Episode 210 - Transcript

So I want to tell you about a book today called the Pedagogy of the Oppressed… by the philosopher Paulo Freire. Pedagogy…as a word…means we’re talking about education and teaching. Oppressed as a word meaning…well we’ll get into that. 

But I feel the need to say here at the start: that people write to me sometimes and say that part of what I WANT when I LISTEN to a podcast like this Stephen West…is if there’s a WORK of philosophy…that’s SO INFLUENTIAL it could get BROUGHT UP by people that AREN’T even really that IN to philosophy…then THAT’S something I want covered on the show. I want it broken down in a way where I could explain it to someone at a party…and I WON’T be the person that people slowly inch away from, say hmm interesting and then they never talk to me again. 

I don’t WANT to explain my philosophy just to my stuffed animals for the rest of my life. Well I HEARD your REQUEST folks out there, and I DID get ONE thing right today: this book we’re talking about, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is by one measurement that was taken the THIRD most cited BOOK… in ALL of the humanities and social sciences. Meaning that when people in academia GIVE citations for what works they took ideas from that inspired THEIR new ideas, and they CITE it in the bibliography…the Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire comes in number three… of all time. 

Meaning at the VERY least this book that was written in 1968 in Brazil has gone on to CHANGE the way that people think about education… ACROSS the entire world. No doubt if you’re LISTENING to this, unless if you’re one of our much OLDER listeners shout out to you folks by the way thanks for paving the way, but if you’re NOT one of them you’ve LIKELY had TEACHERS, ALL throughout your time in school that were INSPIRED by this book by Paulo Freire. 

So I’m gonna do what I ALWAYS do… and try to give you the philosophy behind it as it’s INTENDED by the philosopher. But in the INTEREST of you not being BLINDSIDED when you bring this book UP to someone at a party like that…gotta WARN you: that depending on who you’re talking to…some people are in LOVE with this book, and some people LOATHE it entirely. 

SOME people will say this book is a work of genius that is on a level that is SO good…it’s actually difficult to even find issues with…but then on the OTHER hand there are people that BLAME this book and its influence… for everything, from a recent decline in educational standards, to the GROOMING of an entire generation of students in the west that view themselves fundamentally through the lens of OPPRESSION rather than through the lens of REALITY. 

Now, we’ll get to why Freire would think that BOTH of these takes on his work… are pretty off. And I think a good way to START us on this line of thinking is to ask a question that Freire would have appreciated: what is it…to be someone who is TRULY educated? Just a general question.

And some people might say back to that question well, to be educated…is to BE in possession… of a whole BUNCHA knowledge. 

You know, to EDUCATE people…you make sure they have access to a LOT of information, and then you try to find ways to GET that information…delivered into their head somehow.

But hypothetically, to give some pressure back to this sort of take: what if there was a person… with way too much time on their hands who knew almost nothing about anything… but one day they decided they were gonna sit around the house…and memorize the terms and conditions screen…you know that thing you accept when you agree to a service…it’s 8 miles long, bunch of legal jargon so the company doesn’t get sued. Imagine a person who knows basically NOTHING…except 40,000 pages of terms and conditions from their toaster manual or their TV user guide and their smartphone. WOULD you say THAT is someone who is educated?

Well most people would say no…that there’s something missing there from when we CALL someone educated. And MAYBE they’d say back that one little caveat they’d want to add ON to this is that the knowledge someone has MUST be, you know, RELEVANT in some way to the lives of PEOPLE somewhere, it can’t just be LEGAL jargon that you press yes or no to. 

Okay, fair pont. But WHAT if somebody knew practically EVERYTHING there was to KNOW about PEOPLE…but the PEOPLE they knew about… were the people in ROME in the year 38 AD. Imagine this person knows EVERYTHING about Caligula, Roman medicine, economics, down to what kinds of TUNICS people were wearing, SHAKESPEAREAN FOOTWEAR for $800 alex…as IMPRESSIVE as that would BE… for someone to have an ENCYCLOPEDIC KNOWLEDGE of all this stuff…if they knew next to NOTHING ELSE about the world…would we consider them to BE an educated person? 

Well, no. There’s CLEARLY more to it than that. 

So what IS it…that EARNS someone this DISTINCTION we like to give out…of being EDUCATED or not?

Now let’s PAUSE on that question for a minute as we BUILD a case for Paulo Freire’s ANSWER to it. 

And to get to the bottom of what being an EDUCATED person is…it might be best to start with what Paulo Freire thinks a PERSON even is. 

He has a GREAT line that he uses at MULTIPLE points throughout his career where he says that when it COMES to people…the ONTOLOGICAL VOCATION…of a human being…is to become more human. 

Now to Freire…to BECOME more human… is going to mean to become more self-determining, autonomous and free. But SAYING that would IMPLY that he thinks a lot of people LIVING in  the world and are NOT as self-determining and FREE as they otherwise COULD be. So Why IS that?

Well in PART what he’s referencing is an idea you can find ALL throughout existentialist philosophy, but notably from the work of Jean Paul Sartre. 

The IDEA is that we’re BORN, we COME into the WORLD as people…and we COME to realize the sheer NUMBER of possibilities that there really ARE in the universe– just how much FREEDOM we HAVE… at our DISPOSAL.

We REALIZE this…and are very quickly OVERWHELMED…by the weight of all these possibilities.  

Because as Sartre thinks with a lot of FREEDOM…if you think about it…always comes a lot of RESPONSIBILITY. It’s not comfortable feeling RESPONSIBLE for the things that are going on in your life, in the world around you– to feel a pull that you should be DOING something about them. We don’t want to FEEL like that all the time. It’s pretty uncomfortable. 

So to Sartre we find a way to survive. Sometimes we make excuses for ourselves. Sometimes we attach ourselves to some EXTERNAL AUTHORITY out there… some SET of ideas that GIVES you all the answers: ideology, religion, nationalism, consumerism…and in exchange for LIMITING the CONFUSION we feel about the complexity of the world…we trade GIANT PIECES of our identity in the process that become REFLECTIONS of these external authorities that we rely on. 

What I’m saying is: at the bottom of Paulo Freire’s world view is a set of existentialist assumptions that if you listen to this podcast frequently will be familiar: we start out in life completely free…then we INTERNALIZE certain ideas, ideologies, limited ways of viewing things…but that these limiting ideas, ALWAYS end up limiting YOU as a person right along WITH them.

So if the ONTOLOGICAL vocation of a human being, as he says, is to become more HUMAN. And to become more HUMAN is to be more self-determining. Then finding ways to OVERCOME these LIMITED ways of VIEWING ourselves and our place in the world…APPEARS to be a very IMPORTANT part of that whole process, and for the record, is starting to get us a BIT CLOSER… to what we MEAN when we SAY that someone is EDUCATED. 

Real quick: think of some examples of these limiting stories at even the most basic, personal level. We ALL know people who think in this sort of way. 

Someone could say: my dad died of a heart attack. My grandpa died of a heart attack. I’m probably gonna die of one too, so why BOTHER even worrying about taking care of my health. Or how about saying: look since the SECOND GRADE I’ve been failing in school and my teachers have been telling me I’m not very smart. So whenever there’s new stuff I gotta learn in my life and it’s not coming easy for me…I’m not even gonna TRY…why bother? Or how about saying: I was born into a bad neighborhood where stealing was the only way to survive, ALL the kids were DOING it. Might as well do the same myself…not like I have any other options. 

Take THESE or 10 million OTHER examples out there, WHATEVER it is. If you CARE about people…you just WISH for these people saying these things to be able to SEE through the assumptions they’re making… that are CAUSING their lives to be worse than they could otherwise BE. 

Everybody listening to this can think back to a time in YOUR life when YOU were stuck in a limiting belief about something…and at the TIME it may have felt to you like it was just the REALITY you lived in…but in HINDSIGHT you can SEE now that there was a TOTALLY different way of VIEWING the situation…that you WISH you could go back and TELL yourself at that time. 

Well at the end of the day to Paulo Freire…there’s a word he’d use to DESCRIBE these KINDS of limiting ideas…to HOLD them as part of your worldview… is downright DEHUMANIZING. Meaning, they’re a CLASS of ideas that PREVENT people from being as SELF-DETERMINING, or as HUMAN, as they COULD be. 

In fact, this TYPE of limiting idea, you could say, if you wanted to give a WORD to it…to Freire is a type of OPPRESSION that is being inflicted upon someone’s existence. 

Now, don’t let the word OPPRESSION throw you OFF too much there, we’re obviously not talking about ancient egyptian slaves dragging around limestone in the desert…but this IS a CRUCIAL piece of our existence, that’s EASY to forget, that Freire thinks we need to pay closer attention to: that as people…we are ALWAYS positioned SOMEWHERE in an ONGOING DIALECTIC in our lives…between oppression and liberation. 

That’s something that is ALWAYS going on if you’re paying attention to it.

For the sake of explaining this to anyone not familiar with dialectics…it’s comparable to but NOT the same as ANY OTHER ongoing process you experience, think of how as a human being…you are always oscillating… between feeling hungry and feeling satisfied— or between feeling TIRED and well RESTED. You’re ALWAYS existing somewhere BETWEEN these two oppositional forces.

Well, in a similar way: NONE of us…are TOTALLY without limiting beliefs…a REALITY of our LIVES is that there are ALWAYS forces in the world, in ourselves that are oppressing us… and there are always forces in the world, in ourselves that are liberating us.

And to Freire he wants to be ENTIRELY clear…there is NEVER going to be a world where oppression DOESN’T exist…we are NEVER going to be living in some Utopia, where we’ve removed it from things entirely. Oppression and liberation are two everpresent FACTORS in our reality, UNIQUE to our reality, and we can be in varying levels of AWARENESS of them as they’re going on. 

And ONCE you’ve ACCEPTED that a series of QUESTIONS just start to make sense to be asking: First… JUST like you overcame that thing that was limiting you at some EARLIER point in your life…what is it that you’re currently working on and in the PROCESS of overcoming now? 

More importantly: what does that PROCESS… of recognizing the thing and overcoming it…even LOOK like, when you’re in it? 

And here’s the important question that comes up for Freire when it comes to education: if we wanted to give people the TOOLS… to be able to OVERCOME these ways of seeing existence that have become OPPRESSIVE to them and others…what sorts of TOOLS would we GIVE them? How would we give it to them? And BEYOND that we have to ask: what is it that we’re doing in our societies that is LEADING to the CREATION of so many people…that INTERNALIZE these toxic ways of viewing themselves…and just blindly accept them?

Well to get his answer to ALL of these questions…we have to turn to what Freire calls the BANKING model of education. Or the TYPICAL METHOD we’ve used… to TEACH students over the years… when we sit 'em down in a classroom… and decide we’re gonna try to give' em an edumacation. Sit down and listen folks. 

Because what does a typical classroom look like prior to the year 1970, and MANY classrooms SINCE then it should be said? 

Well to Paulo Freire, back then there was always a CLEAR dynamic that existed…between teacher and student…where the student is listening…and the teacher is TRANSMITTING KNOWLEDGE INTO the brain of the student. 

Protocol is simple here: teacher’s at the FRONT of the classroom, students sit in desks. The teacher GIVES the students a LESSON. Students take notes, memorize the facts that are given to them, and then take a test at the end of the week… to see how much they’ve memorized. 

This is what Paulo Freire calls the BANKING model of education. Where the students are essentially BANK accounts…that are brought into the classroom…sitting passively…and having knowledge DEPOSITED into them. 

And this metaphor where the students are dehumanized and made into these passive containers…this is gonna be the MOVE that’s being MADE for Freire in the way that we used to educate people.

Now to him…he says CREDIT where credit’s due… all right this way of educating people is VERY EFFECTIVE at doing SOME things. First of all it’s very EFFICIENT… when it comes to distributing knowledge to MOST of the people out there STATISTICALLY. 

If ALL you wanted to DO is make sure that MOST people… had internalized a collection of knowledge… that’s been predetermined by some authority…if THAT’S the goal of your education policy…then there’s something really to be SAID for the banking model of education.

That said it IS a one size fits ALL kind of approach… so what that MEANS is that it’s an approach that’s MUCH easier on the teacher side of education…teacher doesn’t have to consider different ways to educate people that LEARN in different ways. 

More than that and PROBABLY most significantly: it’s an EXTREMELY good way of educating people… if the ultimate GOAL is to get MOST people to choose the right answers on a standardized test that you give them. You really can TRAIN people to be able to give certain ANSWERS you want them to have.

But there are also DOWNSIDES to the banking model of education. For example: if you look AROUND you in the world… and think part of the PROBLEMS we’re facing have to do with having a population of people that watch media, mindlessly internalize a way of looking at the world, and then whenever they’re confused about something…uncritically search around for ANSWERS from authority figures to HEAL this feeling of confusion that AILS them…well…I’m sure you can see where this is going: to Paulo Freire…what else would you EXPECT people to do when this is the WAY they’ve been TAUGHT to LEARN…from the time they’re four years old?

And here’s where this is headed as we get DEEPER into the book of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed: to Paulo Freire…we’re NOT JUST talking here…about limiting beliefs that are HOLDING you back from your potential, you know, from startin’ that business or cutting back on your partying. These things at an individual level ARE PART of what he’s talking about, no DOUBT. 

But Freire is a dialectical thinker. And the idea of ONLY viewing yourself as an individual…or for that matter of ONLY viewing yourself in terms of a collective, race, gender, class, etc. BOTH of these extremes… are MASSIVELY oversimplifying the multidimensional nature of what it is to be a human being. In dialectics: we exist at ALL of these levels simultaneously, each ONE of them interdependent upon the OTHERS for what they even mean to us as labels. 

To Freire: you are simultaneously an individual, a member of a family, a member of a nation, a member of an economic class, a member of a gender, and ALL the REST of them. To IGNORE any ONE of these…to do what might be TEMPTING in a liberal society and say what I am FUNDAMENTALLY… is an INDIVIDUAL, that’s the SOLE criteria of my existence, to DO that…is to IGNORE other IMPORTANT aspects of your identity…that ARE HAVING an IMPACT on your life… whether you’re acknowledging them or not. 

Now you can CHOOSE to not pay ATTENTION to any of them. But what happens more FREQUENTLY is that because of the BANKING model of education…people are more often  NOT AWARE of how these different aspects of their identity INTERSECT with reality and make up the borders of what’s POSSIBLE for them to DO as a person. 

To Paulo Freire…the Pedagogy of the oppressed is something that is NOT just going to apply to limiting beliefs at an individual level…but as HE says for understanding contradictions at a social, political and economic level as well. 

So we’re NOT just talking about a self help book here…we’re talking about a book that is POINTING people towards a type of POLITICAL action– SPECIFICALLY in the direction of anti-authoritarianism… of ALL kinds. We’ll get more into it more but the point for right NOW is: 

To BE someone who willfully internalizes ones of these messages from an authority… and then lives their life asymmetrically clinging ON to one of these ASPECTS of your identity as though it’s ALL of you…that INSTANTLY shows your hand as someone who’s a product of the BANKING model of education.

Reminds me a little bit of concerns some people bring up about parenting. Like they ask: is the best way to parent a young adult… to just be an authoritarian? 

To give them a bunch of rules, tell them it's just because I said so, and then punish them if they ever step out of line? I mean in ONE sense that’s a REALLY good way to create a little footsoldier. Somebody that will follow rules SUPER WELL from every boss they ever have, to the friendships or relationships they’re in, to the society they’re a part of…but what it DOESN’T do is create people that are capable of questioning WHY those rules exist… how to enforce them… and how to make NEW rules for THEMSELVES as a new set of circumstances emerges.

Well same thing with the BANKING model of education. We are BRAINWASHING people to seek answers handed down by authority figures…instead of helping people to build the skills to critically engage with the way the world works… to USE their OWN BRAIN… and actively ENGAGE with the material… in a way that produces someone capable of understanding their place in a complex world. 

If we could do THAT…then THAT…would be more along the lines of being EDUCATED to Paulo Freire.

The term Freire uses to describe this sort of CRITICAL, ENGAGED orientation towards the world…is conscientizacao. It’s a Portugese word…it SOUNDS really cool when someone from Brazil says it. I can’t say it like that. You guys know me…I’m a lot of things…but the guy that can perfectly pronounce words in other languages…it’s just not me. But what I CAN do is talk a little bit more about this WORD…and HIGHLIGHT something interesting about it that’s important to know. 

The word conscientizacao is often translated into english as critical consciousness, which is what I will call it from now on. 

And that could LEAD someone speaking only in ENGLISH to think that critical consciousness… is a NOUN…it’s a THING you’re supposed to ACQUIRE. I LEARN things about the world, I RECEIVE KNOWLEDGE…and then I ACQUIRE this critical consciousness. But something INTERESTING about conscientizacao when it’s used in Portugese is that it’s more of a verb than it is a noun. To HAVE critical consciousness…to Freire…is to BE ENGAGED in a PROCESS, it’s an ACTIVITY.  

By the way this is pretty face up on the table…a CLEAR inspiration that Freire is taking from the work of the philosopher Erich Fromm and his thoughts on love– which we did an entire episode on. If you remember, to Fromm: LOVE is not something where you fall into it…and now I’m just IN LOVE and I’m gonna BASK in it for a few decades. 

You don’t FALL IN LOVE with someone…and you know now that I have it I’ll just sit around for years doing absolutely nothing and then act surprised when the person says they’ve fallen out of love with me. 

No, to Fromm…love is an ACTIVE PROCESS that someone’s engaged in. Love is an orientation towards an OTHER…combined with an ongoing set of commitments and actions in RELATION to that other. The second you stop putting in the work when it comes to love…I mean I don’t know what you call it at that point…but to Erich Fromm… you wouldn’t call it love. 

Well think of critical consciousness in the same sort of WAY. You don’t HAVE critical consciousness, to Freire. You’re IN critical consciousness, ACTIVELY. 

So just to RECAP here: we’re BORN into the world incredibly FREE, always changing and in a state of flux, but then we internalize these limiting ideas that DAMPEN our ability to BE free and self-determining…so IN THAT KIND OF WORLD…an IMPORTANT part of EDUCATION HAS to be…teaching people this SKILL of critical consciousness…that they can then use to LIBERATE themselves FROM these ideas that otherwise OPPRESS them and hold them back. 

Now you HEAR it said in that way…that we need to TEACH people to CRITIQUE the oppressive forces in the world around them…and there’s a couple different EMOTIONS you could have DRIVING you as you GO ABOUT that critique. One is ANGER. 

And it’s understandable: I mean if you believe that a FUNDAMENTAL piece of our world is that there’re oppressive forces that are holding people back that CONSTANTLY need to be engaged with…then it’s not surprising SOME people might come at that… from a place of ANGER. 

You can almost HEAR them: for ANYBODY who is oppressing ANYONE ELSE in this world…with all due respect, sir or ma’am: SCREW YOU and all your oppression. You’re a BAD person…and when we FIND YOU…we’re gonna PUNISH you for oppressing all these people for so many years. So what we GOTTA do people gather round… let’s find all these oppressive people, let’s put ‘em into a ROOM…and then we’ll find a way to…you know…limit THEIR freedom…in a way that seems appropriate.

Do you see the obvious problem that emerges here? When this critical consciousness COMES from a place of ANGER…it often just RESULTS in the people who are OPPRESSED…becoming the OPPRESSORS themselves– thus finding their NEW PLACE…in that ongoing DIALECTIC between OPPRESSION and LIBERATION. This is what you’d EXPECT.

But Paulo Freire saw ALL of this COMING. Which is WHY he thought that it’s NOT ENOUGH…to TEACH people this critical consciousness and just call THAT education…no, no…we ALSO need to be teaching people how absolutely CRUCIAL it is…to come at this critique, DRIVEN fundamentally by a feeling of LOVE.  

And before you VOMIT into your government issued philosophize this barf bag…hear me out a second. This isn’t LOVE like my little pony, EEE kind of love. This is, again, BUILDING from the pretty sophisticated concept of love from the work of Erich Fromm. Where love is fundamentally… an active commitment ORIENTED towards the OTHER. 

Because when you look at the dialectic between oppression and liberation from a place of love…and then WITHIN that when you look at the relationships that emerge of oppressor and oppressed WITHIN that dynamic…when you look at that through a lens of TRULY caring about the well being of the OTHER…then to Freire what you FIND is that BOTH the oppressor AND the oppressed… end up being dehumanized in this kind of situation.

Now you can hear that and be like wait, I mean, I GET why the OPPRESSED would feel dehumanized…but how is the OPPRESSOR being dehumanized here? Sounds pretty GOOD to be getting a back rub…SUBJUGATING people all day. 

But is it REALLY great to have SUCH a big piece of your identity…TIED to this ability to have power and control over people? When your self WORTH is CONNECTED to a PROCESS where you’re limiting someone ELSE’S ability to BE fully human…when the WAY you SURVIVE in the world is BUILT around a scaffolding of needing to manipulate people or COERCING people into a situation that’s not that GOOD for them…does a USED car salesman that knowingly sells someone a horrible car sleep well at night? No, they don’t. They end up living their life coming MOSTLY from a place of FEAR. 

In fact BOTH the oppressed AND the oppressor, to Paulo Freire…EVEN if they’re TOLD about this ongoing dialectic that they’re playing a PART in…sometimes BOTH of them…FIND REASONS to STAY in this master/slave situation…because they BOTH have reasons to FEAR the day where they’re NOT a part of this kind of relationship anymore. 

To Freire…on ONE hand the oppressed person can fear… the responsibility and dizziness of being FREE from the oppressive force. I mean imagine feeling RESPONSIBLE for what happens in the world and not having the oppressor as an excuse for why you can’t DO anything. Now on the OTHER hand the OPPRESSOR can fear… no longer HAVING the power and control over the oppressed that maybe HUGE pieces of their life and identity have been built around for a long time. 

Ultimately though, for Freire, BOTH parties are better off WITHOUT being in this type of relationship to other people all the time. And it’s the job of the OPPRESSED to IDENTIFY WHERE these relationships are going on. Which leads nicely into the NEXT point in the book:

Because you may be thinking ALL this talk about oppressors and oppressed, okay, that MAY be all well and good…but we STILL haven’t answered ONE basic QUESTION… that needs to be addressed: if the BANKING model of education is so flawed and produces such bad results…what are the ADJUSTMENTS to the ways we should be TEACHING people that would lead to better outcomes? If not the BANKING model…what model should we be USING?

Well ONE name that’s been thrown around in relation to Freire’s work: is the PROBLEM-POSING model of education, where there are several key differences. Let’s take them on one at a time. 

One of the BIG changes is going to be centering education around DIALOGUE amongst the teacher and students…rather than having just the TEACHER giving a MONOLOGUE in the form of a lecture. This would be Dialogical as opposed to Monological. Let me give an example of this. 

You ever had a TEACHER…who GETS up in front of the classroom…and instead of giving you a lecture maybe they start out by asking a QUESTION…maybe they say WHO here can tell me why alligators are so ornery? Let’s say the lesson’s about alligators today. And then the teacher SEARCHES the room for an ANSWER from someone, they raise their hand, yes you my child… and they say momma says alligators are so ornery cause they got all them teeth and no toothbrush. Teacher says okay, okay…writes it up on the board. And says anybody ELSE got an idea as to why alligators are so ornery? Call on someone else they say alligators are so ornery because they have an abnormally large medulla oblongata. Teacher writes THAT one up on the board.

Now everybody listening to this has had a teacher run a classroom in this way. And the teacher’s NOT doing this…you know, because they went out the night before and forgot to plan a lesson. 

The POINT of DOING this… is to ENGAGE the students in a DIALOGUE rather than a MONOLOGUE. In Paulo Freire’s version of this in particular…the teacher and the student would more or less be on an EQUAL playing field…meaning, the teacher may KNOW more than the students currently…they may have had this PARTICULAR conversation hundreds of times which makes them PARTICULARLY suited for LEADING the dialogue and asking good clarifying questions, knowing the common OBJECTIONS when students bring up their points. 

But the SWITCH here to Freire is that when the relationship BETWEEN the students and the teachers is more equal…students… are going to LEARN from the discussion, by PARTICIPATING and thinking it through…and the TEACHER is ALSO going to set out with the intent to LEARN along WITH the STUDENTS as they give the lesson. To use Freire’s term there is a co-creation of knowledge that starts to happen, between the teacher and student. That there DOESN’T always need to be a PARENT in the room and a CHILD in the room all the time…that there are ways that ADULTS can come together through MUTUAL respect and PRODUCE good things through dialogue.

Even very EARLY ON in education it’s possible to apply this line of thinking from Paulo Freire in an age appropriate way. For example, FIRST graders. You obviously wouldn’t expect them to construct an entire worldview out of Peppa Pig and Bluey…but IN the classroom if you wanted to follow this LEAD…you could ASK the kids to weigh in on SIMPLE things, like somebody leaves colored pencils out on the floor during art time. 

You could ask them: WHY do you think rules are important to have? Why is it important to have a rule that colored pencils go in the colored pencil container rather than spread out all over the floor? You know, you can PRIME people even from a VERY EARLY age to be THINKING in terms of WHY the world is set up in the way that it is. Get them to try to come up with new rules of their own or WHATEVER the exercise. Point is: DIALOGUE and critical thinking is where this sort of thing happens. 

Now RECOGNIZE…that his POINT here is NOT… that there is NEVER any room for a teacher to GIVE students a set of facts for them to have these critical discussions around…CERTAINLY there are contexts where that kind of thing would make sense at ALL grade levels and into adulthood. 

The POINT is that the dialogical aspects of education are SEVERELY LACKING in most  settings when he writes this book…AS are the skills that are required to QUESTION the fundamental assumptions OF the facts you’re getting…AS are the skills to CREATE a coherent PICTURE of what the world is in RELATION to those facts.

We ultimately WANT our education systems to PRODUCE the kinds of people that can SOLVE the difficult problems that COME UP in the world. 

So when teachers…put in effort to facilitate the BEST dialogue POSSIBLE…and when they DO that by POSING PROBLEMS for the students to critically WORK through, rather than just SPEWING information for them to memorize…the result is NOT ONLY that it fosters a kind of mutual respect between people…but it’s ALSO getting people to critically examine their knowledge about the world and think it through in a way that is directly RELEVANT to them. 

And by the way the presence of the different philosophical inspirations of Freire are on full DISPLAY here: you have Immanuel Kant and his famous essay what is enlightenment, where Kant DARES people to think for themselves, to not OUTSOURCE their understanding of the world to some external authority. 

You have Husserl represented and his concept of “turning-toward” experience… where we’re not just examining the CONTENTS of our experience but paying attention to the WAYS in which we EXPERIENCE them. 

The conclusion of ALL of these ideas when they come together… is to produce a critically engaged person, motivated by love–this commitment to preserving the humanity of the other…and it’s a person where when they’re being TAUGHT something new by someone who claims to be an authority…they BECOME somebody who by DEFAULT… is ALWAYS asking the question: how am I potentially being BRAINWASHED here in LEARNING this? 

What is it that this person WANTS me to THINK about the world? Why might they be WANTING me to THINK that way? How does what I’m learning here…potentially interfere with the ability for myself or others to BE as self-determining as possible? In other words: it is an education model that produces, in THEORY, a subject that is DEEPLY…anti-authoritarian, on the other side of it. 

Now, there’s a million different ways teachers over the years have tried to DEMOCRATIZE the classroom– to APPLY this line of thinking from Paulo Freire and others influenced by him. LOT of different teaching styles that no doubt you’ve all encountered before. And while there’s PLENTY of interesting questions about how we might be able to use the PROBLEM posing method of education BETTER…a DIFFERENT question somebody might ASK at this point in the conversation is: if the GOAL of this is to PROTECT against people from being willfully brainwashed and then passing it off as an education…then why are so many people in the world… willfully brainwashed calling it education? I mean doesn’t that FACT of the situation we’re in serve as evidence that Paulo Freire’s method here… has FAILED?

But a common response BACK to that argument is look: the REALITY of most education systems in the world is that you got a ratio of 30 students to one teacher if you’re LUCKY. That EVEN if a teacher is TRYING to include the students…LOT of students in PRACTICE don’t really NEED to be using those critical muscles in the classroom…it’s still possible to sit at the back of the class and try to blend into the wall like you’re a potted plant. EXTEND this into ADULTHOOD…and there’s PLENTY of reasons that people wouldn’t choose to critically engage with the media they’re consuming…confirmation bias is a hell of a drug. 

So a question someone FORWARD THINKING might be asking is: IS there a way to make it MANDATORY for the students to critically engage with the material?

Somebody could say BACK to that…well what about AI? PERSONALIZED education is going to be a THING here soon! And in theory: when EACH student has their own teacher, ASKING them personalized questions…then they’ll have no CHOICE but to be learning these critical skills. 

And that idea SOUNDS great. What I think a lot   of people would say that are trying to navigate the world we’re ACTUALLY in at this point…is that BECAUSE we’re STILL in a place where we have a 30:1 ratio of teacher to students…AI in the world WE live in…actually ends up being a HINDRANCE to teaching people these skills we’re talking about. 

The same way someone who uses a calculator all the time… gets less good at doing basic math in their head…students are using AI these days…to THINK for them when their teacher gives them a question. Teachers are reporting this happening all the TIME. In other words…AI ALSO has the ability as a tool…to allow people to think even LESS than they have in the past. 

Now we’re STILL not DONE…with Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed yet. We’ve put A LOT of the pieces together…combined ideas from a LOT of different great thinkers…and it’s gotten us to this point in the episode. But there’s ONE MORE big INFLUENCE on Freire that needs to be ADDED To this to get the full picture that he’s talking about: and THAT’S gonna be the philosophy of Karl Marx and the movement of Liberation Theology that was going on in Brazil at the time that Freire was doing his work. 

The FIRST part of Karl Marx’s work that’s going to be immediately visible in the work of Freire is the ACTION component in all this talk about education. One of the most WELL KNOWN aspects of Marx’s work is his famous quote that it’s not enough to just INTERPRET the world…the point is ultimately to CHANGE the world as well. So this is going to line up PERFECTLY with Freire’s concept of critical consciousness and how it’s an ACTIVE process that you always need to be ENGAGED in. 

SITTING in a classroom…or at home…THINKING about how these forces of oppression are going on…you know, sitting around making FUN of the person on TV that can’t get past these limiting views about themselves…or, reading yet ANOTHER giant book of THEORY about how people are being oppressed in the world…this isn’t ENOUGH to Paulo Freire. 

Critical consciousness REQUIRES the TAKING ACTION side of this as well. 

Now what that action LOOKS like SPECIFICALLY…is NOT something Paulo Freire feels comfortable making prescriptions about. 

He’s an educator…not a politician or a revolutionary. He definitely DOESN’T feel it’s appropriate for him to be calling for any sort of revolution. So he never does. 

But at the same time…his work IS DIRECTLY at ODDS with authoritarian forces that EXIST in the world, so it’s no doubt if FOLLOWED in the way he WRITES it…it’s ALWAYS going to be producing people that want to revolutionize authoritarianism.

And for what it’s worth: this is ANOTHER similarity between his work and the work of Marx. People will sometimes criticize Marx for not laying out more of a CONCRETE PLAN as to what the “classless” society should be SPECIFICALLY LOOKING like… on the other side of a communist revolution. They’ll say: how do you say NOTHING about how that classless world should be set up, isn’t this a COP out?

But again from Marx’s perspective…he’s a dialectical thinker. One of the MISTAKES of earlier political philosophy he thinks is this idea that we can come UP with some rigid set of parameters of what a society should look like, some social contract…that’s going to work GREAT…no MATTER what kind of WORLD you try to IMPLEMENT it in. 

Marx understood, technology changes, material conditions change, the specific needs of the people change…how could HE…a guy living at the end of the 1800’s EVER claim to know how some totally DIFFERENT world should be structuring their society? To him that would be DELUSIONAL and for HIM that burden would HAVE to fall on the shoulders of the SPECIFIC people CREATING a classless society. This is why it might be more accurate to call it LENINISM and STALINISM and MAOISM… and not MARXISM. 

Well it’s a SIMILAR place that Freire is coming from by not suggesting any sort of specific revolutionary action…or any PLAN for the CLASSROOM that is rigid… and detailed for how EXACTLY the pedagogy of the oppressed should be carried out. 

He doesn’t PROVIDE those things…because to him: SO many factors, SPECIFIC to a situation, would require people to ADAPT the pedagogy… to the needs of the people that were being educated at the time. A FAN of Freire might say that one PART of his work that is so beautiful…is just how ADAPTABLE it is to different circumstances that education is required in: from children to adults, from HIS time period to the time we’re living in now. That’s part of the STRENGTH of the work. 

The LAST big piece of Marx’s work that will be visible in the work of Freire…is something that NO doubt will be OBVIOUS by this point in the episode: that when you’re looking for these forces of oppression in the world…and you’re doing it at ALL those different scales we talked about before: individual, family member, employee, race, gender, citizen of a nation…SOME of these oppressive forces that you end up COMING across…are POSSIBLY going to be things that exist at a STRUCTURAL level. In other words: at the level that Karl Marx is FAMOUS for saying we need to be EXAMINING our societies MORE.

And SOME of those oppressive forces might BE related to ECONOMIC or CULTURAL identities you embody. And it’s POSSIBLE to Freire there are going to BE things you uncover in this process…that have been around for so long that they are just BAKED IN to people’s LIVES in a way that they don’t even SEE. And this WAS the CASE Freire thought with HIS culture of Brazil towards the end of the 1960’s when he’s writing this book: that although the COLONIALISM that DEFINED his region in the recent past was nowhere to be seen…people STILL had INTERNALIZED through education…WAYS of VIEWING themselves and OTHERS that were based on assumptions FROM a colonial society. How do you get RID of that? Well, it’s by people being more AWARE of the sometimes not-so-obvious forces of oppression that successive generations are mindlessly internalizing. 

Now…I said I’d talk about the people that LOVE this work by Freire and the people that despise it. HOPEFULLY the critiques JUST brought up throughout the episode debunk this as some SHINING, GLOWING, PERFECT work of philosophy that is beyond CRITICISM. Freire himself wouldn’t have agreed with that assessment. 

But HOW about this OTHER side of it though? That Paulo Freire’s work has groomed an ENTIRE generation of young adults that HATE the society they’re a part of? That they VIEW the world FUNDAMENTALLY through the lens of oppression…and that this causes them to not only IGNORE how much PROGRESS has really been MADE in the world, but to SEE oppression EVEN where it doesn’t EXIST. 

That INSPIRED by Freire’s work…radical political actors have embedded themselves into academia as professors, they’ve indoctrinated students to SEE themselves in terms of some group identity, usually some immutable characteristic about themselves, turn them into a FOOTSOLDIER for their cause, and then they tell these kids that the GOAL of their lives should be to tear down the existing institutions in western society that are fundamentally BASED in the oppression of innocent people. How would Paulo Freire RESPOND to this criticism of his work?

Well he’d PROBABLY say that nothing ABOUT that situation…even REMOTELY describes his work, or anything that it calls for. For the SAKE of argument: let’s SAY that REALITY that we just described there is true. Students indoctrinated by radical professors are tearing down western society in the name of fighting oppression. 

Well the IRONY is: that’s a very Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed style ANALYSIS…of the ways that those STUDENTS and their education…have been CO OPTED by authoritarian forces. Ironically…if you think that IS what’s going on…the TYPE of self-reflection a student would NEED to RECOGNIZE they were caught UP in that sort of process…is EXACTLY the kind of critical engagement Freire is CALLING for in the book. I think he’d say if these students exist…they are NOT in fact reflections of the type of education he is calling for…and if somebody, ANYBODY out there was EVOKING his work, USING his terminology to promote a form of political action that was oppressing people in the name of liberating others…well that would be the EXACT kind of contradiction that his Pedagogy would aim to dismantle.