Education,
Part 1
People’s education for
people’s power
Our method
is to take a text, and discuss it. This method is modelled on the theory and practice
of the late Paulo Freire. It is appropriate, then, to begin our course on
Education itself, with Freire. (Later in the course, we may look at some of Freire’s
critics.)
In the
first place, Freire can assist us greatly in defining what we are pursuing in
this course on Education. We are looking for a pedagogical theory: a theory of
teaching and learning. What is it for? What is education for? What is
educational theory for? Paulo Freire is an example of one who explored such
questions, and he did so within a liberation-struggle context, akin to our own.
In the
first sentence of Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of
The Oppressed” (attached, pleased find Chapter 1, or use the link
below) Freire “problematises” what he calls “humanisation”. That sentence says:
“While the problem of humanization has always,
from an axiological point of view, been humankind's central problem, it now
takes on the character of an inescapable concern.”
Axiology is
the philosophical study of value. Freire declares his principle value.
It is humanisation. It corresponds directly to the South African concept of
“ubuntu”.
“But while both humanization and dehumanization
are real alternatives, only the first is the people's vocation,” says Freire, asserting this
political and moral principle as a starting point.
In doing
so, Freire stands side-by-side with Karl Marx, who, in his masterpiece
“Capital”, and all his life, wanted to restore humanity to itself.
This is
what education is for.
Let us look
at some more of Marx’s, and Freire’s words.
In his 1844
Introduction
to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, at the gestation, if not
quite the birth of “Marxism”, Marx
wrote: “Criticism has plucked the
imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear
that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the
chain and pluck the living flower.”
Above all,
Marx wanted humans to be human. Criticism was not to crush, but to set humans free.
Similarly, Freire’s
educational method is called “critical pedagogy”. It rests on the fundamental
question of philosophy: the relation of mind to matter (Subject to Object). It asks
to be judged according to that principle. So on page 3 of Chapter One of the
“Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, Freire writes:
“… one cannot conceive of objectivity without
subjectivity. Neither can exist without the other, nor can they be
dichotomized. The separation of objectivity from subjectivity, the denial of
the latter when analyzing reality or acting upon it, is objectivism. On the
other hand, the denial of objectivity in analysis or action, resulting in a
subjectivism which leads to solipsistic positions, denies action itself by
denying objective reality. Neither objectivism nor subjectivism, nor yet
psychologism is propounded here, but rather subjectivity and objectivity in
constant dialectical relationship.
Explicitly
embracing his connection with Marx, Freire continues:
“To deny the importance of subjectivity in the
process of transforming the world and history is naive and simplistic. It is to
admit the impossible: a world without people. This objectivistic position is as
ingenuous as that of subjectivism, which postulates people without a world. World
and human beings do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant
interaction. Man does not espouse such a dichotomy; nor does any other
critical, realistic thinker. What Marx criticized and scientifically destroyed
was not subjectivity, but subjectivism and psychologism.”
The
significance of the human Subject in Freire’s theoretical scheme is clear.
Education as the refreshment and renewal of humanity is declared by these words
from the last paragraph of his Chapter 1:
“Teachers and students (leadership and people),
co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that
reality and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of
re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through
common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent
re-creators.”
The
Communists, in their own minds and in their intentions, seek to educate,
organise and mobilise, not so as to command the working class and the general
masses, but help to set them free.
The problem
of how to do so is exactly the problem that Freire addresses in “The Pedagogy
of the Oppressed.” It requires the formulation quoted above: “World and human
beings do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant interaction.”
Freire
writes about leadership and people both being human Subjects, “co-intent on
reality”. This is what gives meaning both to education, and to politics. Leadership
(teacher) and masses (learners) are “co-intent on reality”, coping together
with the open reality of human life within an objective material universe.
We are
talking here of revolutionary pedagogy. We are talking here of teaching with a
purpose and a reason that anyone can understand, i.e. we are teaching with “intentionality”.
The students can understand it.
We are
talking of liberation. In South Africa this concept is called “people’s education for people’s power”.
In the next
chapter we will dwell upon the dreadful mistakes that can be made if we fall
into the errors of what Freire calls “the banking theory of education”.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Pedagogy of The
Oppressed, Chapter 1, 1970, Freire.
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