Re: [xmca] Concepts of ideology

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

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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> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
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>
>
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