Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy And Why You Should Not Take Everything’s Taught For Granted
The work Pedagogy of the Oppressed — the 3rd most cited social science book in the field and among the best-selling academic works of all time — that was written by Freire, worked to criticize the very backbone of the traditional education system that was heavy on indoctrination while deprived of reflex.
As Vietnamese, we did get ourselves quite familiar with some of the giants of the world’s pedagogy, and especially in some of our domestic education critique forums. On that list, we have John Dewey — the American educational researcher who’s the favorite of the dissidents; Maria Montessori (an Italian pedagogist) and Jean Piaget (a Swiss pedagogist), whose names are so popular they are almost synonymous to preschool and elementary education when searched on Google; Lev Vygotsky (a Russian pedagogist), whose names is probably less known that the former two, but definitely has received some interest from the public thanks to his influence in the creation of the experimental textbook series Cánh Buồm, a project initiated by Prof. Phạm Toàn; and then we got Paulo Freire (a Brazilian educational philosopher) who, despite also being rightfully one of the giants in the field, actually enjoyed not nearly as much of a red carpet in Vietnam as the aforementioned names did. As an educational philosopher who tied every of his works and in fact his own fate as well on the quest for liberation colonies, and being an utter monument for the countries across the Global South, Paulo Freire‘s name somehow completely fell on deaf ears in Vietnam, a former colony.
For that reason, this article will be dedicated to provide a brief introduction to Freire, to the Critical Pedagogy movement and to the man’s masterpiece Pedagogy of the Oppressed — the 3rd most cited work across the field of Social Science, according to statistics of 2016 [1] .
1. A brief biography of Paulo Freire.
Freire did not dedicate much of his work to discuss wisdom, potentials and psychology of children — which was the major topic of discussion for most other authors from his time as well as for those from the previous times, What piqued his interest more was the way how the infrastructures and power relations within a society could intervene with the way how a child grew up and perceived the world . Basically, he saw the education system as a product of the larger political context, instead of considering it entirely independent from the holy quest of liberating mankind. Paulo Freire’s pedagogy was resistive and revolutionary; it worked to point out that there was a reality that needed to be changed, a reality where the class division of the society became hand the hierarchy it resulted in work to generate a determinism on what individual humans could achieve intellectually, and the determinism could be embedded within the education itself with some shrewd manipulation. Illiteracy and lack of education, for Freire, were not a social evil, but instead a reality intentionally created to keep the poor from getting involved in politics.
The historical context that gave birth to Freire’s ideology was a much peculiar one. The country of Brazil, at the time he was born, was severely ravaged by the economic depression that was the aftermath of the Great Depression that took place in the Western countries, and the said situation had led to a severe classification of the Brazilian society. Paulo Freire was born into the middle class, and as a result was trapped within the transitional state between an affluent life and utter destitution. During his childhood, Freire shared a very close bond with the kids from the slumps; and while spending the earliest years of his life playing soccer, doodling on the ground and fooling around these kids, Freire came to notice the gap of education between the rich and the poor. While bearing the characteristics of the middle class, his soul was that of a commoner kid [2] .
As he grew up, Freire studied for a double degree in Law and Philosophy. He was deeply influenced by the schools of Critical theory and Phenomenology in the West, that were represented by some much familiar names: Jean Paul-Sartre, Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Simone Weil and Michel Foucault — whose influence was visible in Freine’s theoretical basis for Chapter II of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire’s educational philosophy was completely obsessed with the problems of freedom and liberation.
Despite graduating in the majors of Law and Philosophy, Paulo Freire decided not to become a part of the judicial system. Instead he taught Portuguese in middle school in his hometown Recife, and then later became the Director of the Department of Education and Culture of Pernambuco state. Here, Freire gained an even better exposure to the poor children and the unprivileged. The experience he had during this phase became the backbone for Freire’s first book — Education and the Practice of Freedom, as well as that of his later work Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
In 1961, Freire was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension at the University of Recife — Brazil. It was here that he was granted with the opportunity to put his educational philosophies into practice. His method of teaching language was used to teach the harvesters at a sugarcane plantation to read and write; and with its effectiveness proved, the education program named after him was quickly nationalized. Unfortunately, in 1964, the Golpe de 64 coup d’etat sponsored by the United States managed to overthrow the Brazilian government, and Freire’s education program was revoked. The man was sentenced to 70 days of imprisonment for the crime of “treason”, and was then exiled to Bolivia, from where he then immigrated to Chile. Freire spent the next 10 years of his life wandering the globe, gave birth to two masterpieces, taught at Harvard university, and later participated in the colonial independence movements in various parts of the world. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that Paulo Freire was both an educator and a revolutionary.
Up until 2000, Pedagogy of the Oppressed had 1 million copies sold and had officially become one of the most popular academic works in the history of mankind. In countries under dictatorship, the book was listed as forbidden, but was still translated and printed underground to spread among the people. Paulo Freire died in 1997, but despite that his works survived the challenge of time really well.
In the next part of the article, I will summarize some of the main arguments of Freire, which served as the backbone for the Critical Education movement initiated by him. The discussion will be based mostly on the publication P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, London: Continuum, 2000 [3] .
2. A critique of the “banking education” and the objectivity of knowledge.
Freire called the education with a specific volume of knowledge being passed on stably from the teachers to the students the “banking education”. Freire explained that under such conditions, “learning” was effectively treated as “the one-way process of teacher stuffing knowledge in the brain of students”. Why could knowledge only be transferred from the teacher to the student and not the other way around? It was because the teachers had a social status higher than that of the student, which was defined by his/her accumulation of knowledge and power being superior to the student’s having-nothing. The teacher’s main practice was the deposit of the truths pre-established by the textbooks and the government into the brain of the student. The only job of the student was to memorize these truths and to recall them when they are required to. In addition to the use of banking terms such as “deposit”, his depiction of the education system also employed some other much clever metaphors: knowledge was compared to money, which was essentially thing established and backed by the government; the teachers were compared to banks — the type of institution to monopolize the distribution of knowledge but not to have any authority to alter or establish it; and the students were compared to the customers, who tried to accumulate and consume the limited amount of knowledge that they were taught without being allowed to question their value.
It is evident that there has to be a precondition for this system of banking education, that is, the student has to accept that the knowledge taught is guaranteed to be true under any circumstances, just like how the people must accept that the money issued by the government is of value under any circumstances. They are not allowed to challenge or criticize what is “deposited” to them, while having to accept without question that those things are of definite value, while the other things are of no value as “they are not backed by the government, for one reason or another”.
The next question is, what exactly has made knowledge so easily transferable from one person to another? For Freire, this was even more the reason for the education system to be deemed as “banking”: because knowledge was quite literally being treated like money. People were assuming that knowledge could be accumulated, just like money. For example, you make the money, you deposit it in a bank and check your account regularly to see how much of it you are possessing, as well as the interest you earn from it. The interest does make your possession swell in number, but not necessarily in value, as money does depreciate over time and could also be devalued for many other reasons. But as the general population is kept blind from the latter, banking is seen as a legitimate method of saving for the future. In the banking education system, learning is also seen as a method of saving for the future: as the teacher (and behind them, the government) tries to feed into the student as much knowledge as possible, along with the false hope that the knowledge would not depreciate too much.
So, from the learners’ perspective, they consider learning a process of wealth accumulation that would make them become wealthier the more they do it, as knowledge is thought to never depreciate. On the other hand, from the government’s perspective, the more people manage to beat the knowledge into themselves the more established the value of knowledge would become. For example, the more Brazilians get exposed to and convinced by the knowledge that their puppet government is the good guys, the more established and reinforced this reality becomes. Of course, this is but a very conceptual example, and in reality the governments are much more subtle when using education to spread these predetermined nationalistic knowledge, nor do they rely on education as the sole mean for this purpose. But nonetheless, the general scheme seems to be that in order to ensure the stable value of the taught knowledge, they will discourage people from reflexing on the knowledge, aka from questioning the correctness of the knowledge, from criticizing it and from trying to creatively transform it — because these practices would cause the value of knowledge to become unstable and cause the teaching of knowledge to become more difficult.
This was even truer in a historical context where Brazil was faced by the imminent hazard of nationalism. What’s needed to nurture this movement was the people’s questionless trust and obedience. For that reason, it spared no effort to discourage questioning and skepticism. So much that whoever was skeptical about what they were severely punished. Freire recognized this threat and decided to dismantle it in a much dexterous, step-by-step way. For example, from the very beginning, he had worked to dismantle the assumption on the permanently stable value of knowledge: Unlike value, knowledge does get transformed as it is passed from one person to another. Freire pointed out the difference in perception of knowledge of people from different social classes: thanks to the differences in their cultural background, the same message could be interpreted into countless different meanings. It is impossible for the transfer of knowledge from one person to another to be completely free of objectivity. And it was even more so for a country where the social classification had come to the point of radicality, on top of the countless ethnicities that it had. With all that reason, the knowledge being distributed by the banking education system had its value varying depending on which social class/ethnicity the students were in.
Next, Freire provided an understanding of knowledge based on the theoretical basis of poststructuralism, that was a lot more far-reaching and hole-proof than the previous one. On a large scale, he said, let alone the means that was education, even knowledge was, by itself, not at all subjective. To demonstrate this, Freire took the concept “the world’’ as an example. He recited a conversation between himself and a Chilean farmer as follows:
In the midst of the discussion, a peasant who by banking standards was completely ignorant said: “Now I see that without man there is no world.” When the educator responded: “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that all the men on earth were to die, but that the earth itself remained, together with trees, birds, animals, rivers, seas, the stars . . , wouldn’t all this be a world?” “Oh no,” the peasant replied emphatically. “There would be no one to say: This is a world’.” [4, 82]
Freire realized that even without being Sartre himself, the said uneducated managed to reproduce almost perfectly the idea of Sartre, that “the world” that mankind had always mentioned was but the world in their perception. By itself, the ultra complicated and bottomless reality out there never categorized itself and asked people to call it “the world”; “the world” was instead a label that mankind attached to it. In the same fashion, what’s commonly known to us is in fact human knowledge, that originates from the subjectivity of humans. For that reason, knowledge always takes the form that fits the best for mankind’s purposes.
As another example more relevant to education, the governments from the time Paulo Freire believed that poverty stemmed from the people’s lack of education and ignorance. Believing that by becoming more educated they could become free from poverty, the people willingly let the government shoved them into the schools where the knowledge would be stuffed as much as possible into their head. However, the real result of this process was that poverty was hardly pushed back at all, because all these people ever learned from the knowledge taught at school was that their poverty resulted entirely from their incapability, or their being subjected to charity. To overcome poverty and the lack of education thus was effectively made into a moral quest. What’s more, it also gave birth to a pair of relations that should not at all be in existence: one was that for someone to still be trapped in poverty meant he/she had not overcome the state of uneducated; and the other was that the wealthier was meant to be the wiser.
In consideration of the social and political structures, on the big-picture scale, everyone was assuming that the social class hierarchy was inherent and unchangeable. The only option for the poor to find happiness was to climb up higher on the social hierarchy — something that they most likely never had sufficient resources to do. The knowledge taught in school was never meant to be the fuel for the race to the top of the society, the only thing they did was to deepen the belief on how irreversible the inequality was. So at the end of the day, while a very small number of the poor managed to overturn their situation thanks to education, the majority would just give up from the start thinking of themselves as being utterly incapable from birth, while another large proportion would refuse to get themselves out of poverty simply because they could just effortlessly live off the government’s charity. On the other hand, this also created a vast sense of moral comfort for the upper class, as this reasoning effectively proved the legitimacy of their status, and also helped to prove that they did everything in their power for the quest of changing the society.
The educators and the policy makers could not simply shove the blame over the poor and the uneducated in such a context. Because this situation was created by the political will of the educators and the policy makers themselves.
3. To point out the abnormalities in what appears normal.
Denaturalization was a strategy borrowed by Freire from Critical theory. He converted a large chunk of borderline illegible academic knowledge into a number of educational practices which were theoretically thorough and yet also very practical. What Freire managed to point out about banking education was the clearest evidence for this. The practice of learning — something that couldn’t be more common for the society — under theoretical consideration, was able to be rediscovered as a practice of power. Freire posed the question that the one-way teacher-to-student brain-stuffing education might perhaps be a miniature, splitting image of or a dictatorial society itself. where even the outlook of the people on the society is put under administrative constraint?
He then proposed a new definition for school-taught knowledge. Instead of being (or having to be) the undisputed subjective truth, knowledge needs to be communicated as problems that the student and the teacher could constantly converse together over to find the right answer. Freire called this method of education the ”problem-posing education”. This approach is not quite the same thing with the debate education that could normally be seen in the TV show Trường Teen VTV7 or advertised by the god-know-how-many oversea educational consultants in Vietnam. Freire’s method does not encourage students to search for the (readily provided) right/wrong, but instead the search for the most fundamental reason why a certain idea/knowledge is seen as right or wrong by the society. So instead of relying on pure reasoning, the learner is pushed to expand their outlook to encompass the bigger-picture power structure of the society; to see within that society, what is being allowed to voice, and what is not allowed to do so. This is what makes Freire’s school of pedagogy a part of Critical pedagogy.
Freire required the student to be more mindful of their position within the bigger flow of history. And with that, any rationality and debate over school-taught knowledge also had to be placed within a clear historical-cultural-social context. This method shares a lot of similarities with the methodology of anthropology and sociology; the only difference was that the students, and not the scholars, would be in charge of conducting the studies.
On a fundamental level, Freire’s pedagogical environment requires the generation of dialogue. Freire argued that it’s something a lot more complicated than simply just to come to the classroom and talk. He said that as knowledge was created by humans through the means of language, and as language itself was a co-creation of countless generations of people, it effectively made knowledge a co-creation. In other words, “the world” exists not because it is a natural existence; we only know what is being represented by the concept “the world” because we share that info with each other through language, and also because we filled up its definition by many many other concepts — which were also presented by language. For that reason, every knowledge has intersubjectivity as its nature. It requires the learners to constantly contemplate the existence of themselves while being constantly reflected by the mirrors that are the existence of other people.
Even the books that Freire wrote, or this article itself, could be considered a practice to pursue understanding by posing questions on the very origin of the knowledge that we were spoon fed with.
4. Conclusion.
When looking at Freire’s biography, a lot of people would just conveniently disregard him as “just another leftist” before even hearing the first thing he had to say because of their political bias. Truth is, if we truly invest in reading the methods of Freire, we would see that it might well be a weapon created to criticize the partisan model of politics-as-a-stage, which is essentially native only to the Western world; the usage of this model to explain the political environment of other parts of the world would be utterly overbearing and prone to oversimplification of local issues. What’s more, being so eager and willing to surrender oneself to this pre-staged political stage model might as well not be the brightest thing to do. For that reason, Freire himself, and in fact even the author of this article, as citizens from ex-colonial countries, did not wish to venture too deep in the left-and-right-wing discussion.
By implicitly recognizing these “mainstream” polarities in the political environment (which was essentially only mainstream in the U.S. and the West) as that of your own, you are also implicitly admitting that the Western way of politics is (or should ideally be) the universal practice for this entire world. That is, quite obviously, not the truth, nor even has a grain of it. By surrendering yourself to this honey-trap of false civility, like how you are binarizing the political conversations in your country in this alien setting of left-and-right-wing, you are also surrendering yourself to endless pointless political controversy because every single idea in this system is almost predetermined that it must clash with something.
Freire also criticized the communities of pure academics and pure philanthropy. In chapter 4 of his work Pedagogy of the Oppressed; he criticized the academics’ benign reflection for turning a blind eye to the reality, and also criticizing philanthropy acts without the support of academic studies for doing more harm than good. For an intellectual worker to do good for society, he needs to do well on both of these fronts. Education, to him, was the fruit born when mankind’s academic methodology and desire to change the society for the better joined hands together. This relationship indeed doesn’t seem to have the best chemistry; it is prone to bring forth skepticism and disillusions, as the academic workers will come to realize that they cannot change the world just by playing around with the theoretical side of thing, why the philanthropists will come to realize that changing the world is not so easy peasy that you can just charge blindly in without proper knowledge and hope for it to work out. But if you turn your eyes to look at education, wouldn’t the exact same be true for it as well?
Freire’s appetite for criticism reminds us to always retain a certain level of skepticism toward anything, and the more obvious and unquestioned something is, the more it should be questioned. Knowledge is no god almighty. It needs to be constantly considered and challenged, to the very bottom of it. Universal existences are something to be respected, but only so if they were the fruits of the best efforts in pursuing the truth, not just the mindless acceptance of it as a part of the system or of nature.
The same applies for this man’s theory, and this article.
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References:
[1] E. D. Green. (12 May 2016). “What are the most-cited publications in the social sciences (according to Google Scholar)?”. LSE Research Online. London School of Economics and Political Science. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/66752/
[2] P. Freire, Letters to Cristina: Reflections on My Life and Work. New York: Routledge, 1996.
[3], [4] P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, London: Continuum, 2000.
