the job of education, its political job ‘is to refresh the idea of justice going dead in us all the time’
I'm going to have to let this idea roam around in my head for a bit. It's such a compelling quote.
5 Matching Annotations
- Oct 2020
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Freire was acutely aware that what makes critical pedagogy so dangerous to ideological fundamentalists, the ruling elites, religious extremists, and right-wing nationalists all over the world is that central to its very definition is the task of educating students to become critical agents who actively question and negotiate the relationships between theory and practice, critical analysis and common sense, and learning and social change. Critical pedagogy opens up a space where students should be able to come to terms with their own power as critically engaged citizens; it provides a sphere where the unconditional freedom to question and assert is central to the purpose of public schooling and higher education, if not democracy itself.
Yes, critical pedagogies will always be feared and attacked by the ruling elites because they have so much to loose. That is, until the ruling elites have their power seized from them. Which will not happen unless critical pedagogies are taught and practiced in schools, and then later in the political and social arenas that make up our democracy. The teaching and learning comes first, and the majority of people have so much to gain from it.
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Freire rejected those modes of pedagogy that supported economic models and modes of agency in which freedom is reduced to consumerism and economic activity is freed from any criterion except profitability and the reproduction of a rapidly expanding mass of wasted humans.
This is so interesting. I have noticed that empowerment and possibility are terms that many educational institutions and schools are using these days to define what they will "give" student.s But the assumed meaning is usually that they will empower young people to unlock as many job opportunities as possible. These open and freeing terms are so so often linked to economic freedom and job choice.
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Thus, for Freire literacy was not a means to prepare students for the world of subordinated labor or ‘careers’, but a preparation for a self-managed life. And self-management could only occur when people have fulfilled three goals of education: self-reflection, that is, realizing the famous poetic phrase, ‘know thyself’, which is an understanding of the world in which they live, in its economic, political and, equally important, its psychological dimensions. Specifically ‘critical’ pedagogy helps the learner become aware of the forces that have hitherto ruled their lives and especially shaped their consciousness. The third goal is to help set the conditions for producing a new life, a new set of arrangements where power has been, at least in tendency, transferred to those who literally make the social world by transforming nature and themselves. (
This understanding reminds me a lot of Gholdy Muhammed's methodologies in the "Abolitionist Pedagogies" video. She outlined 4 learning goals in the video, and in her book "Cultivating Genius", that are reminiscent of these ones.
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Few of even the so-called educators ask the question: What matters beyond the reading, writing, and numeracy that are presumably taught in the elementary and secondary grades?
These same educators were never given the chance to "think beyond the test" in their own education. Creativity, critical decision making, compassion, these are skills that need to be practiced in order to be honed and their value felt. Couple this with our societal fears of "not making it", and we mostly mean financially, and our education decisions become rooted in fear, rather than freedom.
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