Fundamental Questions in LIFE:
What is my place in the social order?
How do I learn my place? How am I connected with
others and with the larger society?
IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK,
WHAT WOULD THEY SAY?
“The information is up here.
Follow along.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
Write down your reactions to this film. I will call on you.
How do these students FEEL about their education?
Is it justified?
What are their complaints? What are their concerns
about their lives? About the world?
Video made by a Cultural Anthropology class at Kansas
State University Spring 2007
Freire on “Banking”
Approaches to Teaching
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Teacher teaches, students are taught
Teacher knows everything, students know nothing
Teacher talks students listen
Teacher chooses, students comply
Teacher acts, students follow passively
Teacher holds authority, students are alienated
The lives of the students don’t matter
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Receive, memorize, repeat
Views the poor as manageable, they need to adapt to world as is, they get
a fragmented view of reality.
For FREIRE Knowledge emerges through invention and reinvention in
communication with others.
Elements: class solidarity, restless, hopeful inquiry, engage in critical
thinking and mutual humanization, consciousness of own thinking,
reflective about social conditions and change.
Through schools and other social experiences
in their lives, students learn what?
Any student experiencing banking
methods of teaching can feel:
• Like objects rather than subjects
• Alienated
• Silenced
Are disadvantaged students:
• Taught not to question?
• Taught to internalize failure, blame
themselves (even though school
structures can promote failure)?.
• Not educated to understand their
position in the world?
How have Classical
Liberal ideas played
out in the 20th century?
How much have the
definitions of liberty and
equality changed?
Freire offers 20th century
critique of education and
schooling of the disadvantaged.
“Literacy for Liberty”
“I have learned to think for myself.”
Have all students had this experience?
Aim of Education
GROWTH
AND
Paulo Freire began teaching peasants in
Brazil who were illiterate, who had no
rights and no voice in governing.
Eventually, Freire became a city
superintendent, and he implemented
democratic school reform for the poor.
“Every person, regardless of education is
capable of looking critically at the world.” Freire
Human beings – have equal rights to be free, they are
capable, can solve problems, can learn from each
other through dialogue, and are creative.
Education – to understand and transform the world.
The oppressed need ways to obtain greater freedom
by working together to change institutions that
exclude or mistreat them, they must seek their own
emancipation.
Key elements of Freire’s approach to learning for
the oppressed, disadvantaged, working class student.
What kind of citizen does Freire envision
this education producing?
PROBLEM POSING EDUCATION:
• Teachers and students learn together. INQUIRY & DIALOGUE,
ACTION (towards change) & REFLECTION about conditions
(praxis), and in the process learn skills and content of disciplines.
• Non-authoritarian.
• Values all kinds of knowledge.
• Seeks to connect knowledge with the reality of students’ lives.
• Authentic liberation (having voice, autonomy, some power)
• Responsible for the process of education (subject, not narrated by
others, or simply as objects of banking education)
How are efforts to improve conditions for disadvantaged students
based on democratic principles? Who is considered a citizen has
been expanded since Jefferson’s time. But what about the
education of low-income and disadvantaged groups today?
Liberal Political Philosopher C.B. McPherson
summarizes real equality to mean:
FREIRE’S CHALLENGE:
ARE MODERN LIBERAL
STATES REALLY
DEMOCRATIC?
Equality before the law.
Basic civil liberties for all.
Equal rights to self development (one important
resource is education).
Equal political voice for each citizen (the interests of
each member of the community matter equally).
FREIRE WOULD APPROVE OF: A low income school
looking to engage students with local needs---an example is:
Students living near toxic waste dumpsites might investigate
the health, environmental, or economic impact on the
neighborhood or examine state policies for locating these
sites. Or, students living in a low-income neighborhood
studying why there are no supermarkets, parks, or after
school programs in their area.
“The pursuit of humanity cannot be carried out in
isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and
solidarity.” Class-based analysis of Freire
“No one can be authentically
human while he prevents
others from being so.”
“Some men’s having must not
be allowed to constitute an
obstacle to other’s having,
must not consolidate the
power of the former to crush
the latter.”
(Freire, 1970)
In a high tech world, there are efforts to provide technology
access to the most disadvantaged students.
Pluralist Approach to Curriculum for All Students
would bring some understanding of different kinds
of experiences, raise social questions, call attention
to injustices.
What are students learning sitting here?
“If these walls could talk, they can’t. But students can, so
what do students say?”
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Large classes-- means what?
Reading assigned texts
Cost of college
Skipping class
Relevance of subject matter in classes
Books vs. web
Writing papers vs. emails
Time in the day
Multi-tasking
• World conditions—over 1 billion people earn less than $1
per day, many experience war, illiteracy, and violence.