reducing pedagogy to a mere theory or reflection. Informed action becomes the ultimate aim of all teaching and learning processes more relevant to the "pedagogy of the oppressed" or a "pedagogy of hope", (titles of his two major books exploring education as cultural action). This implies concern with "conscientisation" or in other words, "developing consciousness, but consciousness that is understood to have the power to transform reality". In terms of hope, Freire maintains that "New forms of subjectivity and new strategies of emancipatory praxis" arising from globally subjugated and exploited groups create "struggles which will lead to new forms of political culture and structures of radical democracy".
Born in a rural family in Recife, Brazil, on September 19, 1921, Freire had first hand experience of hunger, poverty and the relationship between social class and knowledge, of the impact of socio-economics on education. Beginning his career as a grammar teacher he went on to join the Iwa faculty in Recife where he met Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, a schoolteacher who had a significant influence on his life. They married in 1944 and it was she who pushed him towards his work on revolutionary pedagogy.
His appointment in 1946 as director of Education at SESI brought him in contact with workers and their families. Here he began to see more disconnections between elitist educational practices and the real lives of the working class. His interest in popular culture, in the language of the people and in the vigorous use of egalitarianism in lectures became the genesis of his monumental work on education of the oppressed.
In the early 1960s Freire's methods enabled many farm workers to be taught to read and write in just over a month. Encouraged by these experiments, the government permitted thousands of such centres to be set up all over Brazil. Regrettably, the military coup of 1964 led to his arrest and exile for over 15 years. In Chile he worked for five years in the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement. In 1967 appeared his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom, bringing him acclaim and a position as visiting scholar at Harvard in 1969. In 1968 he wrote his most celebrated book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in Spanish and English in 1970. Its narratives of liberation will stand as a landmark of "the struggle for more humane educational practices, for deeper insights into constructions of power and oppression, and the impulse for people to invent their own identities and realities". The de-humanising and oppressive effects of structural adjustment policies and the homogenising discourse of globalisation lead Paulo Freire to articulate a powerful message of opposition to all discourses of ostensibly irrevocable coercion. Freire emphasised "the potential of human agency in the process of social change". It was here that he championed a discourse of freedom based on a belief in the possibility of personal and political transformation.
Far-reaching influence
Invited to Geneva in 1970, he worked for over 10 years as an educational advisor to the World Congress of Churches. During this time, Freire visited a number of countries, helping to put into operation popular education and literacy reforms. It was in 1980 that he returned to Brazil where he enthusiastically joined the Workers' Party in São Paulo and, from 1980 to 1986, took charge of its adult literacy project. In 1988, Freire was appointed Minister of Education for the City of São Paulo. His radical innovations in literacy training as Minister continue to sway the city and Brazil to this day. In 1991 the Paulo Freire Institute was inaugurated, "congregating scholars and critics of his pedagogy, in a permanent dialogue that would foster the advancement of new educational theories and concrete interventions in reality... " For Freire the objective for a pedagogy of the oppressed had always been to restore lost compassion and in so doing unshackle both the oppressed and the oppressor: "As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors' power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression".
Paulo Freire died of heart failure on May 2, 1997, at the age of 75, but his contribution to pedagogy will be reinvented and reinterpreted, redefined and recontextualised as long as we remain involved with new experiments in teaching and learning.
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