Education In Modern Society
Education and U.S. Society: Provenzo Chapter 4
•Education as Cultural Action for Freedom
-- Paulo Freire
In the
• 3.3 million elementary
and secondary school
fall of
2000:
teachers
in public and
private schools
• 2.9 million in public
schools
• 0.4 million in private
schools.
• 2.0 million at
elementary level
• 1.3 million at the
secondary level
Yesterday and today, schools:
• trained people for the
world of work.
• communicated to
people their status
within society and
what was expected of
them.
•
Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup Poll
Strong support for local
(1999)…
schools
• General dissatisfaction with
the schools nationally
Perceived biggest
problems:
use of drugs (46%)
lack of discipline (18%)
Traditionally, we have
the necessity of education in defining a society.
assumed…
Yet if education recreates the society of which it is a
part, we face dilemmas:
• What if the society is
unjust? Inequitable?
• Would the educational
system help to perpetuate a
society that needs to be
changed or redefined?
• “Much of what
goes on in the
schools on a
day-to-day
basis is archaic,
and often
education is
dehumanizing.”
--J. Kozol
Teachers live and work
• “in somewhat the state of mind as intellectual guerillas,
• determined somehow to awaken students, to spark their
curiosity and to open their minds,
• yet no less determined to remain as teachers in the schools.”
Education
and
Power
• “The idea of power has lain
more completely neglected
in educational studies than
in any other field of thought
that is of fundamental social
interest….
•One is more likely to hear singing in a bank than
serious talk of power in relation to education.”
Power is a reality in nearly all relationships.
•
• It determines what we may
or may not accomplish as educators.
Education as Cultural Action for
Freedom
• The poor live in a
“culture of silence”
dominated by the ideas
and values of others.
• Freire saw learning as a
process of liberation;
• for him, education is an
act of cultural action for
freedom
• an act of knowing and not
memorization.
--Paulo Freire
Learning
• dialogue between the
involves
teacher and the
student.
• development of
critical consciousness
on the part of the
student.
•Instead of being simply acted on and
reacting to the world in which he or she
lives, the student learns to reflect and act
on the events of his life.
Education for critical consciousness.
• “Vocabulary words were of a generative nature, and came
from the experience of and reflected the needs of those being
taught to read.
• How and why questions took precedence over questions of
who and what.
• Instead of domestication, education became an act of
liberation,… “conscientization” or education for critical
consciousness.
model
of education
•The
Viewsbanking
students as empty
containers
• banking model is “well suited to the purposes of
the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how
well humans fit the world the oppressors have
created, and how little they question it.”
Educational
Colonialism
• Manifests in three different ways …schools reflect the
needs of the colonizers,
•
the aspirations and needs of those being dominated are
typically ignored.
•
“The thread that read through all colonial education was
the fact that it was offered by the colonizer without the
input or the consent of the colonized.”
•
“…neither provided the opportunity for integration into the
dominant culture…nor prepared those who were colonized
for positions of leadership within their indigenous cultures.
•
In a colonized educational system the individual becomes
increasingly alienated from his or her native culture.
•
Colonized people are directed; they do not direct
themselves.”
• The colonized
group eventually
comes to
identify with the
values and
beliefs of the
colonizer and to
assume their
superiority.
Education and Hegemony
•“Hegemony refers
• Hegemony refers to
the maintenance of
domination
• primarily through
consensual social
practices, social
forms, and social
structures
• produced in specific
sites such as the
church, the state, the
school, the mass
media, the political
system and the
family….
to the moral and
intellectual
leadership of a
dominant class over
a subordinate class
•achieved not
through willful
construction of rules
and regulations…
•but rather through
the general winning
of consent of the
subordinate class to
the authority of the
dominant class.”
Hegemonic systems try
to:
• define the limits of
discourse,
• set the political
agenda, by defining
the issues and terms
of debate
• exclude oppositional
ideas.
Schools as Social Systems
• If we try hard enough,
we can improve the lives
of the children we teach.
• Noble.
• Realistic?
•
Crises
arise
when
“…the structure of a social system allows fewer
possibilities for problem solving than are necessary
to the continued existence of the system.”