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<http://us.mc1103.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=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<http://us.mc1103.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=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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