We teachers decided to meet every week where we could get noodle soup, squaring gastrological needs with intellectual.
We’d met to read and talk about Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book that’s not a teacher’s guide, a manifesto, or a philosophical tract, but something in between. Freire (doesn’t he look like the son of Santa Claus and Noam Chomsky?) wrote the book in exile. A Brazilian educator who’d grown up in a home knocked from the middle class by the Crash of ’29, Freire ran peasant literacy programs, which got him an “invitation” from Brazil’s military government to leave the country in 1964.
As for us: S assists police domestic-violence trainings, W is interested in anti-racism, E and G teach disabled-and-neurotypical mixed pre-school, M does anti-violence work with middle-school-age boys; in a few months (waiting on a background check) I’ll be tutoring and teaching (GED, creative writing, business English) at King County jail.
So how can we do our jobs? Re-entering the language of theory was tough (G: “I felt like I had to take a Tylenol just to understand his nouns”), but Freire’s argument starts clean. We are incomplete beings aware of our incompleteness. Our ontological vocation– our job-of-being– is to act on and transform reality (which is a process, “a problem to be worked on,” not, as a behaviorist would assert, a thing) for a richer individual and collective life. This is what Freire calls becoming more human.
If, Freire says, you accept this argument, you must work toward humanization for everyone. The converse is absurd: “To affirm that men are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.”
So what is humanization? Freire frames an artful Hegelian binary: the oppressed must be free to work to transform the world, and shake loose double-consciousness (the oppressor in the head) and the nagging sense that the “organized disorder” of oppression is simply their destiny. The awakened oppressor must untangle being from having, and forgo a love of stasis and control. (The fight’s against fascism as well as pious upper-middle-class hippie condescension toward the poor they want to help.)
Unlike in Marx, a person can be both oppressor and oppressed. In fact, class, race, religion, and bad love all get a mention. But it’s education that Freire focuses on, as the problem (banking-deposit teaching, school as training for normative adulthood)–
–and the solution. Ideal education, Freire contends, is mutual: a dialogue that’s slippery, dynamic, and driven by student concerns, questions and consciousness.
(Repeat that again: “We are incomplete beings aware of our incompleteness.”)
After all, if thought is always toward something– if consciousness is intentional– why not make education the same way? Freedom isn’t a gift, but something awakened. Freire is way past John Dewey or Rousseau: he wants a classroom of Subjects, out for a method as limber and free as the opened mind. (Under a friendlier president, Freire was invited back for three years as a superintendent in Sao Paulo, a great story on its own.)
Why read this stuff? Isn’t this dynamism, in its broadest sense, already its own grade-school cliche?
Well, teaching “critical thinking” and “leadership” alongside times tables, Freire might contend, isn’t revolution if education is still thought of as a ladder toward a received success. Though the adult world (at least in the US) now sports a non-conformist gloss, education still sands us into adult shapes.
Still, the pace of educational projects like Freire’s is step-by-step. In our second meeting, G told us he’d started a dinosaur unit (“they all told me, ‘dinosaurs!!!'”) and taken down his classroom’s six-feet-up square “student art” board, then told his kids to tape up their art wherever they liked.