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Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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Description

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pedagogy of the Oppressed (written by educator Paulo Freire) proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society. It was first published in Portuguese in 1968, and was translated and published in English in 1970.
Dedicated to what is called "the oppressed" and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between what he calls "the colonizer" and "the colonized". The book is one of the foundations of critical pedagogy.
In the book Freire calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model" because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggybank. However, he argues for pedagogy to treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.
According to Donaldo Macedo, a former colleague of Freire and University of Massachusetts Amherst professor, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a revolutionary text, and people in totalitarian states risk punishment reading it; Arizona's former Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, objected to its use in classrooms. The book has sold over 750 000 copies worldwide.

Summary

Translated into several languages, most editions of Pedagogy of the Oppressed contain at least one introduction/foreword, a preface, and four chapters.
The first chapter explores how oppression has been justified and how it is overcome through a mutual process between the "oppressor" and the "oppressed" (oppressors-oppressed distinction). Examining how the balance of power between the colonizer and the colonized remains relatively stable, Freire admits that the powerless in society can be frightened of freedom. He writes, "Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion". (47) According to Freire, freedom will be the result of praxis — informed action — when a balance between theory and practice is achieved.

BAD TEACHER TRAINING

The  stature of  the teaching profession continues  to diminish  exponentially as the profession continues to be comprised mostly  of people who performed at the bottom third of their class in undergraduate school.  Teaching in a public school insures that teachers, bolstered by the teacher's union, can work to minimum standards with impunity.  Most teachers come from the working class; therefore,  lack  the  cultivated experience to recognize that their education was mediocre at best since working class children are educated differently than upper class children.  Working class children,some of whom will be future teachers, receive an education predicated on obedience to rules since those are the values that the ruling class wants inculcated in the working class. Working class education with its adherence to rules and conformity fails to be the fertile incubation  for the development of  brilliance and rebellion required of a great teacher.  The essence of great teaching remains the ability to inspire in students the passion and desire to question the status quo even if that could mean questioning the teacher who could be perceived as its embodiment. .  Unfortunately, teachers benefit from the statusquo where the unions insure job safety for most teachers who have no incentive to be anything  other than mediocre.

THE BEST TEACHERS

How stupefying, that a teacher would participate in teaching language arts in the IB program providing rigorous academics denied to her and her own children as members of the working class. Isn't that teacher ever troubled by the incongruity that she has to produce results day after day in a private school, teaching the children of the rich in stark relief to her meager education and that of her children? Who are these people who only want their children educated with the upper class? How ironic  those parents and their working class  teacher pay lip service to the IB philosophy emphasizing a global community, social constructivism and attention to multiculturalism as they insure it remains upper class multiculturalism. Such hypocrisy. So at the end of her teaching career what will remain will be the teacher's identification with the oppressors.


It takes no talent or effort to teach upper middle class kids. They come to school riddled with resources knowing how to learn, most of them know more than their teachers due to their superior cognitive development, the end product of their enormous financial resources. The real teachers, young people in the” Teach for America “program, college graduates from Harvard and Yale,  go into marginal schools and advocate for the resources to educate the marginalized, the disenfranchised in the spirit of social justice.   The Teach for America program remains this country’s best effort to remediate educational inequality.  The Teach for America program continues to define how to educate,  upper middle class  college students educating the poor.