Paulo Freire and Revolutionary Education Essay

In reading Paulo Freires inspiring and idealistic hold Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in 1970, the question arises is whether such a radically transformed teaching methodal system of rules is even practicable. According the person I inter debateed, a professor with many years of principle experience in many countries, the answer is non particularly optimistic. Paolo Freires radical and humanistic view of education is light years removed from what actually takes place in closely classrooms close to the humanness.At the lower levels, education often amounts to little more than rote memorization to prepare for like tests, with administrators mainly concerned that their numbers look good. Higher education has devolved into occupational group training for big business enterprise interests, and frankly has be decrease a business itself. Virtually none of the creativity, humanization or liberation that Freire writes to the highest degree so eloquently legitimately e xists in most educational systems around the world, which exactly turn fall out more cogs for the machinery.There may be a few truly creative and humanistic teachers, although they commonly end up frustrated, burned out and cynical because of the nature of the system itself. For Freire, the worst form of inform is the banking concept of education, in which students are passive and alienated none takers of any information the teacher provides. This has been the frequent type of education system in most of the world by dint ofout history, mirroring the authoritarian and paternalistic socio-economic relationships in the world outside the classroom.In fact, the schools and universities are preparing students to take their place in the system without questioning it. Freire claims that teachers puke either work for the liberation of the heaptheir humanizationor for their domestication, their domination. They do-nothing either create an education system in which all persons in t he classroom are simultaneously teachers and learners, realizing that knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impertinent, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, or simply uphold the status quo (Freire 72).He also insists that the teacher cannot remember for her students, nor can she impose her thoughts on them (Freire 77). rule elites merely want to use the education system as part of the apparatus of domination and repression, to proceed order, but real education should be revolutionary and deliberately set out to transform the world (Freire 79-80). Are there teachers who actually believe in this radical mission for education? Is it even possible within the present system? How long does it take for teachers who were once boylike and idealistic to become disillusion?The following are excerpts from an interview with Dr. W. a university professor who has taught in various countries around the world for twenty-two ye ars doubtfulness Have you ever read Paulo Freires book Pedagogy of the Oppressed? Dr. W Yes, parts of it. Over the years, Id say Ive become fairly familiar with his normal theories. foreland Do you regard the educational systems you confirm seen as oppressive? Dr. W I have experienced many educational systems around the world, including a number that I would regard as extremely oppressive.For example, Ive taught in Asian and Middle Eastern countries where primary and secondary school teachers regularly slap, trailer and beat studentshit them with sticks and so on. For the most part, those systems are based on rote memorization as Freire described, and the students are not even allowed to question the teacher they are strictly passive. Mainly, the students are just being prepared for standardized tests, not to develop creativity or imagination, and this becomes very clear when they reach the university level.At that point, they have become used to treating teachers like little tin gods, although I suppose it prepares them for the kind of bureaucratic and managerial salaried positions most of them will be expected to fill in society. Question Isnt that also the case with the American education system? Isnt it mostly geared toward jobs in the capitalistic economy? Dr. W. Absolutely. The American education system is also a class system, and this is already the case in primary and secondary schools. My first job was as a student teacher in a high school in New York.The kids from working class backgrounds were generally tracked into general classes that were not preparing them for higher education, while those from the pith class were. Ill never forget the first class I ever taught, with a group of sullen, nonresponsive working class kids, stuck in a basement classroom that did not even have windows, taught by people who didnt oft care whether they learned anything or not. These kids knew it, too. They were not dumb, although the system certainly treated th em that way.They knew they were being prepared for jobs as mechanics and cashiers. And this was not an inner metropolis school, though, where the American class and caste system reveals itself at its most brutal. Question Caste system? Dr. W. Yes, in the United States, we have a long history of education segregated by color, with the worst schools constantly being reserved for minority groups. Compare any inner city public school system today with those in the white suburbs, or with expensive hole-and-corner(a) schools for the upper classes, and you will see the diversion in about two seconds.For the poor and minority groups in the inner cities, the teachers and facilities are much worsened than in the suburbs, as is the housing, health care, nutrition and so on. Conditions in these ghettoized schools and neighborhoods are not all that much better from those in developing countriesthe types of places Freire was talking about in his books. In those countries, the oppression is v ery real indeed, and the students are being prepared for lives as peasants, workers or simply part of the marginalized economy and society, like kids in Americas inner city schools. Those institutions are programmed for failure.Question But you never taught in inner city schools like those? I mean the types of schools that are like jails, with cops on duty, metal detectors and things like that? Dr. W. No, my career has been mostly at the university level, and the students Ive had were relatively privileged by the standards of this worldmiddle class or upper class. In the Middle East, I taught students from royalty and the aristocracy who had huge allowances every month, and in Asia I once taught students who arrived in limos with their own drivers. I wouldnt say that they were exactly the oppressed masses Freire was describing.On the other hand, I taught at a university in the former Soviet Union were about 60% of the students were on scholarships and came from fairly modest backgr ounds. A lot of people had also been hit hard by the collapse of the economy when the Soviet Union cease. We even had a former brain surgeon who ended up working as a janitor at the university, earning about $150 a month. The whole medical exam and public education system was so far gone that she could make more money that way. Question So you basically see the education system as being unequal, designed to keep people in their place generation after generation?Dr. W. Yes, thats been mostly my experience. I think its designed to insure that the children of the owners and the ruling class will stay at the same level as their parents, while the children of the middle class will preserve to manage and administer the system for them, and the children of workers will continue to be mostly worker bees, although a few might be allowed up into the middle class. Question So in all your years of experience, you never experienced education as being liberating in the way Freire describes?Dr . W. Absolutely never. The system is set up to do the opposite and it will usually locoweed out teachers who do not aline to its requirements, unless they are protected by tenure. Most teachers just go along and get along, never rocking the boat because they are relatively powerless themselves and just need the paycheck. Moreover, parents of middle class and upper class students do not want anyone to be liberated, but expect their children to conform to the systemto insure that the family maintains its class position.Question So given this reality, is there any way you can imagine that a truly liberating education system might be established? Dr. W. (laughs) I think to do what Freire was talking about would require a revolution. Clearly, then, Dr. W. was a case of someone who had become cynical about the education system after long years of experience. He admitted that he had once been young and idealistic and might even have believed some of Freires ideas, but over the years he had found that there was really no meaningful way to put them into practice under the reliable system.In addition, he thought that most students simply went along with this system because that was what their parents expected, especially when they were paying private schools and universities to provide certain services. They were most definitely not interested in making students more humanistic, insubordinate or questioning of authority, but only to prepare them for careers and to get ahead in life. Only in rare cases in American history, such as the 1960s during the era of the Vietnam War, counterculture and civil rights movements did students actually come to question the dominant values of society on a mass scale.That has most certainly not been the case in recent decades, at least not in the United States, nor in most other countries that Dr. W. had experienced. He had come to regard education as a business, run by bureaucrats and entrepreneurs for a profit rather than to encou rage critical thinking or humanistic values among the students. Only once in a while would rebels and nonconformists challenge this system, except in very unusual historical circumstances. WORKS CITED Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy on the Oppressed. NY Continuum, 2000. wonder with Dr. W. by author, February 4, 2010.