[xmca] Propaganda Objectives and Agitation Invectives

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

I like the Geertz: ideology is just ideal culture. The word ideology, and also words like "propaganda" and "agitation", are just terms for the creation, transmission, fission and fusion, asexual and sexual reproduction, repetition and modification of ideas. It's an objective term, not an invective one. Ideology is nothing more and nothing less than idea-ology. 
 
I guess I think of Freire as an agitator rather than a propagandist; a man who is taking a few simple ideas and repeating them to large numbers of people. I think of Vygotsky as a propagandist rather than an agitator, someone who is taking a very large and complex body of thought and transmitting it to a very small group of people (which I am blessed to be on the margins of). I can see that Freire's invective use of "ideology", like his "banking" metaphor, is useful for agitation; but I don't think Vygotsky would want to use it in his propaganda.
 
That said, I think it's always a little dangerous to freight words with fixed restrictions. In the latest issue of MCA, there is a brilliant if somewhat tetchy Commentary by Andy, from which we learn a very great deal about the fundamental epistemological differences between a phenomenological viewpoint and a psychological one: "The subject matter of Phenomenology is the stream of subjective consciousness as revealed by introspection; the subject matter of Psychology is consciousness as reconstructed by the scientific observation of behavior (!) and physiology (?)."  
 
Andy adds that we can use introspection, but with caution. Perhaps only as a form of observed behavior? At any rate, we need to take it with a block of salt, maybe a whole salt mine. But of course Vygotsky DOES use introspective data, quite a bit. Egocentric thinking, where it is directed towards the activity of consciousness itself (as in the second section of Chapter Six of Thinking and Speech) can be interpreted as a form of introspection.
 
So I'm not sure why we can't use concepts such as "consumer", properly salted, Andy. Doesn't Marx use it? Here he is, in Part II of Capital Volume One, chewing over the words of Condillac and Torrens:
 
"In relation to circulation, producers and consumers meet only as buyers and sellers. To assert that the surplus value acquired by the producer has its origin in the fact that consumers pay for commodities more than their value, is only to say in other words: The owner of commodities possesses, as a seller, the privilege of selling too dear. (....) The distinction between them is, that one buys and the other sells. The fact that the owner of the commodities, under the designation of producer, sells them over their value, and under the designation of consumer, pays too much for them, does not carry us a single step further." (Capital, Chapter Five, Contradictions in the general form of capital).
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

--- On Thu, 9/23/10, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:


From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Concepts of ideology
To: "Robert Lake" <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu>
Cc: "CultureActivity eXtended Mind" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Thursday, September 23, 2010, 5:25 PM


Thanks for people's help with Friere text. Seems like I was wrong, the uses
of the term, ideology, in
the text presuppose its meaning while I had (mis) remembered him offering
something somewhat different. I guess I have to go back and start over on
that.

The Geertz link remains relevant to David's discussion of LSV I believe,
although my interpretation of the relevance may be misguided.
mike

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 6:09 AM, Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu>wrote:

>  Mike, Here is Chapter Two of *Pedagogy of the Oppressed.*
> * PAULO FREIRE: CHAPTER 2 OF PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED
>
> This reading is from: PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED by Paulo Freire. New York:
> Continuum Books, 1993.
>
> CHAPTER 2
>
> A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside
> or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This
> relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient
> listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical
> dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become
> lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.
>
> The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static,
> compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic
> completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is
> to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration -- contents which
> are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered
> them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their
> concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.
>
> The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the
> sonority of words, not their transforming power. "Four times four is
> sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem." The student records, memorizes, and
> repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means,
> or realizing the true significance of "capital" in the affirmation "the
> capital of Para is Belem," that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para
> means for Brazil.
>
> Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize
> mechanically the narrated account. Worse yet, it turns them into
> "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teachers. The more
> completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teachers she is. The more
> meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students
> they are.
>
> Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the
> depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the
> teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently
> receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking' concept of education,
> in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as
> receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the
> opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store.
> But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away
> through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at
> best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis,
> individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention
> and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful
> inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each
> other.
>
> In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those
> who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know
> nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of
> the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of
> inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary
> opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own
> existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic,
> accept their ignorance as justifying the teachers existence -- but unlike
> the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.
>
> The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its
> drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the
> teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction
> so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.
>
> This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the
> contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction
> through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive
> society as a whole:
>
>    - the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
>    - the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
>    - the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
>    - the teacher talks and the students listen -- meekly;
>    - the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
>    - the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
>    - the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through
>    the action of the teacher;
>    - the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were
>    not consulted) adapt to it;
>    - the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own
>    professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom
>    of the students;
>    - the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils
>    are mere objects.
>
> It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as
> adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits
> entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which
> would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that
> world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the
> more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented
> view of reality deposited in them.
>
> The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the student's
> creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the
> oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it
> transformed. The oppressors use their "humanitarianism" to preserve a
> profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any
> experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not
> content with a partial view of reality always seeks out the ties which link
> one point to another and one problem to another.
>
> Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in "changing the consciousness
> of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them," (1) for the more
> the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they
> can be dominated. To achieve this the oppressors use the banking concept of
> education in conjunction with a paternalistic social action apparatus,
> within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of "welfare
> recipients." They are treated as individual cases, as marginal persons who
> deviate from the general configuration of a "good, organized and just"
> society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society
> which must therefore adjust these "incompetent and lazy" folk to its own
> patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be
> "integrated," "incorporated" into the healthy society that they have
> "forsaken."
>
> [Footnote #1: Simone de Beauvoir. La Pensee de Droite, Aujord'hui (Paris);
> ST, El Pensamiento politico de la Derecha (Buenos Aires, 1963), p. 34.
>
> The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not "marginals," are not
> living "outside" society. They have always been "inside" the structure which
> made them "beings for others." The solution is not to 'integrate" them into
> the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they
> can become "beings for themselves." Such transformation, of course, would
> undermine the oppressors' purposes; hence their utilization of the banking
> concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientizacao.
>
> The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never propose to
> students that they critically consider reality. It will deal instead with
> such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat, and
> insist upon the importance of learning that, on the contrary, Roger gave
> green grass to the rabbit. The "humanism" of the banking approach masks the
> effort to turn women and men into automatons -- the very negation of their
> ontological vocation to be more fully human.
>
> Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly (for there are
> innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that
> they are serving only to dehumanize), fail to perceive that the deposits
> themselves contain contradictions about reality. But sooner or later, these
> contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their
> domestication and the attempt to domesticate reality. They may discover
> through existential experience that their present way of life is
> irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human. They may perceive
> through their relations with reality that reality is really a process,
> undergoing constant transformation. If men and women are searchers and their
> ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the
> contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then
> engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation.
>
> But the humanist revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibility to
> materialize. From the outset, her efforts must coincide with those of the
> students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual
> humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in people and
> their creative power. To achieve this, they must be partners of the students
> in their relations with them.
>
> The banking concept does not admit to such partnership -- and necessarily
> so. To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to exchange the role of
> depositor, prescriber, domesticator, for the role of student among students
> would be to undermine the power of oppression and serve the cause of
> liberation.
>
> Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between
> human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the
> world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator. In this
> view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is
> rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty "mind" passively open to
> the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside. For example, my
> desk, my books, my coffee cup, all the objects before me, -- as bits of the
> world which surround me -- would be "inside" me, exactly as I am inside my
> study right now. This view makes no distinction between being accessible to
> consciousness and entering consciousness. The distinction, however, is
> essential: the objects which surround me are simply accessible to my
> consciousness, not located within it. I am aware of them, but they are not
> inside me.
>
> It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the
> educator's role is to regulate the way the world "enters into" the students.
> The teacher's task is to organize a process which already occurs
> spontaneously, to "fill" the students by making deposits of information
> which he of she considers to constitute true knowledge. (2) And since people
> "receive" the world as passive entities, education should make them more
> passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated individual is the
> adapted person, because she or he is better 'fit" for the world. Translated
> into practice, this concept is well suited for the purposes of the
> oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the
> oppressors have created and how little they question it.
>
> [Footnote #2: This concept corresponds to what Sartre calls the 'digestive'
> or 'nutritive' in which knowledge is 'fed' by the teacher to the students to
> "fill them out." See Jean-Paul Sartre, 'Une idee fundamentals de la
> phenomenologie de Husserl: L'intentionalite," Situations I (Paris, 1947).]
>
> The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant
> majority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their
> own purposes), the more easily the minority can continue to prescribe. The
> theory and practice of banking education serve this end quite efficiently.
> Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements, (3) the methods for evaluating
> "knowledge," the distance between the teacher and the taught, the criteria
> for promotion: everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate
> thinking.
>
> {Footnote #3: For example, some professors specify in their reading lists
> that a book should be read from pages 10 to 15 -- and do this to 'help'
> their students!]
>
> The bank-clerk educator does not realize that there is no true security in
> his hypertrophied role, that one must seek to live with others in
> solidarity. One cannot impose oneself, nor even merely co-exist with one's
> students. Solidarity requires true communication, and the concept by which
> such an educator is guided fears and proscribes communication.
>
> Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher's
> thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students'
> thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her
> thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about
> reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in
> communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by
> action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes
> impossible.
>
> Because banking education begins with a false understanding of men and
> women as objects, it cannot promote the development of what Fromm calls
> "biophily," but instead produces its opposite: "necrophily."
>
> While life is characterized by growth in a structured functional manner,
> the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is
> mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the
> organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living
> persons were things. . . . Memory, rather than experience; having, rather
> than being, is what counts' The necrophilous person can relate to an object
> -- a flower or a person -- only if he possesses it; hence a threat to his
> possession is a threat to himself, if he loses possession he loses contact
> with the world. . . . He loves control, and in the act of controlling he
> kills life. (4)
>
>  [Footnote #4: Fromm, op. cit. p. 41.]
>
> Oppression --overwhelming control -- is necrophilic; it is nourished by
> love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the
> interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic,
> static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms
> students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action,
> leads women and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative
> power.
>
> When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find
> themselves unable to use their faculties, people suffer. "This suffering due
> to impotence is rooted in the very fact that the human has been disturbed."
> (5) But the inability to act which people's anguish also causes them to
> reject their impotence, by attempting
>
> . . . .to restore [their] capacity to act. But can [they], and how? One way
> is to submit to and identify with a person or group having power. By this
> symbolic participation in another person's life, (men have] the illusion of
> acting, when in reality [they] only submit to and become a part of those who
> act. (6)
>
>  [Footnote #5: Ibid., p 31.]
>
> [Footnote #6: Ibid. 7.]
>
> Populist manifestations perhaps best exemplify this type of behavior by the
> oppressed, who, by identifying with charismatic leaders, come to feel that
> they themselves are active and effective. The rebellion they express as they
> emerge in the historical process is motivated by that desire to act
> effectively. The dominant elites consider the remedy to be more domination
> and repression, carried out in the name of freedom, order, and social peace
> (that is, the peace of the elites). Thus they can condemn -- logically, from
> their point of view -- "the violence of a strike by workers and [can] call
> upon the state in the same breath to use violence in putting down the
> strike." (7)
>
> [Footnote #7: Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York,
> 1960), p. 130. ]
>
> Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of
> students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of
> indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. This accusation is
> not made in the naive hope that the dominant elites will thereby simply
> abandon the practice. Its objective is to call the attention of true
> humanists to the fact that they cannot use banking educational methods in
> the pursuit of liberation, for they would only negate that very pursuit. Nor
> may a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society.
> The revolutionary society which practices banking education is either
> misguided or mistrusting of people. In either event, it is threatened by the
> specter of reaction.
>
> Unfortunately, those who espouse the cause of liberation are themselves
> surrounded and influenced by the climate which generates the banking
> concept, and often do not perceive its true significance or its dehumanizing
> power. Paradoxically, then, they utilize this same instrument of alienation
> in what they consider an effort to liberate. Indeed, some "revolutionaries"
> brand as "innocents," "dreamers," or even "reactionaries" those who would
> challenge this educational practice. But one does not liberate people by
> alienating them. Authentic liberation-the process of humanization-is not
> another deposit to be made in men. Liberation is a praxis: the action and
> reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.
>
> Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its
> entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings,
> and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon
> the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the
> problems of human beings in their relations with the world. "Problem-posing"
> education, responding to the essence of consciousness --intentionality --
> rejects communiques and embodies communication. It epitomizes the special
> characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on
> objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian split" --consciousness
> as consciousness of consciousness.
>
> Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of
> information. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far
> from being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors
> -- teacher on the one hand and students on the other. Accordingly, the
> practice of problem-posing education entails at the outset that the
> teacher-student contradiction to be resolved. Dialogical relations --
> indispensable to the capacity of cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving
> the same cognizable object --are otherwise impossible.
>
> Indeed problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical
> characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function of freedom
> only if it can overcome the above contradiction. Through dialogue, the
> teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a
> new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no
> longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue
> with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become
> jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process,
> arguments based on "authority" are no longer valid; in order to function
> authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one
> teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other,
> mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education
> are "owned" by the teacher.
>
> The banking concept (with its tendency to dichotomize everything)
> distinguishes two stages in the action of the educator. During the first he
> cognizes a cognizable object while he prepares his lessons in his study or
> his laboratory; during the second, he expounds to his students about that
> object. The students are not called upon to know, but to memorize the
> contents narrated by the teacher. Nor do the students practice any act of
> cognition, since the object towards which that act should be directed is the
> property of the teacher rather than a medium evoking the critical reflection
> of both teacher and students. Hence in the name of the "preservation of and
> knowledge" we have a system which achieves neither true knowledge nor true
> culture.
>
> The problem-posing method does not dichotomize the activity of
> teacher-student: she is not "cognitive" at one point and "narrative" at
> another. She is always "cognitive," whether preparing a project or engaging
> in dialogue with the students. He does not regard objects as his private
> property, but as the object of reflection by himself and his students. In
> this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in
> the reflection of the students. The students -- no longer docile listeners
> -- are now--critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The
> teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and
> re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own.
> The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the
> students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is
> superseded by true knowledge at the level of the logos. Whereas banking
> education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education
> involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain
> the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of
> consciousness and critical intervention in reality.
>
> Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to
> themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly
> challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend
> the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context not
> as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be
> increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. Their response to
> the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and
> gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed.
>
> Education as the practice of freedom -- as opposed to education as the
> practice of domination -- denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent
> and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a
> reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract
> man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the
> world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous:
> consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it.
>
> La conscience et le monde sont dormes dun meme coup: exterieur par essence
> a la conscience, le monde est, par essence relatif a elle. (8)
>
>  [Footnote #8: Sartre, op. cit., p. 32.]
>
> In one of our culture circles in Chile, the group was discussing (based on
> a codification) the anthropological concept of culture. 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 remained, together with trees, birds, animals, rivers,
> seas, the stars. . . wouldn't all this be a world?" "Oh no," the peasant
> replied . "There would be no one to say: 'This is a world'."
>
> The peasant wished to express the idea that there would be lacking the
> consciousness of the world which necessarily implies the world of
> consciousness. I cannot exist without a non-I. In turn, the not-I depends on
> that existence. The world which brings consciousness into existence becomes
> the world of that consciousness. Hence, the previously cited affirmation of
> Sartre: "La conscience et le monde sont dormes d'un meme coup."
>
> As women and men, simultaneously reflecting on themselves and world,
> increase the scope of their perception, they begin to direct their
> observations towards previously inconspicuous phenomena:
>
> In perception properly so-called, as an explicit awareness [Gewahren], I am
> turned towards the object, to the paper, for instance. I apprehend it as
> being this here and now. The apprehension is a singling out, every object
> having a background in experience. Around and about the paper lie books,
> pencils, inkwell and so forth, and these in a certain sense are also
> "perceived," perceptually there, in the "field of intuition"; but whilst I
> was turned towards the paper there was no turning in their direction, nor
> any apprehending of them, not even in a secondary sense. They appeared and
> yet were not singled out, were posited on their own account. Every
> perception of a thing has such a zone of background intuitions or background
> awareness, if "intuiting" already includes the state of being turned
> towards, and this also is a "conscious experience", or more briefly a
> "consciousness of" all indeed that in point of fact lies in the co-perceived
> objective background. (10)
>
>  [Footnote #10: Edmund Husserl, Ideas-General Introduction to Pure
> Phenomenology (London, 1969), pp. 105-106.]
>
> That which had existed objectively but had not been perceived in its deeper
> implications (if indeed it was perceived at all) begins to "stand out,"
> assuming the character of a problem and therefore of challenge. Thus, men
> and women begin to single out elements from their "background awareness" and
> to reflect upon them. These elements are now objects of their consideration,
> and, as such, objects of their action and cognition.
>
> In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive
> critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find
> themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a
> reality in process, in transformation. Although the dialectical relations of
> women and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are
> perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true
> that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how
> they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-student and the
> students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without
> dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic
> form of thought and action.
>
> Once again, the two educational concepts and practices under analysis come
> into conflict. Banking education (for obvious reasons) attempts, by
> mythicizing reality, to conceal certain facts which explain the way human
> beings exist in the world; problem-posing education sets itself the task of
> demythologizing. Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing
> education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which
> unveils reality. Banking education treats students as objects of assistance;
> problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers. Banking education
> inhibits creativity and domesticates (although it cannot completely destroy)
> the intentionality of consciousness by isolating consciousness from the
> world, thereby denying people their ontological and historical vocation of
> becoming more fully human. Problem-posing education bases itself on
> creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby
> responding to the vocation of persons as beings only when engaged in inquiry
> and creative transformation. In sum: banking theory and practice, as
> immobilizing and fixating forces, fail to acknowledge men and women as
> historical beings; problem-posing theory and practice take the people's
> historicity as their starting point.
>
> Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings the process of
> becoming -- as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise
> unfinished reality. Indeed, in contrast to other animals who are unfinished,
> but not historical, people know themselves to be unfinished; they are aware
> of their incompletion. In this incompletion and this awareness lie the very
> roots of education as an human manifestation. The unfinished character of
> human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that
> education be an ongoing activity.
>
> Education is thus constantly remade in the praxis. In order to be, it must
> become. Its "duration" (in the Bergsonian meaning of the word) is found in
> the interplay of the opposites permanence and change. The banking method
> emphasizes permanence and becomes problem-posing education -- which accepts
> neither a "well-behaved" present nor a predetermined future -- roots itself
> in the dynamic present and becomes revolutionary.
>
> Problem-posing education is revolutionary futurity. Hence it is prophetic
> (and as such, hopeful). Hence, it corresponds to the historical nature of
> humankind. Hence, it affirms women and men as who transcend themselves, who
> move forward and look ahead, for whom immobility represents a fatal threat
> for whom looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more
> clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.
> Hence, it identifies with the movement which engages people as beings aware
> of their incompletion -- an historical movement which has its point of
> departure, its Subjects and its objective.
>
> The point of departure of the movement lies in the people themselves. But
> since people do not exist apart from the world, apart from reality, the
> movement must begin with the human-world relationship. Accordingly, the
> point of departure must always be with men and women in the "here and now,"
> which constitutes the situation within which they are submerged, from which
> they emerge, and in which they intervene. Only by starting from this
> situation -- which determines their perception of it -- can they begin to
> move. To do this authentically they must perceive their state not as fated
> and unalterable, but merely as limiting - and therefore challenging.
>
> Whereas the banking method directly or indirectly reinforces men's
> fatalistic perception of their situation, the problem-posing method presents
> this very situation to them as a problem. As the situation becomes the
> object of their cognition, the naive or magical perception which produced
> their fatalism gives way to perception which is able to perceive itself even
> as it perceives reality, and can thus be critically objective about that
> reality.
>
> A deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that
> situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation.
> Resignation gives way to the drive for transformation and inquiry, over
> which men feel themselves to be in control. If people, as historical beings
> necessarily engaged with other people in a movement of inquiry, did not
> control that movement, it would be (and is) a violation of their humanity.
> Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the
> process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to
> alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into
> objects.
>
> This movement of inquiry must be directed towards humanization -- the
> people's historical vocation. The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot
> be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and
> solidarity; therefore it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relations between
> oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he
> prevents others from being so. Attempting to be more human,
> individualistically, leads to having more, egotistically, a form of
> dehumanization. Not that it is not fundamental to have in order to be human.
> Precisely because it is necessary, some men's having must not be allowed to
> constitute an obstacle to others' having, must not consolidate the power of
> the former to crush the latter.
>
> Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as
> fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for their
> emancipation. To that end, it enables teachers and students to become
> Subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and an
> alienating intellectualism; it also enables people to overcome their false
> perception of reality. The world -- no longer something to be described with
> deceptive words -- becomes the object of that transforming action by men and
> women which results in their humanization.
>
> Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the
> oppressor. No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to
> question: Why? While only a revolutionary society can carry out this
> education in systematic terms, the revolutionary leaders need not take full
> power before they can employ the method. In the revolutionary process, the
> leaders cannot utilize the banking method as an interim measure, justified
> on grounds of expediency, with intention of later behaving in a genuinely
> revolutionary fashion. They must be revolutionary -- that is to say,
> dialogical -- from the outset.
>
>
>
>  *
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> References
>
> Freire, P. (1971). *Pedagogy of the oppressed*. New York: Seabury.
>
> Freire, P. (1973). *Education for critical consciousness *(1st ed.). New
> York: Seabury.
>
> Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). *Literacy: Reading the word & the world*.
>
>  South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey.
>
> Horton, M. & Freire, P. (1990).* We make the road by walking.*
> Philadelphia:
>
>  Temple University Press.
>
> Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). *Mind in society: The development of higher
> psychological processes.*
>
> * *Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.**
>
> Vygotsky, L. S. (1986).* Thought and language.* Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
>
> Vygotsky, L. S. (1987).* The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky* (N.
> Minick, Trans. Vol. 1).
>
>             New York: Plenum.
>
> Wertsch, J. (1985). *Vygotsky and the social formation of mind.*
>
> Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  Robert Lake  Ed.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Social Foundations of Education
> Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
> Georgia Southern University
> P. O. Box 8144
> Phone: (912) 478-5125
> Fax: (912) 478-5382
> Statesboro, GA  30460
>
>  *Democracy must be born anew in every generation, and education is its
> midwife.*
> *-*John Dewey.
>
>
> >>> mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> 9/22/2010 10:50 PM >>>
>
> David's interesting discussion of the meanings of "ideology" got me
> wondering about the relation of the conception used by Vygotsky and other
> conceptions. Could anyone help me by looking in *Pedagogy of the Oppressed"
> and posting Friere's definition of ideology? I remember it being
> interesting
> but my copy has gone missing.
>
> For those interested, the discussion by Geertz may also be relevant:
> http://www.gongfa.com/geertz1.htm
>
> mike
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>
>
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