Lecture 2 – Philosophy of Education

Paulo Freire – Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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Agenda

1. What is the Point of School?

2. Review• What is Philosophy?

• The Allegory of the Cave

• Reading Philosophy

3. Who is Paulo Freire?

4. Key Terms

5. Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed

6. Comparison to the Allegory of the Cave

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What is the Point of School?

• Why should you go to college? Why should you try to get good grades?

• Is education just “instrumentally valuable?”

• Everyone has opinions about classes they’ve liked and not liked.

• What sort of classes have you enjoyed the most or learned the most in?

• How were those classes taught? What pedagogical methods helped you learn the best?

• What kind of a learner are you?

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What is Philosophy?

• Philo | sophia = love of wisdom

• Method• Conceptual vs. empirical

• Clear, rigorous, argumentative thinking

• Questions presuppositions of other disciplines

• Subject Matter• Metaphysics: fundamental nature of reality

• Epistemology: study of knowledge

• Ethics: what ought we do?

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The Allegory of the Cave

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• The shadows that the prisoners see are analogous to the unreflective opinions that people hold.

• Doing philosophy is like leaving the cave and freeing your mind from imprisonment by illusions.

• Engaging in rational inquiry and questioning appearances is difficult work and may open you up to ridicule.

• Once you have been out in the sun’s light though, would you ever want to return to the cave?

Reading Philosophy

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Every time you read, make sure you get PAED.

Preview the text• Skim the text to find its organizational structure.• Try to find its main conclusion.

Active reading• Annotate and highlight.• Circle key terms or definitions.• Write questions and objections in the margins.• Diagram or outline the article’s main argumentative pieces.• Identify reasons and premises offered in favor of an argument.

Evaluate• Do you agree or disagree with article’s main argument and why?• What flaws might there be in an author’s reasoning?• Is the author making assumptions that you think should be challenged?

Do it again!• Reread, reread, reread!

Paulo Freire

• Paulo Freire (1921–1997)

• Brazilian educator and advocate of critical pedagogy.

• Grew up dealing with poverty and hunger, which informed his understanding of the relationship between social class and knowledge.

• Studied law and philosophy at the University of Recife.

• Worked as a teacher in secondary schools teaching Portuguese.

• Appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the state of Pernanbuco in 1946. Worked primarily among the illiterate poor.

• Offered a visiting professorship at Harvard in 1969.

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Key Terms

• Banking Concept of Education

• Problem-Posing Education

• Consciousness

• Conscientização (Consciousness Raising or Critical Consciousness)

• Teacher-student and Student-teachers

• Narratives

• Dialogue

• Becoming

• Praxis

Other Possibly Unfamiliar Terms

• Ontological

• Intentionality

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Banking Concept of Education

• The banking concept of education turns students “into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are” (72).

• What might be the consequences of thinking about education through this metaphor or image?

• What is the relationship between teacher and student under the banking concept of education?

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Teacher-Student Contradiction

• Teacher as Subject, student as object.

• Why does Freire speak of a teacher-student contradiction?

• “The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite, by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence” (72).

• “Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students” (72).

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Education and Oppression

• “The banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world” (73).

• “The interests of the oppressors lie in ‘changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them’; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated” (74).

• For Freire, education isn’t simply the transfer of information. Rather education is a praxis—it involves theory and practice intertwined. This implies that education is also always already political—it can be oppressive or liberatory. 11

What is Critical Consciousness?

• Conscientização (Portuguese) is translated usually as conscientization, consciousness raising, or critical consciousness.• Is critical consciousness simply being aware of

the world?• Besides becoming aware of social and political

contradictions, critical consciousness must also involve acting to resolve these contradictions and to end oppression.

• Praxis ≠ theory + action. Rather, theory and action must be intertwined and mutually informing each other.

• If one is not taking acting against social and political contradictions, one cannot really be aware of them and vice versa.

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Struggle for Liberation

• “Sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate reality. They may discover through existential experience that their present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human. …If men and women are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for liberation” (75).

• Why is it important to make this claim—that students will inevitably realize the contradictions reified by the banking approach?

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Relationship of Humans to the World

• The banking concept of education does not see the individual as conscious. It conceives of the person as “merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator” (75).

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Problem-Posing Education

• “ ‘Problem-posing’ education, responding to the essence of consciousness—intentionality—rejects communiqués and embodies communication. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian ‘split’—consciousness as consciousness ofconsciousness” (79).

• Self-consciousness.

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Problem-Posing Education

• “Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers” (80).

• “Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality” (81).• Education as creative, transformative, and involving praxis (practice and

action intertwined)—engagement in the world, with the world and with others.

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Relationship of Humans to the World

• “Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it” (81).

• We might say that different pedagogical approaches have different implicit metaphysical views. Remember, metaphysics (beyond reality) concerns the fundamental nature of reality. In other words, different educational theories have different implicit views about reality—what is human nature and what is a person’s relationship to the world and to others.

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Becoming (Human)

• “Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming—as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality.… The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity… In order to be, it must become” (84).

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Automatic Beginning of a Portrait of GalaBy Salvador Dalí (1932)

What is the Structure of the Text?

1. Criticize The Banking Concept of Education

2. Offer The Alternative of Problem-Posing Education

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How Can We Apply Freire’sProblem-Posing Model of Education?

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Compare to the Allegory of the Cave

• Similarities1. Education is liberatory2. Education reveals reality3. Education involves metaphysical views about the relationship between humans and the

world4. Are there analogies between the prisoners in the cave and the banking concept of

education?

• Differences1. In Freire, humans are not atomistic but they are social. Education requires engagement

with others (student-teachers and teacher-students).2. Who is leading the prisoner from the cave to outside the cave?3. Education is an ongoing process for Freire. For Plato, perhaps there is an end to

enlightenment once the prisoner sees objects for what they are rather than mistaking them to be their shadows.

4. Freire understands education as having a historical starting point. The allegory of the cave is a myth that lacks socio-historical context.

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