Freire states that "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 their liberation (p.75)."
This makes me think about all of the high school students I have encountered who are completely lost after graduating from high school and then drop-out of college after one year or less. Is it because they received a banking education in high school that lacked dialogue and guidance? Did they encounter this same banking education at the college level and become even more disenchanted and were seeking liberation elsewhere? Do any of you after reading Freire credit a teacher for being a humanist revolutionary leader who helped you achieve your goals or opened your mind to new possibilities?
My response:In response to your question, I didn't find anyone who really inspired me until I was in college. It was my second semester and I had a photography teacher who had such passion and she encouraged all of us to find that same passion through art. Because of what I found out about myself in her class, I changed my whole plans for college. I went from Pre-Vet to Art/Comm.
Thinking back to my high school days I recall a lot of "banking." But given my path at the time, it was seemingly necessary. The medical field has a lot of memorization involved. The one art teacher I had in high school told me I would never go anywhere with art. But as I evolved, art was an area where I could create and draw my own lines. I was the master of my creation, not being mastered by someone else's creation.
In a sense I was seeking this liberation Freire talks about. "Little by little... they (students) tend to try out rebelious forms of action. In working towards liberation, one must neither lose sight of this passivity or nor overlook the moment of awakening" (64). We must believe in ourselves, in our students, so as not to overlook to moment of awakening and lose something great that otherwise could have been ours and theirs.
Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I constantly caught myself imagining Freire's concepts and examples in the context of adult education, rather than, say, elementary school or middle school. Maybe it was because I was aware that Freire was jailed by the junta in Brazil for teaching adults (his early students were sugarcane workers). Still, the educational theories that he advances seem more applicable to the political organizing that would occur in an adult education setting than to a typical elementary school class where students might be learning basics such as the alphabet or their multiplication tables.
Are the revolutionary theories advanced by Freire in Pegagogy of the Oppressed relevant to elementary school education or only to older students and adults?
My response:
I know I am jumping in a little late due to some health problems... But I have been thinking about what you wrote. Just today I read an article in the New York Times talking about these very concepts (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/06/01/us/0602EDUC_index.html?WT.mc_id=fb_nyt223&WT.mc_ev=click).
I taught high school Spanish for the last 8 weeks of school and I saw a lot of oppressed vs. oppressor come through my doors in the faces of my students. To many of my Latin students I was just some gringa in there to teach Spanish. My last assignment was to watch the movie Rudy and they had to write a short essay on dreams.
Many of my students will be the first to graduate high school (even some white students) and many will be the first to go to college. Freire said something that caught my eye toward the end of Ch. 1, "It is only when the oppressed find the oppressor out and become involved in the organized struggle for their liberation that they begin to believe in themselves. This discovery cannot be purely intellectual but must involve action; nor can it be limited to mere activism, but must include serious reflection: only then will it be a praxis" (65).
As an educator I believe that the sooner students find out what their "oppressor" is, the more successful they will be later on down the road. Too often education is looked at backwards as far as problem solving. We don't believe they are mature enough for certain things, so we hold off until college (which most students never make it too...). Students now days are exposed to way more than we ever were at their age and as a result are being forced to mature, if you will, quicker. They aren't looking for someone to come up behind them and whisper truth in their ear. They want it straight up like it is with no sugar coating.
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