Conceptualizing Paulo Freire's approach to Education Reform through 'Critical Consciousness'
Presented on: 14th of October, 2010
Venue: Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
Contents
1. The Thinker
2. Rationale
3. Relating to self
4. The Social Context
5. Epistemological and Ontological Premises
6. Key Concepts and Issues in Freirean Education
6.1. Philosophical Assumptions in Freirean thought
6.2. Conscientization
6.3. Dialogue
6.4. Liberation
6.5. Literacy ‘Method’
6.6. Oppression and the oppressed
7. Freire: The Subject Object Paradigm and Dialogue
8. Ontological structure of Humanization
9. Education: Political Practice
10. Myth of school
11. Theory of Education
12. Awakening of Consciousness
13. The Marginal as a Subject
14. The adult literacy process: an act of knowing
15. Education as a Practice of Freedom
16. Arguments
16.1. The Pedagogy: Indian Context
16.2. Education: A tool for Oppression
16.3. Media-centered entertainment-Education Intervention
17. Footnotes
18. References
1. The Thinker
Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (September 19, 1921 to May 2, 1997)
The objectives of literacy cannot be separated from those of education “as practice of freedom”. Learning the alphabet or the three R’s can be meaningful only when it constitutes a stage in the process of “conscientizacao”, only when it enables men to take their first steps along the road towards their humanization. In such context, the Individual with the greater store of sheer “knowledge” is not basically different from an illiterate. The alphabet, like any other tool for reading the world, is nothing but a technical instrument. The main problem for man is how to perceive and use this instrument as an aid to his liberation, to his passage from state of “primary consciousness” to one of critical consciousness.
Paulo Freire foremost contribution to literacy has been to show the irrelevance of a formal, aimless, “content-less” approach to the subject. To a greater extent than any other contemporary thinker, he has succeeded in identifying the true dimensions of literacy and its place in man’s process of self-realization.
Paulo Freires’ literacy method is the application of his philosophy derived from his conception of man and man’s role in the social order. This philosophy, in turn, is rooted in his experience of the environment in which he grew to manhood – North East of Brazil, a geographical expression with political and social overtones. In order to comprehend his approach to literacy, it is also important to know his philosophy and the social situation in which it was concieved and to which it relates. His fundamental thesis to be noted is “the the purpose of education as the formation of man as a creative and critical being”.
2. Rationale
· To develop an understanding of critical education process
· To trace the impact of reflexive as a means to emerge as a ‘Free’ human being
· To decipher the uses of ‘dialogue’ as a means of transformation
3. Relating to self
The proposed method given by Freire's on ‘Popular Education’ could be noted to have two distinct and sequential moments, these are as listed below:
The first involves becoming conscious of the reality that the individual lives as an oppressed being subject to the decisions that the oppressors impose;
The second refers to the initiative of the oppressed to fight and emancipate themselves from the oppressors.
It is also clear that Freire does not believe that the lived situation consists only of a simple awareness of reality. Instead, he believes that the individual has a historical need to fight against the status that dwells within him. The efforts of the oppressed become focused and concrete through the type of learning that school really should give them, instead of encouraging them to adapt to their reality, as the oppressors themselves do.
In the relationships they establish, the oppressed appear to be the instigators of violence, even when the conditions and events that they have experienced up to that point incite them to try to modify their status. Nevertheless, in the eyes of the oppressors, such fights are canonized as unnecessary violence or utopian dreams, and not as the ideas of a revolutionary who is known for the ideological commitment that he establishes with his peers, rather than for the battles he carries out. These circumstances occasionally provoke a mistaken horizontal violence between the oppressed themselves in their efforts to achieve emancipation.
Furthermore, the oppressors accuse those who oppose them of being disobliging, irresponsible, depraved and responsible for their own situation, despite the fact that even if these adjectives do sometimes apply, they are really a response to being oppressed and are ultimately the result of the exploitation to which these people have been subjected. The situation gets even worse when the oppressed accept this reality and adapt to it without questioning or even attempting to change it. This generates in the oppressed an emotional dependence that seems irrevocable. It is necessary, therefore, that these individuals get to know themselves in order to begin the fight for their inexorable emancipation through ‘Critical Consciousness’.
4. The Social Context
Education, being a subsystem of society, necessarily reflects the main features of that society. It would be vain to hope for a rational, humane education in an unjust society.
- Unesco. “Learning to be; the world of education today and tomorrow”. Paris, 1972. P. 60[1]
Paulo Freire was a middle-class family in a region beset by poverty. That Freire’s mind and future vocation were shaped by the social situation into which he was born and in which he grew to manhood seem evident. Schooling in Recife was a privilege enjoyed by a minority dominating the social and economic institutions of society, where as the majority (the oppressed) lived in what Freire terms a “culture of silence”, condemned to passivity.
In Recife, Freire completed his university studies in the philosophy of education and began an academic career. The course of that career was determined by the concern that dominated his thoughts and action. His purpose was to work out an educational method that could speak to and make speak those who lived in silence and accepted ignorance and poverty as their assigned lot in life. To them he proclaimed a “pedagogy of freedom” founded upon an awareness of both self and society. Basing himself upon a study of Brazilian history and the writings of Marx, Sartre, Fromm and Althusser, Freire stressed the need for literacy teaching based on his concept of “Conscientization”.[2]
According to him, the myth of the school as a democratic institution is still far too alive; this myth must be destroyed, and the process of selection of privileged elites must be shown to be no accident, but the actual aim of the system, even if well-hidden beneath the democratic rhetoric of equal opportunity for accession to the ruling class. Paulo Freire, as both pedagogue and philosopher, is one of the partisans of authentic democratization of educational opportunity. Although his ideas on the new concept of education in general, and on adult literacy in particular, clearly reflect the disturbed situation in Brazilian society, his overall view of education is nevertheless, to some extent, valid for all oppressed people of the third world.
Paulo Freire’s experimented his pedagogy date back to 1962, at his birth place, Recife and in Joao Pessoa. He set up an important organization for education and popular culture, the ‘Cultural Center,’ in which ‘cultural circles’ took the place of traditional classes. He instituted group discussions, to promote the analysis of existential situations or action itself inspired by such analysis. After six months of experimentation, he applied the same active method to adult literacy, thereby transforming the traditional approach. In the ‘cultural circles’ the predominant notion of liberty gave meaning to educational experience, which cannot be effective, nor achieve its aim, without the free and conscious participation of the adult illiterates.
Conscientization cleared the way for the voicing of social claims which are often produced by a state of oppression. This new element, a political awareness among the masses, began to engender opposition. The oppressed were no longer prepared to passively accept the policies of others. Popular education was developing a spirit of questioning and doubting. In the domain of education, Freire achieved a unity of theory and action that was his purpose. As an educator, engrossed in the problem of illiteracy, he addressed himself to the most oppressed classes. He used his own experiences and those of the people as the basis for his pedagogy in which the the teacher and the taught, equally deserving of freedom and capable of criticism and judgement, share and apprenticeship in the development of an awareness of the situation in which they live. His pedagogy is fundamentally anti-authoritarian.
5. Epistemological and Ontological premises
…our task is not to teach students to think—they can already think; but to exchange our ways of thinking with each other and look together for better ways of approaching the decodification of an object. (Freire, 1982)
Freire’s theological ontology shades into the Marxist politics that reinterpreted Hegel’s analysis of the Master-Slave relationship (Torres, 1994).[3] The inescapable essence of the oppressor class is that it embodies a way of life that distorts what is most fundamentally human. Caught in an illusion of its own independence and freedom, the oppressor class cannot make the required critique of and breach with the concrete economic, political, social, and ideological orders. These orders actually prevent both the oppressor and oppressed classes from achieving the deepest possibilities of humanization and freedom. On the other hand, the oppressed class faces daily the impositions of the dehumanizing systems of an unjust society. By refusing to accede to its subordinated position and working to understand the raison d’être of its structural formation, the oppressed class has an advantage in intervening strategically to overcome the limits in the context. Given the ontological capacity for intentionally directing cultural re-formation toward humanizing ends, liberation struggle is always a possible prerogative of the oppressed.
Paulo Freire insists that knowledge must be democratically available to everyone in order to politically transform society through social justice, and this has been his sharp epistemological approach. This aim is achieved when the noetic[4] process becomes a critical reading of reality, a reflection in action which is applied so that traditional ways of thinking constitute a permanent subject for reinterpretation. Knowledge is perceived in Freirean epistemology as a medium of communication between human beings, a process in which there is no permanently unaltered noetic data but rather an ongoing dialectic strategically pursued through contradiction and constantly aimed at radically redefining how people can coexist in a state of social equality.
According to this view, knowledge offers everyone the possibility to think more critically about the world so as to act on it in a more humanizing way. It is ideally a liberating methodology aimed at reshaping the socio-political power structures so as to create a culture of freedom. The teacher is depicted in this account as a political pedagogue who encourages students to "read reality[5]" in a critical way in order to radically transform it. Such issues as social accountability and ideology are central to Freirean epistemology. This further means the breaking down of dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity, between action and reflection, between teaching and learning, and between knowledge and its applications.[6]
The epistemology of Paulo Freire is in direct opposition to the dominant educational paradigm of positivism.[7] The problem, however, is that positivists claim that knowledge, though a product of human consciousness, is itself also neutral, value-free, and objective. Further, learning is the discovery of static facts and their subsequent description and classification. In contrast to the dominant educational paradigm of positivism, Freire insists that knowledge is not static; that there is no dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity or between reflection and action; and that knowledge is not neutral. Therefore, Knowledge is not fixed permanently in the abstract properties of objects, but is a process where gaining existing knowledge and producing new knowledge are “two moments in the same cycle”[8]
Embedded in this notion is the recognition that knowledge requires subjects; objects to be known are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Knowledge…necessitates the curious presence of subjects confronted with the world. It requires their transforming action on reality. It demands a constant searching…In the learning process the only person who really learns is s/he who re-invents that learning.[9]
Knowledge, therefore, is a negotiated product emerging from the interaction of human consciousness and reality; it is produced as we, individually and collectively, search and try to make sense of our world. Necessarily, then, the human act of sense-making implies the subjectivity of our descriptions of the world. However, contrary to the view that subjective statements contain no connection to objective reality and that there exists objective statements about the world, unpolluted by subjective perspectives, Freire insists that subjectivity and objectivity are not separate ways of knowing.
To deny the importance of subjectivity in the process of transforming the world and history is…to admit the impossible: a world without people.…On the other hand, the denial of objectivity in analysis or action…postulates people without a world…[and] denies action itself by denying objective reality.[10] Because of the unity between subjectivity and objectivity, people cannot completely know particular aspects of the world—no knowledge is finished or infallible. As humans change, so does the knowledge they produce.
Through constant search and dialogue in a dialectical manner, reflection leads to new action. That is, action and reflection are not separate moments of knowing. For, on the one hand, reflection that is not ultimately accompanied by action to transform the world is meaningless, alienating rhetoric. On the other hand, action that is not critically analyzed cannot sustain progressive change. Without reflection, people cannot learn from each other’s successes and mistakes; particular activities need to be evaluated in relation to larger collective goals. Only through praxis - reflection and action dialectically interacting to re-create our perception and description of reality - can people become subjects in control of organizing their society. In Freire’s view, people produce knowledge to humanize themselves. Overcoming dehumanization involves resolving the fundamental contradiction of our epoch: domination against liberation.
Further coupling his ontological and epistemological positions, Freire argued that the conditions that promote freedom also produce the human capacity for critical knowledge. He translated these conditions into communicative and linguistic metaphors that prescribed certain methods for the educational dimensions of his theory of liberation. Central to these metaphors is his notion of dialogue. Knowledge becomes founded on dialogue characterized by participatory, open communication focused around critical inquiry and analysis, linked to intentional action seeking to reconstruct the situation (including the self) and to evaluated consequences. The dialogue that distinguishes critical knowledge and cultural action for freedom is not some kind of conversation, it is a social praxis. To be liberatory, it must respect the everyday language, understanding, and way of life of the knowers, and it must seek to create situations in which they can more deeply express their own hopes and intentions. Dialogue enables the oppressed to “speak a true word” and overcome their “silencing”[11] not simply at the communicative or linguistic levels, but also in regard to their forming culture, history, and their own identities. This cultural action for liberation reveals the profound importance of language for a people’s being, knowing, and capacity to produce reality.
Conscientization is the term Freire used to capture the complex ontological, epistemological, and ethical-political features of education as a practice of freedom.[12] His analysis placed cultural formation, knowledge creation, and linguistic practices as central to situations and identity and thus also as necessarily central to revolutionary (or any other) social change. Since situations are permeated with defining axes of power and authority that establish standards and norms in favor of some rather than others, liberation entails a people’s struggle to be, to feel, to know, and to speak for themselves.
Conscientization is thus a mode of life always in the process of becoming, one that enacts ongoing cultural action for liberation that accepts an ethic of the “fineness of the striving” as “a job to do in history”.[13] This ethic indicates precisely the importance of education as a practice of freedom for a successful revolution because it enables the ongoing reinvention and recreation of democratic culture.
He further emphasizes that without praxis, human beings cease to be the “makers of their way” and they become simply what history makes of them. For Freire, to be human means to make and remake one’s self through making history and culture, to struggle against the limiting conditions that prevent such creative action, and to dream into existence a world where every person has this opportunity and responsibility.
6. Key Concept and Issues in Freirean Education
6.1. Philosophical Assumptions in Freirean thought
At the centre of Freire’s world-view, is his belief that humans have an ontological vocation to become more fully human, which is through Human consciousness. He believes that the structures of capitalist societies are founded on relations of exploitation of certain groups or individuals by other. Prevailing historical conditions in capitalist societies makes it difficult, therefore, for exploited individuals and groups to pursue their ontological vocation is a must.
Unlike Marx, Freire does not envisage on ideologically sound and just society in the future in which people can experience freedom equally. However, human liberation, or what he calls “Humanization”, is a goal that can never be fully achieved because it requires an ongoing encounter with reality, which is itself permanently changing.[14] As the oppressed humans strive towards greater humanization, “dialogue” between individual and society is important. And, mutual conscientization between individual and individual in an act through critical consciousness is also equally important.
“Critical Consciousness” allows man to emerge as a free human being. It allows him to perceive the world as it is, relate to it, and question it. It enables him to choose, and to commit himself to the choice he made to accept responsibility and, together with his fellow men, to learn how to reach a higher degree of authentic freedom. In other words, critical consciousness focuses on achieving an in-depth understanding of the world, allowing for the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions.
Critical consciousness also includes taking action against the oppressive elements in one's life that are illuminated by that understanding. Thus, for Paulo Freire, the task of education is, therefore, to bring about the most favorable conditions to enable man, and society as a whole, to reach this state of critical awareness.
6.2. Conscientization
Conscientization is the process of learning to perceive social, political, and economic oppressions in society and to take actions against them. It is the process of developing a critical consciousness. After overcoming dehumanization, identification with the oppressor, and “fear of freedom”, the individual can develop a critical consciousness through dialogue and communication, change in the program content of education, and use of specific pedagogical techniques.[15] Simply put Conscientization means “to make aware” or “awakening of consciousness” or “critical consciousness”.
Freire always uses the concept of Conscientization to refer not only to the knowledge that a group of people have, but, beyond this, consciousness is formed in a process of investigation and changes – deriving from it – are made in their own reality. In this process, each person, through dialogue, meets with other people and can move from a magical consciousness to a critical one. We can say that Conscientization is a process and not a stage. In this path, Freire names different steps: magical consciousness where fate and inevitability are dominant in people’s understanding, naïve consciousness which involves some understanding of the context in which events occur but the analysis is shallow, and finally critical consciousness where deeper and contextual analysis are evident.
Conscientization is more than merely ‘consciousness raising’ it implies also the need to act on what is known. But the most important element that can stress is that, Conscientization is forged in everyday liberating actions that allow people not only to be conscious about their alienation, but changing the situation that are the cause of it.
6.3. Dialogue
According to Freire (1970), dialogue is the encounter between people to name and change the world. Dialogue emerges with critical consciousness. It is an act of creation, not of domination.
He further explains;
. . . dialogue is the encounter in which the united reflection and action of the dialoguers are addressed to the world which is to be transformed and humanized, the dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person’s “deposition” ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be “consumed” by the discussants.[16]
Dialogue is the core of Freire’s philosophy and his method. Dialogue guarantees communication and establishes education as a cooperative process characterized by social interactions between people in which new knowledge is created through joining and sharing the knowledge that people have. For this, dialogue as an educational journey considers people as social human beings and not as recipients of knowledge. It is the essence of liberating education. Dialogue is, in this sense, the starting point to edify a liberating education.
6.4. Liberation
Freire (1970) maintains that liberation is the process by which both oppressor and oppressed find freedom. He elaborates:
. . . Sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), it become in turn oppressors of the oppressor, but rather restorers of the humanity of both . . . only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both..[17]
6.5. Literacy ‘Method’
According to Freire, education is not a way merely to learn letters, words or sentences. The starting point is always people’s real situations and experiences shared through dialogue. From this point of departure, people can build the meanings of their own surrounding world. The literacy method makes sense within the bounds of a concrete territory – physical and symbolic. People in literacy processes become learners of their own everyday life. In this sense, to ‘say their world’ is to speak about the world in cooperation with others through dialogue. In Freire’s ‘method’ words are more than a simple skill. Words are doors opened to understand the world and change it.
6.6. Oppression and the oppressed
From his early works, Freire considered the educational process as one of liberation that will allow people to move away from a Culture of Silenceand to have the experience and confidence to say their own word. To maintain this kind of oppression – Culture of Silence – the prevailing sectors in society maintain an educational system that Freire called ‘banking education’: deposits are made; rules are given; knowledge is memorized not built. All these kind of things maintain people in a state of alienation. To turn this around, his proposal is for a ‘liberating education’ that supports people to say their own word/world. This means, that people can express their dreams, desires, hopes, and to find ways to act on these. In this way, individual consciousness helps end the "culture of silence" in which the socially dispossessed internalize the negative images of themselves created and propagated by the oppressor in situations of extreme poverty.
7. Freire: The Subject Object Paradigm and Dialogue
The Point of Departure of Freire’s pedagogy is an ontology of praxis as a distinctive human quality. Humans are defined by a “separateness from and openness to the world” that distinguished them as beings of “relationship”, hence “not only in the world but with the world.”[18] For animals, there is no historical sense, no options or values, no “project” or “vocation”[19]. Thus, according to him, without projects, human action is not praxis…And not being of praxis, it is action ignorant both of its own process and its own aim. But such a person is a mere “object”, not a “subject” capable of making choices and transforming reality.[20]
Freire’s social ontology overtly operates within the framework of a “Humanist” and “Existentialist”.Marxian framework based on the subject-object distinction. As a consequence, Freire’s humanism potentially runs the risk of an essential conception of subject (he does refer to “man”) and a theory of praxis that suffers from the limitations of an individualistic philosophy of consciousness and the model of praxis as “Work”.
He then made actual use of the praxis model moves in a communicative direction that avoids most of the problems associated with essentialist form of humanism; hence, it is not based on a deterministic, theological model of human essence to be realized, as opposed to diverse possibilities to be created within the limits of “humanization”. This interpretation can be sustained by considering his characterization of the subject-object paradigm.
Given the communicative focus, Freire also refrain from reducing the peasant subject to the categories of “labor” or “production” in the classic Marxist sense. Though work is a dimension of praxis, it is subordinated to “action-reflection” as a communicative process of naming. As he puts it in Pedagogy of the Oppressed;
To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the “namers” as a problem and requires of them as new naming. Men are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.[21]
As a consequence, he argues that the dialogical is an ontological feature of social life, a necessary condition of its historicity:
We should understand liberating dialogue not as a technique, a mere technique, which we can use to help us get some results…on the contrary, dialogue must be understood as something taking part in the very historical nature of human beings. It is part of our historical progress in becoming human beings. That is, dialogue is a kind of necessary posture to the extent that humans have become more and more critically communicative beings. (Shor & Freire, 1987, pp. 98)[22]
Freire’s developmental ontology follows European structuralism in placing language at the origins of human experience. The theory of dialogical action clearly illustrated the distance of Freire from more traditional accounts in praxis philosophy given his stress on understanding the pragmatic origins of language as the basis for creative social action. He then further stated that dialogue is thus grounded in several fundamental forms of relationship that are ontologically the conditions of possibility of human society:
Founding itself upon love, humanity, and faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the dialoguers is the logical consequence. It would be a contradiction in terms of dialogue – loving, humble, and full of faith – did not produce this climate of mutual trust, which leads the dialoguers into ever closer partnership in the naming of the world…Nor yet can dialogue exist without hope.[23]
8. Ontological structure of Humanization
The transformative potential of words is linked to postulating hope as an “ontological need” and a necessary condition of struggle. On the one hand, hope is related to how not merely expres the interest of this struggle or that group, but is implicated in a “truth” that justifies the ethical claims of participants. On the other hand, describing hope as a need does not mean that it is always available to the consciousness of participants. Educational practices must seek to elicit hop: “to attempt to do without hope…is tantamount to denying that struggle one of its mainstays…Hope, as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice”[24]
Though Freire’s use of the term hope has theological origin, he refrains from anchoring it in an essentialist or teleological metaphysics. His emphasize can be seen in twofold. First, he always stresses the open-ended character of process of humanization. The means of express this are the paired terms humanization-dehumanization, where humanization is identified as ‘incompletion’. Second, this process of humanization is known not primarily by some necessary and fixed endpoint, but more importantly form its opposite dehumanization, defined as the denial of “Freedom”. For the oppressed, this condition is expressed negatively as the “Fear of Freedom”. The said freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift…freedom is not an ideal located outside of man…it is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.[25]
9. Education: Political Practice
In Freire’s view, education is never neutral. Every educational practice is political, just as political practice is educational. Educational practices are always political because they involve values, projects and utopian dreams that reproduce, legitimize, question and change the relationships of power obtaining in the society; education is never neutral, but is in favor either of domination or emancipation. Hence, he distinguishes between conservative educational practice and progressive educational practice:
Conservative educational practice seeks, in teaching the subject matter, to hide the reasons for a vast array of social problems; in progressive educational practice, the teaching of the subject-matter tends to reveal the reason for those problems.
The former leads to learners accommodating themselves, adapting to the given world, the latter seeks to unsettle the learners, challenging them so that they realize that the world is not finally given and can therefore be changed, transformed and re-invented.
Education by itself does not change the world, but it is impossible to do so without it. In consequence, a progressive educator must make an ethical, political commitment to building a fairer world. The educator sees history as possibility; must not lose the capacity for indignation, must not be indifferent or neutral towards injustice, oppression, discrimination and exploitation; must keep and encourage hope in the possibility of overcoming the unjust order, of imagining achievable utopias (“the viable unknown”).
Freire therefore sees reality not merely as the starting point for education but also as the point of arrival. If reality is not given, but in the process of being given, the purpose of liberating education is to help to bring about change, in accordance with visions of the future that go beyond the existence of oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited, excluders and excluded; it means overcoming economic, social, political and cultural obstacles preventing the development of learners as human beings. Critical educational practice, linked to transformative social practice, enables people to write their own history, that is to say, to overcome the adverse circumstances and factors that condition them.
This education for awareness inevitably became political "Conscientization" because it focused on the social dimensions of exploitation which gave rise to the existential contradictions experienced by the oppressed. Learning to identify the word brick for example, took place in the context of a discussion about bricklayers and their work.
10. Myth of school
The myth of the school as a democratic institution is still far too alive; this myth must be destroyed, and the process of selection of privileged elites must be shown to be no accident, but the actual aim of the system, even if well – hidden beneath the democratic rhetoric of equal opportunity for accession to the ruling class. Paulo Freire, as both pedagogue and philosopher, is one of the partisans of authentic democratization of educational opportunity as opposed to what he termes as the “Banking Concept” of Education.
In accordance with his pedagogical conception, he went further than certain classical models by replacing the concept of class by that of the cultural circle. Instead of ‘teacher’, he offered discussion leader or coordinator. Dialogue was substitued for the discursive lesson, participating group member for illiterage, homogeneous, limited programmes, codified in to learning units, for traditional programs and curricula.
In the course of the conversation in the “Cultural Circles”, topics for discussion were proposed by the groups themselves with the intention of drawing up a list of problems that could be used as items for debate. The various topics selected / choosen by the group were presented to the group through a dialogue to encourage all members of the group to participate. In the “Cultural Circles” the predominant notion of liberty gave meaning to educational experience, which cannot be effective, nor achieve its aims, without the free and conscious participation fo the adult illiterates.
11. Theory of Education
Freire regards knowing about reality not as an individual or merely intellectual act. Knowing the world is a collective, practical process involving different kinds of knowledge: consciousness, feeling, desire, will and physicality. Every educational practice must recognize what learners and teachers know about the topic, and must generate collective, dialogical experiences so that both sides develop new knowledge. The celebrated statement by Freire that “No one knows everything and no one knows nothing; no one educates anyone, no one educates himself alone, people educate each other, mediated by the world” needs to be read in this constructivist sense (“whoever teaches learns, and whoever learns teaches”) and not as a denial of the specifics of the active role that educators must play.
Knowing about the world is not merely an intellectual operation; it is a process linked to practice and to all human dimensions. This means not so much understanding and being aware of the world in order then to change it, as understanding the world from and through the practice of change, in which desires, values, will, emotions, imagination, intentions and dreams play a part.
His theory of education rests on the conviction that any man, however ignorant, is capable of looking ‘ciriticall’ at his world. What is important for the illiterate masses is not to learn how to read and write, but rather to discover how ‘to hold history in their hands’. They must learn to read, and at the same time to make history, instead of learning to to intone.
His educational conception is generated by critical reflection on the reflection on the condition of the illiterate. This is a perpetual dialectic according to which one should denounce in order to announce, keeping the transformation of the existential reality. As the oppressed gradually perceive their personal and social situation more clearly and critically, discerning its contradictions, discovering its causes and foreseeing its consequences, they become capable of transforming these facts into concrete action. Furthermore, in applying themselves to this transformation, the more clearly do they discover all implication of these facts and the more acute does their critical awarenes become. It is in this perspective that Freire avoids the use of ‘domestication’ or ‘personal promotion’. He prefers the term “Cultural Action”.
Freire accepts, as a definition of cultural action, the formula of Mao Tse-tung: ‘Progressing from emotional knowledge to a rational perception of reality.’ The transformation of existential reality is brought about by means of reflection, which is admiration of the object received. Reflection received will lead dialectically to a praxis, which is action for freedom provoked by reflection; this action in its turn will evoke new reflection, and so on… This process leads to “Conscientization” which is the development of critical reflection or the critical insertion of man into history and culture. Culture is conceived as the transforming action of man on nature.
All educational practice implies a theoretical stance on the educator’s part. This stance in turn implies sometimes more, sometimes less explicitly – an interpretation of man and the world. It could not be otherwise. The process of man’s orientation to the world involves not just an association of sense images as for animals, it involves above all, thought- language that is the possibility of the act of knowing through his praxis, by which man transforms reality. For man this process of orientation is an event wherein subjectivity and objectivity are united. Orientation if the world, so understood places the question of the purposes of action at the level of critical perception of reality.
The action of men without objectives whether the objectives are right or wrong, mythical or demythologized naive or critical, is not praxis, though it may be orientation in the world. And not being praxis, it is action ignorant of its own process and of its aim. The interrelation of the awareness of aim and of process is the basis for planning action which implies method, objectives and value options. Teaching adults to read and write must be understood in this way.
12. Awakening of Consciousness
Awareness is the essential attitude of man in and with the world. As consciouness is “consciousness of something”, the growth of consciouness is not always knowledg and, moreover, much time is often needed for the awakening of consciousness.
He thinks that man must establish a relationship with the world, and by an act of creation and recreation beginning in the world of nature, he must succeed in evolving a personal contribution a cultural action so that he can take his place in the world of culture. Man, in his relationship with reality, within reality, in order to pass successfully from the world of nature to that of culuture, creates a specific link of subject to object, resulting in the knowledge that will expressed through language. This link must be established by man, whether literate or not.
The first step in conscientization,therefore, consists of helping the illiterate to rediscover nature with new eyes and to distinguish himself from it. This stage is translated into practice by interpolating all the habits, routines and tradition that have been conserved. This interpolation leads to the second stage, in which man discovers the principal difference between nature and culture. By distinguishing himself from nature and recognizing himself as a subject, man discovers himself to be a creator of culture (mans’ contribution to nature).
Conscientization cleared the way for the voicing of social claims which are often produced by a state of oppression. To Freire, if any one became literate and joined a movement to organize syndicates, this was because they had discovered for themselves, that this was a legitimate means of defending their own interests and those of their work mates. This new element, a political awareness among the masses, began to engender oppositon. Although incapable of instigating an autonomous policy themselves, the oppressed were no longer prepared to passively accept the policies of others. Popular Education was developing a spirit of Questioning and Doubting.
One must not think, however, that learning to read and write precedes “conscientization,” or vice – versa. Conscientization occurs simultaneously with the literacy or post – literacy process. It must be so. In our educational method, the word is no something static or disconnected from men’s existential experience, but a dimension of their thought – language about the world. That is why, when they participate critically in analyzing the first generative words linked with their existential experience; when they focus on the syllabic families which result from that analysis; when they perceive the mechanism of the syllabic combinations of their language, the learners finally discover, in the various possibilities of combination, their own words. Little by little, as these possibilities multiply, the learners, through mastery of new generative words, expand both their vocabulary and their capacity for expression by the development of their creative imagination.
13. The Marginal as a Subject
According to Freire, in Brazilian society, the illiterate offers an almost perfect example of alienation. But illiteracy is not the whole cause of this alienation, only one aspect of it. The illiterate is not effectively master of himself but a proleterian in the true sense. His work is devoid of any creativity. His activity centres on the satisfaction of two basic instincts – survial and reporduction. In satisfying these, he is dependent on nature and her magical power.
The one who is unable to comprehend his potential, the illiterate cannot develop Unable to comprehend his potential, the illiterate cannot develop it. He is marginal with respect both to himself and to others. Time, for him, does not permit the exercise of his freedom: his life has no historical contour (Eg: Illeterates denied of their right to vote in Brazil).
The solution to their marginality is not to become “being inside of,” but men freeing themselves; for, in reality, they are not marginal to the structure, but oppressed men within it. Alienated men, they cannot overcome their dependency by “incorporation” into the very structure responsible for their dependency. There is no other road to humanization – theirs as well as everyone else’s – but authentic transformation of the dehumanizing structure.
From this view, the illiterate is no longer a person living on the fringe of society, a marginal man, but rather a representative of the dominated strata of society in conscious or unconscious opposition to those who, in the same structure, treat him as a thing (object).Thus, also, teaching men to read and write is no longer an inconsequential matter of ba, be, bi, etc. of memorizing an alienated word, but a difficult apprenticeship in naming the world.
In the first hypothesis, interpreting illiterates as men marginal to society, the literacy process reinforces the mystification of reality by keeping it opaque and by dulling the “empty consciousness” of the learner with innumerable alienating words and phrases. By contrast, in the second hypothesis – interpreting illiterates as men oppressed within the system – the literacy process, as cultural action for freedom, is an act of knowing in which the learner assumes the role ofknowing subjectin dialogue with the educator. For this very reason, it is a courageous endeavor to demythologize reality, a process through which men who had previously been submerged in reality begin to emerge in order to re-insert themselves in to it with critical awareness.
Therefore, the educator must strive for an ever greater clarity as to what, at times without his conscious knowledge, illumines the path of his action. Only in this way will he truly be able to assume the role of one of the subjects of this action and remain consistent in the process
14. The adult literacy process: an act of knowing
The adult literacy program demands from teachers and students an authentic dialogue. True dialogue unites subjects together in the cognition of a knowable subject which unites them. The learners must assume from the beginning the role of “creative subjects”. It is not a matter of memorizing and repeating given syllables, words, and phrases, but rather of reflecting critically on the process of reading and writing its, and on the profound significance of language.
The cognitive dimensions of the literacy process must include the relationships of men with their world. These relationships are the source of the dialectic between the products men achieve in transforming the world and the conditioning which these products in turn exercise on men. Learning to read and write out to be an opportunity for men to know what speaking the word really means: a human act implying reflection and action. As such it is a primordial human right and not the privilege of a few.
The act of knowing involves a dialectical movement which goes from action to reflection and from reflection upon action to a new action. For the learner to know what he did not know before, he must engage in an authentic process of abstraction by means of which he can reflect on the action-object whole or more generally on the forms of orientation in the world. In this process of abstraction, situations representative of how the learner orients himself in the world are proposed to him as the objects of his critique. As an event calling forth the critical reflection of both learners and educators, the literacy process must relate speaking the word to transforming reality and to man’s role in this transformation.
In the culture of silence the masses are “mute” that is they are prohibited from creatively taking part in the transformations of their society and therefore prohibited from “being”. Even if they can occasionally read and write, they were “taught” in humanitarian but not humanist literacy campaigns, they are nevertheless alienated from the power responsible for their silence. Overcome by the myths of this culture, including the myth of their own “natural inferiority”, they do not know that their action upon the world is also transforming. Prevented from having a “structural perception” of the facts involving them, they do not know that they cannot have a voice i.e. that they cannot exercise the right to participate consciously in socio-historical transformation of their society, because their work does not belong to them.
15. Education as a Practice of Freedom
Freire developed his conception of education as a practice of freedom from a critical reflection on various adult education projects he undertook in Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s. That is, the theory was part of a praxis, “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it”.[26] At the same time, Freire’s theory was based on an ontological argument that posited praxis as a central defining feature of human life and a necessary condition of freedom.
Freire contended that human nature is expressed through intentional, reflective, meaningful activity situated within dynamic historical and cultural contexts that shape and set limits on that activity. The praxis that defines human existence is marked by this historicity, this dialectical interplay between the ways in which history and culture make people even while people are making that very history and culture. Human historicity enables the realization of freedom, opening up choices among various ways of being within any given situation. He argued that the struggle to be free, to be human and make history and culture from the given situation, is an inherent possibility in the human condition. The struggle is necessary because the situation contains not only this possibility for humanization, but also for dehumanization. Dehumanization makes people objects of history and culture, and denies their capacity to also be self-defining subjects creating history and culture. These dehumanizing forces reside in both the material and psychic conditions of persons and situations, so freedom requires people to engage in a kind of historico-cultural political psychoanalysis.
He further argues that overcoming the limits of situations is ultimately an educational enterprise that he calls a practice of freedom, a permanent form of cultural re-creation that enables the fullest possible expression of human existence. Further, Freire holds that democratic socialism provides the necessary conditions for each person to achieve his or her freedom, to become fully human. Freire follows a long tradition in philosophy when he links a particular understanding of human nature with a conception of the proper formation of both self and society. Within this tradition, some type of education and moral life mediates the cultivation of human nature into ideal forms of individual and social existence. In other words, human nature alone cannot produce the good life, but must be shaped and nurtured into specific forms that enable the realization of what is best and most fruitful for a community.
Education draws out these possibilities from human nature, and at the same time instills a moral order capable of resisting impulses that threaten the attainment of what is good for each person and the community. Education thus is essential because without it, human life would not rise to the level of existence but would rather remain at the level of instinct and basic survival needs. As Freire put it
I cannot understand human beings as simply living. I can understand them only as historically, culturally, and socially existing . . . I can understand them only as beings who are makers of their “way,” in the making of which they lay themselves open to or commit themselves to the “way” that they make and that therefore remakes them as well.[27]
Language, culture, history, and community are dependent on education, on freedom and the capacity to create forms (“ways”) of life. Practical reason and knowledge are central in the work of ethical and political formation, not so much as deliberative tools but as integral to the actions creating culture and history.
Freire built his theory not so much on the continuities between human beings and the rest of the animal world, but on the discontinuities. Freire’s humanistic view reverses the emphasis and attempts to integrate deliberative and communicative actions in their particular and distinctive role in producing culture and history. For Freire, what is crucially important is that humans are animals that operate not only from reflex, habit, or even intelligent creative response; they are animals that exist meaningfully in and with the world of history and culture that humans themselves have produced.
He thinks that if we fail to grasp how the capacity for historical, cultural, linguistic praxis makes us different from the rest of the organic and inorganic world, we will fail to be able to transform society toward a vision of justice and democracy. Freire grounded his arguments in ontological interpretations of human existence and assumed this as necessary to orient any successful educational practice intended to enable human flourishing, though they had somewhat different interpretations through which to frame their theories.
For Freire, the essentially defining ontological feature of being human is that people produce history and culture, even as history and culture produce them, and thus both the theory and application of education as a practice of freedom “take the people’s historicity as their starting point”[28]. The dialectical interplay between existence and context reveals that any given situation, including one’s identity and self-understanding, is not a necessity. Situations and identities congeal in the course of time under the press of history and culture, but most importantly also under the influence of human action, and they are thus susceptible to human intervention, to the power of freedom. The ontological truth of historicity thus not only defines human nature for Freire, but grounds his theory of liberation and provides the opening for concrete efforts to transform oppressive realities.
The historical, cultural, and social background shapes the present context, from the privacy of family life to the public spheres of the state and mass media. It establishes the field within which free action can move, and even outlines possible psychological states and the most intimate aspects of a self, from identity to feelings and desires. The situational constraints that prevent freedom are thus also always internal and not only external to individuals. Human beings inhabit, and are inhabited by, the structures, institutions, social relations, and self-understandings that comprise a people’s culture.
The practice of freedom, as a critical reflexive praxis, must grasp the outward direction, meaning, and consequences of action, and also its inward meaning as the realization and articulation of a self. Therefore, education as a practice of freedom must include a kind of historico-cultural, political psychoanalysis that reveals the formation of the self and its situation in all their dynamic and dialectical relations. People then become critically conscious of themselves as the very sorts of creatures that produce (and are produced by) their culture and history, and to realize their freedom they become engaged in liberatory acts that challenge the limits (internal and external) of particular situations that maintain oppression or injustice. Human freedom is not outside particular situations but is geared to them. While the context “programs” people to see and experience their situation in a particular way, it does not “determine” how people are or can be.[29] People are not free to choose the time, place, meanings, standards, and so on, into which they have been thrown by their birth, yet they are able to take up specific stances within that context and make of it what they may. Free action strives to go beyond the given reality to posit and create a new future through effort and struggle, a future that cannot be simply declared into existence but must be achieved.
Freire argued that liberation, oppression, and their interrelation are contingent facts, while from an ontological point of view, human historicity marks precisely the possibility to choose one way of life or another. “Just so, human nature, as it generates itself in history, does not contain, as part and parcel of itself, being more, does not contain humanization, except as the vocation whose contrary is distortion in history” (Freire, 1994b, p. 99; emphasis in original). Freire deploys the theological notion of vocation to build a link between particular contingent choices, for humanization, and universal human ontological capacities. He wants to invoke a type of authenticity that distinguishes a way of living that expresses the deepest, most primordial aspects of human existence. This vocation embodies freedom, and through humanizing action people understand and become critically intentional about their creation of culture and history. Inauthentic ways of being distort this ontological essence of being human, and deny some people the possibility and right of being selfdefining, self-realizing, and self-determining. This denial defines dehumanization or oppression.
[W]e are this being—a being of ongoing, curious, search, which “steps back” from itself and from the life it leads. . . . [W]e live the life of a vocation, a calling, to humanization, and . . . in dehumanization . . . we live the life of a distortion of the call—never another calling.[30]
Here Freire is extending his argument about liberation, for by conjoining the theological notions of calling and vocation, he emphasizes the particularity of each individual response to the universal demands of the human condition. He maintained that humanization is about concrete choices in history, and only those certain choices are true to our most fundamental nature: “Humanization [is the] ontological vocation of human being”
On the other hand, the oppressed class faces daily the impositions of the dehumanizing systems of an unjust society. By refusing to accede to its subordinated position and working to understand the raison d’être of its structural formation, the oppressed class has an advantage in intervening strategically to overcome the limits in the context.[31] Given the ontological capacity for intentionally directing cultural re-formation toward humanizing ends, liberation struggle is always a possible prerogative of the oppressed.
For the oppressed, as individuals and as a class, to discern the truth of their nature, identities, and situation requires the achievement of a kind of knowledge that reaches behind the way things are to grasp the way things came to be. Here we see the connection between Freire’s ontological and epistemological arguments. Epistemically, the oppressed are faced with the challenge of knowing systematically and determinately what is already known experientially and uncritically; that is, the oppressed must make good sense out of common sense. The knowledge that enables such a critique of the situation, ideology, and the self, must include an understanding of the dialectical, permanent tension between consciousness and the world, between subjectivity and objectivity. For Freire, this interplay does not undermine knowledge or certainty, but only makes the demand for methods of critical analysis more emphatic and makes the pragmatic tests of knowing more telling.
Critical consciousness is mindful of the relationships among consciousness, action, and world, and grasps the why of the world in the constructive nature of knowing. Freire argued that knowledge was not a state of mind or a type of warranted proposition that could be settled in the manner of a mathematical equation, but rather it was a way of being that reflected the deepest human capacities for producing culture and history. Critical knowledge enfolds the knower and the known in a dialectical unity embodied through the creative powers of existence.
As people take hold of the indeterminateness of history and the openness of the future, their hopes and dreams of a more just life become realized as the fulfillment of an “ontological need”. Striving to meet these primordial human needs, and wielding “truth as an ethical quality of the struggle” the politics of liberation harnesses the ontological and epistemological foundations of existence to overcome the limits of oppression and build a democratic socialism that sustains diverse communities. “[W]e, as existent, outfit ourselves to engage in the struggle in quest of and in defense of equality of opportunity, by the very fact that, as living beings, we are radically different from one another”.[32]
Freire understood how fragile and contingent this struggle had to be, and accepted that no guarantees could warrant the humanistic reinvention of citizenship. Conscientization is thus a mode of life always in the process of becoming, one that enacts ongoing cultural action for liberation that accepts an ethic of the “fineness of the striving” as “a job to do in history”. This ethic indicates precisely the importance of education as a practice of freedom for a successful revolution because it enables the ongoing reinvention and recreation of democratic culture.
This overview of Freire’s argumentative structure for his theory of liberation and education identified the foundational interrelationships among his ontological, epistemological, ethical, and political analyses. Freire argued that education as a practice of freedom is actually a necessary aspect of being fully human. Without this kind of praxis, human beings cease to be the “makers of their way” and they become simply what history makes of them.
16. Arguments and Applications
16.1. The Pedagogy: Indian Context
Not to deny the fact that Paulo Freire’s approach to educational reform through “Critical Awareness” and his pedagogy is the need of an hour in the context of India. Besides, I am also convinced with a belief that within the pedagogical endeavor lies the potential for “Social Transformation” and “Social Change”.
Access to education and the so-called quality varies from east to west and north to south within the so-called nation. And, that the access a person has to different ways of seeing and understanding the world and the reality is intricately connected to the opportunity s/he possesses to act on that reality. Conversely, those who are denied the means to think about; to choose and decide, and understand the world in which they live are robbed not only of words but also of power to act or enact change.[33]
Herein lies the potential that education can offer, to equip people/one with access to ways of thinking about the world in order to be able to transforms it through critical education.[34] The education which will only equips one to understand the gap between the ways the world is and the way the world should be, the reasons for this gap, and the means to act to overcome this gap. However, just taking an ideological stand and not reaching to the level of transformation – the level of praxis, will only prolong and maintain the gap, or in other words the status-quo.
My memory is often painted by the picture of a system that is largely characterized by teacher-centered classrooms, where students are generally discouraged from asking questions but encouraged to memorize information, focus on examinations where one will have to regurgitate this information, knowledge are measured, quality over quantity, prejudice among the teacher, etc. This practice has largely enslaved a significant part of the population through educational experiences.
Thus, educational reform through critical consciousness in an attempt to erase one of the few spots of the exclusory education system of India is a must and is relevant to the approach of Paulo Freire.
16.2. Education: A tool for Oppression
As noted, Jotiba Phule (1827-1890) was a pioneer in Indian society in launching a historical-materialist critique of caste and Brahminism, and in launching a subsequent movement for the liberation of India‘s masses from caste oppression. One of India‘s prominent 19th century social reformers, he saw Brahminism as an ―ideological and institutional system of monopolizing knowledge and power by a particular class which uses these to exclude, divide and dominate other groups in society having a close relationship between knowledge and power, and saw education as a key tool used by Brahmins to perpetuate their hegemony.
During that time, stress were made on the need to democratize education, based on the belief that the illiteracy and educational disabilities of the lower castes due to their social and material conditions were being reinforced by the power structure of the Brahmins as well as the Imperial government. Witnessing the exclusion from knowledge as the main cause behind women‘s subordination as well, and education as the main resource to liberate them thereby establishing the first girls‘school in India in 1848, in his native city of Pune.
As clear, the Dominant groups in India have used education as a tool of oppression not only by withholding access to education in general, but also access to critical literacy in particular within education. They are the one who created and rewrite history and its ill effect are still in the limelight of the society. Classical example can be that the North-East states of India are never included in the Indian History and as well in the movement for Independence.
As stated, the first to the liberation of the lower castes and tribes from the domination will be to bring out of the ideologies of Brahmanism, for which access to knowledge was an essential prerequisite. This will then be followed by an attitudinal change leading to a kind of Cultural Revolution for social change, or social transformation in Paulo Freire’s term.
16.3. Media-centered entertainment-Education Intervention
Media-centered entertainment-Education Intervention are seldom designed, owned and operated by the people themselves. Moreover, most media initiatives are designed and implemented by the so-called “Experts” for a specific target audience or group thereby leaving little room for the dynamic dialogic pedagogy as proposed by Paulo Freire. The one-way nature of mass media interventions, as also the desire of development officials and agency to reach large audiences with time-bound implementation, relegate the relatively smaller-reach theater based/mass media interventions to the sidelines of most development programs and the participation of the target group (the masses in general).
The dialogical pedagogy as proposed by Paulo Freire can be supported for more consciously adding participatory intervention in the field of theater based/mass media. This would give enormous upliftment of the people in terms of their participation and importantly to transform entertainment-education interventions from being one-way (monologue) in to a two-way process (dialogue) between the audience (the general mass/target group) and the actors. It should necessary entail that the mass media-based entertainment-education initiatives should go hand-in-hand with engaging participatory initiatives and each supplementing the other. As the field of entertainment-education initiatives continues to evolve, grow and re-invent itself, this participatory strategies for empowering the masses can yield positive results. Classical example can be initiatives for community radio or video.
17. Footnotes
[1] Cited in , Literacy Discussion, Spring 1974
[2] It is through which “man, not as recipient but as a knowing subject, reaches a deeper awareness both of the socio-cultural reality on which life is built and his ability to transform that reality.”
[3] Cited in Freire, P., (1970)
[4]The study of the effects of perceptions, beliefs, and intentions on human consciousness.
[5] Subject of examination
[6] Freire, P., (1970)
[7] Cited in Frankenstein, M & Powell, A.B.
[8] Freire, P. (1982),
[9] Freire, P., (1973), pp. 101
[10] Freire, P., 1970, pp. 35-36
[11] Freire, (1970)
[12] Glass, R.D., (2001)
[13] Freire, P., (1970)
[14] Freire, P., (1972), pp. 52
[15] Freire, P., (1973)
[16] Freire, P., (1970) pp. 69-70
[17] Freire, P., (1970) pp. 26
[18] Freire, P., (1973), pp. 03
[19] Freire, P., (1970), pp. 06
[20] Freire, P., (1973), pp. 04
[21] Freire, P., (1970), pp. 76
[22] Cited in Morrow, R.A. and Torres, C.A., (2002)
[23] Freire, P., (1970), pp. 79-80
[24] Freire, P., (1970)
[25] Ibid., pp.31
[26] Freire, P., (1970), pp. 36
[27]Freire, P., (1973)
[28] Freire, P., (1982)
[29] Freire, P., (1982)
[30] Ibid., (1973)
[31] Freire, P. (1982)
[32] Freire, P., (1973)
[33] Reality of the Indian Educational System including TISS
[34] In the same line to what Paulo Freire proposed for educational reform
18. References
18.1. Articles
18.2. Books
1. The Thinker
2. Rationale
3. Relating to self
4. The Social Context
5. Epistemological and Ontological Premises
6. Key Concepts and Issues in Freirean Education
6.1. Philosophical Assumptions in Freirean thought
6.2. Conscientization
6.3. Dialogue
6.4. Liberation
6.5. Literacy ‘Method’
6.6. Oppression and the oppressed
7. Freire: The Subject Object Paradigm and Dialogue
8. Ontological structure of Humanization
9. Education: Political Practice
10. Myth of school
11. Theory of Education
12. Awakening of Consciousness
13. The Marginal as a Subject
14. The adult literacy process: an act of knowing
15. Education as a Practice of Freedom
16. Arguments
16.1. The Pedagogy: Indian Context
16.2. Education: A tool for Oppression
16.3. Media-centered entertainment-Education Intervention
18. References
1. The Thinker
The objectives of literacy cannot be separated from those of education “as practice of freedom”. Learning the alphabet or the three R’s can be meaningful only when it constitutes a stage in the process of “conscientizacao”, only when it enables men to take their first steps along the road towards their humanization. In such context, the Individual with the greater store of sheer “knowledge” is not basically different from an illiterate. The alphabet, like any other tool for reading the world, is nothing but a technical instrument. The main problem for man is how to perceive and use this instrument as an aid to his liberation, to his passage from state of “primary consciousness” to one of critical consciousness.
Paulo Freire foremost contribution to literacy has been to show the irrelevance of a formal, aimless, “content-less” approach to the subject. To a greater extent than any other contemporary thinker, he has succeeded in identifying the true dimensions of literacy and its place in man’s process of self-realization.
Paulo Freires’ literacy method is the application of his philosophy derived from his conception of man and man’s role in the social order. This philosophy, in turn, is rooted in his experience of the environment in which he grew to manhood – North East of Brazil, a geographical expression with political and social overtones. In order to comprehend his approach to literacy, it is also important to know his philosophy and the social situation in which it was concieved and to which it relates. His fundamental thesis to be noted is “the the purpose of education as the formation of man as a creative and critical being”.
2. Rationale
· To develop an understanding of critical education process
· To trace the impact of reflexive as a means to emerge as a ‘Free’ human being
· To decipher the uses of ‘dialogue’ as a means of transformation
3. Relating to self
The proposed method given by Freire's on ‘Popular Education’ could be noted to have two distinct and sequential moments, these are as listed below:
The first involves becoming conscious of the reality that the individual lives as an oppressed being subject to the decisions that the oppressors impose;
The second refers to the initiative of the oppressed to fight and emancipate themselves from the oppressors.
It is also clear that Freire does not believe that the lived situation consists only of a simple awareness of reality. Instead, he believes that the individual has a historical need to fight against the status that dwells within him. The efforts of the oppressed become focused and concrete through the type of learning that school really should give them, instead of encouraging them to adapt to their reality, as the oppressors themselves do.
In the relationships they establish, the oppressed appear to be the instigators of violence, even when the conditions and events that they have experienced up to that point incite them to try to modify their status. Nevertheless, in the eyes of the oppressors, such fights are canonized as unnecessary violence or utopian dreams, and not as the ideas of a revolutionary who is known for the ideological commitment that he establishes with his peers, rather than for the battles he carries out. These circumstances occasionally provoke a mistaken horizontal violence between the oppressed themselves in their efforts to achieve emancipation.
Furthermore, the oppressors accuse those who oppose them of being disobliging, irresponsible, depraved and responsible for their own situation, despite the fact that even if these adjectives do sometimes apply, they are really a response to being oppressed and are ultimately the result of the exploitation to which these people have been subjected. The situation gets even worse when the oppressed accept this reality and adapt to it without questioning or even attempting to change it. This generates in the oppressed an emotional dependence that seems irrevocable. It is necessary, therefore, that these individuals get to know themselves in order to begin the fight for their inexorable emancipation through ‘Critical Consciousness’.
4. The Social Context
Education, being a subsystem of society, necessarily reflects the main features of that society. It would be vain to hope for a rational, humane education in an unjust society.
- Unesco. “Learning to be; the world of education today and tomorrow”. Paris, 1972. P. 60[1]
Paulo Freire was a middle-class family in a region beset by poverty. That Freire’s mind and future vocation were shaped by the social situation into which he was born and in which he grew to manhood seem evident. Schooling in Recife was a privilege enjoyed by a minority dominating the social and economic institutions of society, where as the majority (the oppressed) lived in what Freire terms a “culture of silence”, condemned to passivity.
In Recife, Freire completed his university studies in the philosophy of education and began an academic career. The course of that career was determined by the concern that dominated his thoughts and action. His purpose was to work out an educational method that could speak to and make speak those who lived in silence and accepted ignorance and poverty as their assigned lot in life. To them he proclaimed a “pedagogy of freedom” founded upon an awareness of both self and society. Basing himself upon a study of Brazilian history and the writings of Marx, Sartre, Fromm and Althusser, Freire stressed the need for literacy teaching based on his concept of “Conscientization”.[2]
According to him, the myth of the school as a democratic institution is still far too alive; this myth must be destroyed, and the process of selection of privileged elites must be shown to be no accident, but the actual aim of the system, even if well-hidden beneath the democratic rhetoric of equal opportunity for accession to the ruling class. Paulo Freire, as both pedagogue and philosopher, is one of the partisans of authentic democratization of educational opportunity. Although his ideas on the new concept of education in general, and on adult literacy in particular, clearly reflect the disturbed situation in Brazilian society, his overall view of education is nevertheless, to some extent, valid for all oppressed people of the third world.
Paulo Freire’s experimented his pedagogy date back to 1962, at his birth place, Recife and in Joao Pessoa. He set up an important organization for education and popular culture, the ‘Cultural Center,’ in which ‘cultural circles’ took the place of traditional classes. He instituted group discussions, to promote the analysis of existential situations or action itself inspired by such analysis. After six months of experimentation, he applied the same active method to adult literacy, thereby transforming the traditional approach. In the ‘cultural circles’ the predominant notion of liberty gave meaning to educational experience, which cannot be effective, nor achieve its aim, without the free and conscious participation of the adult illiterates.
Conscientization cleared the way for the voicing of social claims which are often produced by a state of oppression. This new element, a political awareness among the masses, began to engender opposition. The oppressed were no longer prepared to passively accept the policies of others. Popular education was developing a spirit of questioning and doubting. In the domain of education, Freire achieved a unity of theory and action that was his purpose. As an educator, engrossed in the problem of illiteracy, he addressed himself to the most oppressed classes. He used his own experiences and those of the people as the basis for his pedagogy in which the the teacher and the taught, equally deserving of freedom and capable of criticism and judgement, share and apprenticeship in the development of an awareness of the situation in which they live. His pedagogy is fundamentally anti-authoritarian.
5. Epistemological and Ontological premises
Paulo Freire insists that knowledge must be democratically available to everyone in order to politically transform society through social justice, and this has been his sharp epistemological approach. This aim is achieved when the noetic[4] process becomes a critical reading of reality, a reflection in action which is applied so that traditional ways of thinking constitute a permanent subject for reinterpretation. Knowledge is perceived in Freirean epistemology as a medium of communication between human beings, a process in which there is no permanently unaltered noetic data but rather an ongoing dialectic strategically pursued through contradiction and constantly aimed at radically redefining how people can coexist in a state of social equality.
According to this view, knowledge offers everyone the possibility to think more critically about the world so as to act on it in a more humanizing way. It is ideally a liberating methodology aimed at reshaping the socio-political power structures so as to create a culture of freedom. The teacher is depicted in this account as a political pedagogue who encourages students to "read reality[5]" in a critical way in order to radically transform it. Such issues as social accountability and ideology are central to Freirean epistemology. This further means the breaking down of dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity, between action and reflection, between teaching and learning, and between knowledge and its applications.[6]
The epistemology of Paulo Freire is in direct opposition to the dominant educational paradigm of positivism.[7] The problem, however, is that positivists claim that knowledge, though a product of human consciousness, is itself also neutral, value-free, and objective. Further, learning is the discovery of static facts and their subsequent description and classification. In contrast to the dominant educational paradigm of positivism, Freire insists that knowledge is not static; that there is no dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity or between reflection and action; and that knowledge is not neutral. Therefore, Knowledge is not fixed permanently in the abstract properties of objects, but is a process where gaining existing knowledge and producing new knowledge are “two moments in the same cycle”[8]
Embedded in this notion is the recognition that knowledge requires subjects; objects to be known are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Knowledge…necessitates the curious presence of subjects confronted with the world. It requires their transforming action on reality. It demands a constant searching…In the learning process the only person who really learns is s/he who re-invents that learning.[9]
Knowledge, therefore, is a negotiated product emerging from the interaction of human consciousness and reality; it is produced as we, individually and collectively, search and try to make sense of our world. Necessarily, then, the human act of sense-making implies the subjectivity of our descriptions of the world. However, contrary to the view that subjective statements contain no connection to objective reality and that there exists objective statements about the world, unpolluted by subjective perspectives, Freire insists that subjectivity and objectivity are not separate ways of knowing.
To deny the importance of subjectivity in the process of transforming the world and history is…to admit the impossible: a world without people.…On the other hand, the denial of objectivity in analysis or action…postulates people without a world…[and] denies action itself by denying objective reality.[10] Because of the unity between subjectivity and objectivity, people cannot completely know particular aspects of the world—no knowledge is finished or infallible. As humans change, so does the knowledge they produce.
Through constant search and dialogue in a dialectical manner, reflection leads to new action. That is, action and reflection are not separate moments of knowing. For, on the one hand, reflection that is not ultimately accompanied by action to transform the world is meaningless, alienating rhetoric. On the other hand, action that is not critically analyzed cannot sustain progressive change. Without reflection, people cannot learn from each other’s successes and mistakes; particular activities need to be evaluated in relation to larger collective goals. Only through praxis - reflection and action dialectically interacting to re-create our perception and description of reality - can people become subjects in control of organizing their society. In Freire’s view, people produce knowledge to humanize themselves. Overcoming dehumanization involves resolving the fundamental contradiction of our epoch: domination against liberation.
Further coupling his ontological and epistemological positions, Freire argued that the conditions that promote freedom also produce the human capacity for critical knowledge. He translated these conditions into communicative and linguistic metaphors that prescribed certain methods for the educational dimensions of his theory of liberation. Central to these metaphors is his notion of dialogue. Knowledge becomes founded on dialogue characterized by participatory, open communication focused around critical inquiry and analysis, linked to intentional action seeking to reconstruct the situation (including the self) and to evaluated consequences. The dialogue that distinguishes critical knowledge and cultural action for freedom is not some kind of conversation, it is a social praxis. To be liberatory, it must respect the everyday language, understanding, and way of life of the knowers, and it must seek to create situations in which they can more deeply express their own hopes and intentions. Dialogue enables the oppressed to “speak a true word” and overcome their “silencing”[11] not simply at the communicative or linguistic levels, but also in regard to their forming culture, history, and their own identities. This cultural action for liberation reveals the profound importance of language for a people’s being, knowing, and capacity to produce reality.
Conscientization is the term Freire used to capture the complex ontological, epistemological, and ethical-political features of education as a practice of freedom.[12] His analysis placed cultural formation, knowledge creation, and linguistic practices as central to situations and identity and thus also as necessarily central to revolutionary (or any other) social change. Since situations are permeated with defining axes of power and authority that establish standards and norms in favor of some rather than others, liberation entails a people’s struggle to be, to feel, to know, and to speak for themselves.
Conscientization is thus a mode of life always in the process of becoming, one that enacts ongoing cultural action for liberation that accepts an ethic of the “fineness of the striving” as “a job to do in history”.[13] This ethic indicates precisely the importance of education as a practice of freedom for a successful revolution because it enables the ongoing reinvention and recreation of democratic culture.
He further emphasizes that without praxis, human beings cease to be the “makers of their way” and they become simply what history makes of them. For Freire, to be human means to make and remake one’s self through making history and culture, to struggle against the limiting conditions that prevent such creative action, and to dream into existence a world where every person has this opportunity and responsibility.
6. Key Concept and Issues in Freirean Education
6.1. Philosophical Assumptions in Freirean thought
At the centre of Freire’s world-view, is his belief that humans have an ontological vocation to become more fully human, which is through Human consciousness. He believes that the structures of capitalist societies are founded on relations of exploitation of certain groups or individuals by other. Prevailing historical conditions in capitalist societies makes it difficult, therefore, for exploited individuals and groups to pursue their ontological vocation is a must.
Unlike Marx, Freire does not envisage on ideologically sound and just society in the future in which people can experience freedom equally. However, human liberation, or what he calls “Humanization”, is a goal that can never be fully achieved because it requires an ongoing encounter with reality, which is itself permanently changing.[14] As the oppressed humans strive towards greater humanization, “dialogue” between individual and society is important. And, mutual conscientization between individual and individual in an act through critical consciousness is also equally important.
“Critical Consciousness” allows man to emerge as a free human being. It allows him to perceive the world as it is, relate to it, and question it. It enables him to choose, and to commit himself to the choice he made to accept responsibility and, together with his fellow men, to learn how to reach a higher degree of authentic freedom. In other words, critical consciousness focuses on achieving an in-depth understanding of the world, allowing for the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions.
Critical consciousness also includes taking action against the oppressive elements in one's life that are illuminated by that understanding. Thus, for Paulo Freire, the task of education is, therefore, to bring about the most favorable conditions to enable man, and society as a whole, to reach this state of critical awareness.
6.2. Conscientization
Conscientization is the process of learning to perceive social, political, and economic oppressions in society and to take actions against them. It is the process of developing a critical consciousness. After overcoming dehumanization, identification with the oppressor, and “fear of freedom”, the individual can develop a critical consciousness through dialogue and communication, change in the program content of education, and use of specific pedagogical techniques.[15] Simply put Conscientization means “to make aware” or “awakening of consciousness” or “critical consciousness”.
Freire always uses the concept of Conscientization to refer not only to the knowledge that a group of people have, but, beyond this, consciousness is formed in a process of investigation and changes – deriving from it – are made in their own reality. In this process, each person, through dialogue, meets with other people and can move from a magical consciousness to a critical one. We can say that Conscientization is a process and not a stage. In this path, Freire names different steps: magical consciousness where fate and inevitability are dominant in people’s understanding, naïve consciousness which involves some understanding of the context in which events occur but the analysis is shallow, and finally critical consciousness where deeper and contextual analysis are evident.
Conscientization is more than merely ‘consciousness raising’ it implies also the need to act on what is known. But the most important element that can stress is that, Conscientization is forged in everyday liberating actions that allow people not only to be conscious about their alienation, but changing the situation that are the cause of it.
6.3. Dialogue
According to Freire (1970), dialogue is the encounter between people to name and change the world. Dialogue emerges with critical consciousness. It is an act of creation, not of domination.
He further explains;
. . . dialogue is the encounter in which the united reflection and action of the dialoguers are addressed to the world which is to be transformed and humanized, the dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person’s “deposition” ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be “consumed” by the discussants.[16]
Dialogue is the core of Freire’s philosophy and his method. Dialogue guarantees communication and establishes education as a cooperative process characterized by social interactions between people in which new knowledge is created through joining and sharing the knowledge that people have. For this, dialogue as an educational journey considers people as social human beings and not as recipients of knowledge. It is the essence of liberating education. Dialogue is, in this sense, the starting point to edify a liberating education.
6.4. Liberation
Freire (1970) maintains that liberation is the process by which both oppressor and oppressed find freedom. He elaborates:
. . . Sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), it become in turn oppressors of the oppressor, but rather restorers of the humanity of both . . . only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both..[17]
6.5. Literacy ‘Method’
According to Freire, education is not a way merely to learn letters, words or sentences. The starting point is always people’s real situations and experiences shared through dialogue. From this point of departure, people can build the meanings of their own surrounding world. The literacy method makes sense within the bounds of a concrete territory – physical and symbolic. People in literacy processes become learners of their own everyday life. In this sense, to ‘say their world’ is to speak about the world in cooperation with others through dialogue. In Freire’s ‘method’ words are more than a simple skill. Words are doors opened to understand the world and change it.
6.6. Oppression and the oppressed
From his early works, Freire considered the educational process as one of liberation that will allow people to move away from a Culture of Silenceand to have the experience and confidence to say their own word. To maintain this kind of oppression – Culture of Silence – the prevailing sectors in society maintain an educational system that Freire called ‘banking education’: deposits are made; rules are given; knowledge is memorized not built. All these kind of things maintain people in a state of alienation. To turn this around, his proposal is for a ‘liberating education’ that supports people to say their own word/world. This means, that people can express their dreams, desires, hopes, and to find ways to act on these. In this way, individual consciousness helps end the "culture of silence" in which the socially dispossessed internalize the negative images of themselves created and propagated by the oppressor in situations of extreme poverty.
7. Freire: The Subject Object Paradigm and Dialogue
The Point of Departure of Freire’s pedagogy is an ontology of praxis as a distinctive human quality. Humans are defined by a “separateness from and openness to the world” that distinguished them as beings of “relationship”, hence “not only in the world but with the world.”[18] For animals, there is no historical sense, no options or values, no “project” or “vocation”[19]. Thus, according to him, without projects, human action is not praxis…And not being of praxis, it is action ignorant both of its own process and its own aim. But such a person is a mere “object”, not a “subject” capable of making choices and transforming reality.[20]
Freire’s social ontology overtly operates within the framework of a “Humanist” and “Existentialist”.Marxian framework based on the subject-object distinction. As a consequence, Freire’s humanism potentially runs the risk of an essential conception of subject (he does refer to “man”) and a theory of praxis that suffers from the limitations of an individualistic philosophy of consciousness and the model of praxis as “Work”.
He then made actual use of the praxis model moves in a communicative direction that avoids most of the problems associated with essentialist form of humanism; hence, it is not based on a deterministic, theological model of human essence to be realized, as opposed to diverse possibilities to be created within the limits of “humanization”. This interpretation can be sustained by considering his characterization of the subject-object paradigm.
Given the communicative focus, Freire also refrain from reducing the peasant subject to the categories of “labor” or “production” in the classic Marxist sense. Though work is a dimension of praxis, it is subordinated to “action-reflection” as a communicative process of naming. As he puts it in Pedagogy of the Oppressed;
To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the “namers” as a problem and requires of them as new naming. Men are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.[21]
As a consequence, he argues that the dialogical is an ontological feature of social life, a necessary condition of its historicity:
We should understand liberating dialogue not as a technique, a mere technique, which we can use to help us get some results…on the contrary, dialogue must be understood as something taking part in the very historical nature of human beings. It is part of our historical progress in becoming human beings. That is, dialogue is a kind of necessary posture to the extent that humans have become more and more critically communicative beings. (Shor & Freire, 1987, pp. 98)[22]
Freire’s developmental ontology follows European structuralism in placing language at the origins of human experience. The theory of dialogical action clearly illustrated the distance of Freire from more traditional accounts in praxis philosophy given his stress on understanding the pragmatic origins of language as the basis for creative social action. He then further stated that dialogue is thus grounded in several fundamental forms of relationship that are ontologically the conditions of possibility of human society:
Founding itself upon love, humanity, and faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the dialoguers is the logical consequence. It would be a contradiction in terms of dialogue – loving, humble, and full of faith – did not produce this climate of mutual trust, which leads the dialoguers into ever closer partnership in the naming of the world…Nor yet can dialogue exist without hope.[23]
8. Ontological structure of Humanization
The transformative potential of words is linked to postulating hope as an “ontological need” and a necessary condition of struggle. On the one hand, hope is related to how not merely expres the interest of this struggle or that group, but is implicated in a “truth” that justifies the ethical claims of participants. On the other hand, describing hope as a need does not mean that it is always available to the consciousness of participants. Educational practices must seek to elicit hop: “to attempt to do without hope…is tantamount to denying that struggle one of its mainstays…Hope, as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice”[24]
Though Freire’s use of the term hope has theological origin, he refrains from anchoring it in an essentialist or teleological metaphysics. His emphasize can be seen in twofold. First, he always stresses the open-ended character of process of humanization. The means of express this are the paired terms humanization-dehumanization, where humanization is identified as ‘incompletion’. Second, this process of humanization is known not primarily by some necessary and fixed endpoint, but more importantly form its opposite dehumanization, defined as the denial of “Freedom”. For the oppressed, this condition is expressed negatively as the “Fear of Freedom”. The said freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift…freedom is not an ideal located outside of man…it is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.[25]
9. Education: Political Practice
In Freire’s view, education is never neutral. Every educational practice is political, just as political practice is educational. Educational practices are always political because they involve values, projects and utopian dreams that reproduce, legitimize, question and change the relationships of power obtaining in the society; education is never neutral, but is in favor either of domination or emancipation. Hence, he distinguishes between conservative educational practice and progressive educational practice:
Conservative educational practice seeks, in teaching the subject matter, to hide the reasons for a vast array of social problems; in progressive educational practice, the teaching of the subject-matter tends to reveal the reason for those problems.
The former leads to learners accommodating themselves, adapting to the given world, the latter seeks to unsettle the learners, challenging them so that they realize that the world is not finally given and can therefore be changed, transformed and re-invented.
Education by itself does not change the world, but it is impossible to do so without it. In consequence, a progressive educator must make an ethical, political commitment to building a fairer world. The educator sees history as possibility; must not lose the capacity for indignation, must not be indifferent or neutral towards injustice, oppression, discrimination and exploitation; must keep and encourage hope in the possibility of overcoming the unjust order, of imagining achievable utopias (“the viable unknown”).
Freire therefore sees reality not merely as the starting point for education but also as the point of arrival. If reality is not given, but in the process of being given, the purpose of liberating education is to help to bring about change, in accordance with visions of the future that go beyond the existence of oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited, excluders and excluded; it means overcoming economic, social, political and cultural obstacles preventing the development of learners as human beings. Critical educational practice, linked to transformative social practice, enables people to write their own history, that is to say, to overcome the adverse circumstances and factors that condition them.
This education for awareness inevitably became political "Conscientization" because it focused on the social dimensions of exploitation which gave rise to the existential contradictions experienced by the oppressed. Learning to identify the word brick for example, took place in the context of a discussion about bricklayers and their work.
10. Myth of school
The myth of the school as a democratic institution is still far too alive; this myth must be destroyed, and the process of selection of privileged elites must be shown to be no accident, but the actual aim of the system, even if well – hidden beneath the democratic rhetoric of equal opportunity for accession to the ruling class. Paulo Freire, as both pedagogue and philosopher, is one of the partisans of authentic democratization of educational opportunity as opposed to what he termes as the “Banking Concept” of Education.
In accordance with his pedagogical conception, he went further than certain classical models by replacing the concept of class by that of the cultural circle. Instead of ‘teacher’, he offered discussion leader or coordinator. Dialogue was substitued for the discursive lesson, participating group member for illiterage, homogeneous, limited programmes, codified in to learning units, for traditional programs and curricula.
In the course of the conversation in the “Cultural Circles”, topics for discussion were proposed by the groups themselves with the intention of drawing up a list of problems that could be used as items for debate. The various topics selected / choosen by the group were presented to the group through a dialogue to encourage all members of the group to participate. In the “Cultural Circles” the predominant notion of liberty gave meaning to educational experience, which cannot be effective, nor achieve its aims, without the free and conscious participation fo the adult illiterates.
Knowing about the world is not merely an intellectual operation; it is a process linked to practice and to all human dimensions. This means not so much understanding and being aware of the world in order then to change it, as understanding the world from and through the practice of change, in which desires, values, will, emotions, imagination, intentions and dreams play a part.
His theory of education rests on the conviction that any man, however ignorant, is capable of looking ‘ciriticall’ at his world. What is important for the illiterate masses is not to learn how to read and write, but rather to discover how ‘to hold history in their hands’. They must learn to read, and at the same time to make history, instead of learning to to intone.
His educational conception is generated by critical reflection on the reflection on the condition of the illiterate. This is a perpetual dialectic according to which one should denounce in order to announce, keeping the transformation of the existential reality. As the oppressed gradually perceive their personal and social situation more clearly and critically, discerning its contradictions, discovering its causes and foreseeing its consequences, they become capable of transforming these facts into concrete action. Furthermore, in applying themselves to this transformation, the more clearly do they discover all implication of these facts and the more acute does their critical awarenes become. It is in this perspective that Freire avoids the use of ‘domestication’ or ‘personal promotion’. He prefers the term “Cultural Action”.
Freire accepts, as a definition of cultural action, the formula of Mao Tse-tung: ‘Progressing from emotional knowledge to a rational perception of reality.’ The transformation of existential reality is brought about by means of reflection, which is admiration of the object received. Reflection received will lead dialectically to a praxis, which is action for freedom provoked by reflection; this action in its turn will evoke new reflection, and so on… This process leads to “Conscientization” which is the development of critical reflection or the critical insertion of man into history and culture. Culture is conceived as the transforming action of man on nature.
All educational practice implies a theoretical stance on the educator’s part. This stance in turn implies sometimes more, sometimes less explicitly – an interpretation of man and the world. It could not be otherwise. The process of man’s orientation to the world involves not just an association of sense images as for animals, it involves above all, thought- language that is the possibility of the act of knowing through his praxis, by which man transforms reality. For man this process of orientation is an event wherein subjectivity and objectivity are united. Orientation if the world, so understood places the question of the purposes of action at the level of critical perception of reality.
The action of men without objectives whether the objectives are right or wrong, mythical or demythologized naive or critical, is not praxis, though it may be orientation in the world. And not being praxis, it is action ignorant of its own process and of its aim. The interrelation of the awareness of aim and of process is the basis for planning action which implies method, objectives and value options. Teaching adults to read and write must be understood in this way.
12. Awakening of Consciousness
He thinks that man must establish a relationship with the world, and by an act of creation and recreation beginning in the world of nature, he must succeed in evolving a personal contribution a cultural action so that he can take his place in the world of culture. Man, in his relationship with reality, within reality, in order to pass successfully from the world of nature to that of culuture, creates a specific link of subject to object, resulting in the knowledge that will expressed through language. This link must be established by man, whether literate or not.
The first step in conscientization,therefore, consists of helping the illiterate to rediscover nature with new eyes and to distinguish himself from it. This stage is translated into practice by interpolating all the habits, routines and tradition that have been conserved. This interpolation leads to the second stage, in which man discovers the principal difference between nature and culture. By distinguishing himself from nature and recognizing himself as a subject, man discovers himself to be a creator of culture (mans’ contribution to nature).
Conscientization cleared the way for the voicing of social claims which are often produced by a state of oppression. To Freire, if any one became literate and joined a movement to organize syndicates, this was because they had discovered for themselves, that this was a legitimate means of defending their own interests and those of their work mates. This new element, a political awareness among the masses, began to engender oppositon. Although incapable of instigating an autonomous policy themselves, the oppressed were no longer prepared to passively accept the policies of others. Popular Education was developing a spirit of Questioning and Doubting.
One must not think, however, that learning to read and write precedes “conscientization,” or vice – versa. Conscientization occurs simultaneously with the literacy or post – literacy process. It must be so. In our educational method, the word is no something static or disconnected from men’s existential experience, but a dimension of their thought – language about the world. That is why, when they participate critically in analyzing the first generative words linked with their existential experience; when they focus on the syllabic families which result from that analysis; when they perceive the mechanism of the syllabic combinations of their language, the learners finally discover, in the various possibilities of combination, their own words. Little by little, as these possibilities multiply, the learners, through mastery of new generative words, expand both their vocabulary and their capacity for expression by the development of their creative imagination.
13. The Marginal as a Subject
According to Freire, in Brazilian society, the illiterate offers an almost perfect example of alienation. But illiteracy is not the whole cause of this alienation, only one aspect of it. The illiterate is not effectively master of himself but a proleterian in the true sense. His work is devoid of any creativity. His activity centres on the satisfaction of two basic instincts – survial and reporduction. In satisfying these, he is dependent on nature and her magical power.
The one who is unable to comprehend his potential, the illiterate cannot develop Unable to comprehend his potential, the illiterate cannot develop it. He is marginal with respect both to himself and to others. Time, for him, does not permit the exercise of his freedom: his life has no historical contour (Eg: Illeterates denied of their right to vote in Brazil).
The solution to their marginality is not to become “being inside of,” but men freeing themselves; for, in reality, they are not marginal to the structure, but oppressed men within it. Alienated men, they cannot overcome their dependency by “incorporation” into the very structure responsible for their dependency. There is no other road to humanization – theirs as well as everyone else’s – but authentic transformation of the dehumanizing structure.
From this view, the illiterate is no longer a person living on the fringe of society, a marginal man, but rather a representative of the dominated strata of society in conscious or unconscious opposition to those who, in the same structure, treat him as a thing (object).Thus, also, teaching men to read and write is no longer an inconsequential matter of ba, be, bi, etc. of memorizing an alienated word, but a difficult apprenticeship in naming the world.
In the first hypothesis, interpreting illiterates as men marginal to society, the literacy process reinforces the mystification of reality by keeping it opaque and by dulling the “empty consciousness” of the learner with innumerable alienating words and phrases. By contrast, in the second hypothesis – interpreting illiterates as men oppressed within the system – the literacy process, as cultural action for freedom, is an act of knowing in which the learner assumes the role ofknowing subjectin dialogue with the educator. For this very reason, it is a courageous endeavor to demythologize reality, a process through which men who had previously been submerged in reality begin to emerge in order to re-insert themselves in to it with critical awareness.
Therefore, the educator must strive for an ever greater clarity as to what, at times without his conscious knowledge, illumines the path of his action. Only in this way will he truly be able to assume the role of one of the subjects of this action and remain consistent in the process
14. The adult literacy process: an act of knowing
The adult literacy program demands from teachers and students an authentic dialogue. True dialogue unites subjects together in the cognition of a knowable subject which unites them. The learners must assume from the beginning the role of “creative subjects”. It is not a matter of memorizing and repeating given syllables, words, and phrases, but rather of reflecting critically on the process of reading and writing its, and on the profound significance of language.
The cognitive dimensions of the literacy process must include the relationships of men with their world. These relationships are the source of the dialectic between the products men achieve in transforming the world and the conditioning which these products in turn exercise on men. Learning to read and write out to be an opportunity for men to know what speaking the word really means: a human act implying reflection and action. As such it is a primordial human right and not the privilege of a few.
The act of knowing involves a dialectical movement which goes from action to reflection and from reflection upon action to a new action. For the learner to know what he did not know before, he must engage in an authentic process of abstraction by means of which he can reflect on the action-object whole or more generally on the forms of orientation in the world. In this process of abstraction, situations representative of how the learner orients himself in the world are proposed to him as the objects of his critique. As an event calling forth the critical reflection of both learners and educators, the literacy process must relate speaking the word to transforming reality and to man’s role in this transformation.
In the culture of silence the masses are “mute” that is they are prohibited from creatively taking part in the transformations of their society and therefore prohibited from “being”. Even if they can occasionally read and write, they were “taught” in humanitarian but not humanist literacy campaigns, they are nevertheless alienated from the power responsible for their silence. Overcome by the myths of this culture, including the myth of their own “natural inferiority”, they do not know that their action upon the world is also transforming. Prevented from having a “structural perception” of the facts involving them, they do not know that they cannot have a voice i.e. that they cannot exercise the right to participate consciously in socio-historical transformation of their society, because their work does not belong to them.
Freire developed his conception of education as a practice of freedom from a critical reflection on various adult education projects he undertook in Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s. That is, the theory was part of a praxis, “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it”.[26] At the same time, Freire’s theory was based on an ontological argument that posited praxis as a central defining feature of human life and a necessary condition of freedom.
Freire contended that human nature is expressed through intentional, reflective, meaningful activity situated within dynamic historical and cultural contexts that shape and set limits on that activity. The praxis that defines human existence is marked by this historicity, this dialectical interplay between the ways in which history and culture make people even while people are making that very history and culture. Human historicity enables the realization of freedom, opening up choices among various ways of being within any given situation. He argued that the struggle to be free, to be human and make history and culture from the given situation, is an inherent possibility in the human condition. The struggle is necessary because the situation contains not only this possibility for humanization, but also for dehumanization. Dehumanization makes people objects of history and culture, and denies their capacity to also be self-defining subjects creating history and culture. These dehumanizing forces reside in both the material and psychic conditions of persons and situations, so freedom requires people to engage in a kind of historico-cultural political psychoanalysis.
He further argues that overcoming the limits of situations is ultimately an educational enterprise that he calls a practice of freedom, a permanent form of cultural re-creation that enables the fullest possible expression of human existence. Further, Freire holds that democratic socialism provides the necessary conditions for each person to achieve his or her freedom, to become fully human. Freire follows a long tradition in philosophy when he links a particular understanding of human nature with a conception of the proper formation of both self and society. Within this tradition, some type of education and moral life mediates the cultivation of human nature into ideal forms of individual and social existence. In other words, human nature alone cannot produce the good life, but must be shaped and nurtured into specific forms that enable the realization of what is best and most fruitful for a community.
Education draws out these possibilities from human nature, and at the same time instills a moral order capable of resisting impulses that threaten the attainment of what is good for each person and the community. Education thus is essential because without it, human life would not rise to the level of existence but would rather remain at the level of instinct and basic survival needs. As Freire put it
I cannot understand human beings as simply living. I can understand them only as historically, culturally, and socially existing . . . I can understand them only as beings who are makers of their “way,” in the making of which they lay themselves open to or commit themselves to the “way” that they make and that therefore remakes them as well.[27]
Language, culture, history, and community are dependent on education, on freedom and the capacity to create forms (“ways”) of life. Practical reason and knowledge are central in the work of ethical and political formation, not so much as deliberative tools but as integral to the actions creating culture and history.
Freire built his theory not so much on the continuities between human beings and the rest of the animal world, but on the discontinuities. Freire’s humanistic view reverses the emphasis and attempts to integrate deliberative and communicative actions in their particular and distinctive role in producing culture and history. For Freire, what is crucially important is that humans are animals that operate not only from reflex, habit, or even intelligent creative response; they are animals that exist meaningfully in and with the world of history and culture that humans themselves have produced.
He thinks that if we fail to grasp how the capacity for historical, cultural, linguistic praxis makes us different from the rest of the organic and inorganic world, we will fail to be able to transform society toward a vision of justice and democracy. Freire grounded his arguments in ontological interpretations of human existence and assumed this as necessary to orient any successful educational practice intended to enable human flourishing, though they had somewhat different interpretations through which to frame their theories.
For Freire, the essentially defining ontological feature of being human is that people produce history and culture, even as history and culture produce them, and thus both the theory and application of education as a practice of freedom “take the people’s historicity as their starting point”[28]. The dialectical interplay between existence and context reveals that any given situation, including one’s identity and self-understanding, is not a necessity. Situations and identities congeal in the course of time under the press of history and culture, but most importantly also under the influence of human action, and they are thus susceptible to human intervention, to the power of freedom. The ontological truth of historicity thus not only defines human nature for Freire, but grounds his theory of liberation and provides the opening for concrete efforts to transform oppressive realities.
The historical, cultural, and social background shapes the present context, from the privacy of family life to the public spheres of the state and mass media. It establishes the field within which free action can move, and even outlines possible psychological states and the most intimate aspects of a self, from identity to feelings and desires. The situational constraints that prevent freedom are thus also always internal and not only external to individuals. Human beings inhabit, and are inhabited by, the structures, institutions, social relations, and self-understandings that comprise a people’s culture.
The practice of freedom, as a critical reflexive praxis, must grasp the outward direction, meaning, and consequences of action, and also its inward meaning as the realization and articulation of a self. Therefore, education as a practice of freedom must include a kind of historico-cultural, political psychoanalysis that reveals the formation of the self and its situation in all their dynamic and dialectical relations. People then become critically conscious of themselves as the very sorts of creatures that produce (and are produced by) their culture and history, and to realize their freedom they become engaged in liberatory acts that challenge the limits (internal and external) of particular situations that maintain oppression or injustice. Human freedom is not outside particular situations but is geared to them. While the context “programs” people to see and experience their situation in a particular way, it does not “determine” how people are or can be.[29] People are not free to choose the time, place, meanings, standards, and so on, into which they have been thrown by their birth, yet they are able to take up specific stances within that context and make of it what they may. Free action strives to go beyond the given reality to posit and create a new future through effort and struggle, a future that cannot be simply declared into existence but must be achieved.
Freire argued that liberation, oppression, and their interrelation are contingent facts, while from an ontological point of view, human historicity marks precisely the possibility to choose one way of life or another. “Just so, human nature, as it generates itself in history, does not contain, as part and parcel of itself, being more, does not contain humanization, except as the vocation whose contrary is distortion in history” (Freire, 1994b, p. 99; emphasis in original). Freire deploys the theological notion of vocation to build a link between particular contingent choices, for humanization, and universal human ontological capacities. He wants to invoke a type of authenticity that distinguishes a way of living that expresses the deepest, most primordial aspects of human existence. This vocation embodies freedom, and through humanizing action people understand and become critically intentional about their creation of culture and history. Inauthentic ways of being distort this ontological essence of being human, and deny some people the possibility and right of being selfdefining, self-realizing, and self-determining. This denial defines dehumanization or oppression.
[W]e are this being—a being of ongoing, curious, search, which “steps back” from itself and from the life it leads. . . . [W]e live the life of a vocation, a calling, to humanization, and . . . in dehumanization . . . we live the life of a distortion of the call—never another calling.[30]
Here Freire is extending his argument about liberation, for by conjoining the theological notions of calling and vocation, he emphasizes the particularity of each individual response to the universal demands of the human condition. He maintained that humanization is about concrete choices in history, and only those certain choices are true to our most fundamental nature: “Humanization [is the] ontological vocation of human being”
On the other hand, the oppressed class faces daily the impositions of the dehumanizing systems of an unjust society. By refusing to accede to its subordinated position and working to understand the raison d’être of its structural formation, the oppressed class has an advantage in intervening strategically to overcome the limits in the context.[31] Given the ontological capacity for intentionally directing cultural re-formation toward humanizing ends, liberation struggle is always a possible prerogative of the oppressed.
For the oppressed, as individuals and as a class, to discern the truth of their nature, identities, and situation requires the achievement of a kind of knowledge that reaches behind the way things are to grasp the way things came to be. Here we see the connection between Freire’s ontological and epistemological arguments. Epistemically, the oppressed are faced with the challenge of knowing systematically and determinately what is already known experientially and uncritically; that is, the oppressed must make good sense out of common sense. The knowledge that enables such a critique of the situation, ideology, and the self, must include an understanding of the dialectical, permanent tension between consciousness and the world, between subjectivity and objectivity. For Freire, this interplay does not undermine knowledge or certainty, but only makes the demand for methods of critical analysis more emphatic and makes the pragmatic tests of knowing more telling.
Critical consciousness is mindful of the relationships among consciousness, action, and world, and grasps the why of the world in the constructive nature of knowing. Freire argued that knowledge was not a state of mind or a type of warranted proposition that could be settled in the manner of a mathematical equation, but rather it was a way of being that reflected the deepest human capacities for producing culture and history. Critical knowledge enfolds the knower and the known in a dialectical unity embodied through the creative powers of existence.
As people take hold of the indeterminateness of history and the openness of the future, their hopes and dreams of a more just life become realized as the fulfillment of an “ontological need”. Striving to meet these primordial human needs, and wielding “truth as an ethical quality of the struggle” the politics of liberation harnesses the ontological and epistemological foundations of existence to overcome the limits of oppression and build a democratic socialism that sustains diverse communities. “[W]e, as existent, outfit ourselves to engage in the struggle in quest of and in defense of equality of opportunity, by the very fact that, as living beings, we are radically different from one another”.[32]
Freire understood how fragile and contingent this struggle had to be, and accepted that no guarantees could warrant the humanistic reinvention of citizenship. Conscientization is thus a mode of life always in the process of becoming, one that enacts ongoing cultural action for liberation that accepts an ethic of the “fineness of the striving” as “a job to do in history”. This ethic indicates precisely the importance of education as a practice of freedom for a successful revolution because it enables the ongoing reinvention and recreation of democratic culture.
This overview of Freire’s argumentative structure for his theory of liberation and education identified the foundational interrelationships among his ontological, epistemological, ethical, and political analyses. Freire argued that education as a practice of freedom is actually a necessary aspect of being fully human. Without this kind of praxis, human beings cease to be the “makers of their way” and they become simply what history makes of them.
16.1. The Pedagogy: Indian Context
Not to deny the fact that Paulo Freire’s approach to educational reform through “Critical Awareness” and his pedagogy is the need of an hour in the context of India. Besides, I am also convinced with a belief that within the pedagogical endeavor lies the potential for “Social Transformation” and “Social Change”.
Access to education and the so-called quality varies from east to west and north to south within the so-called nation. And, that the access a person has to different ways of seeing and understanding the world and the reality is intricately connected to the opportunity s/he possesses to act on that reality. Conversely, those who are denied the means to think about; to choose and decide, and understand the world in which they live are robbed not only of words but also of power to act or enact change.[33]
Herein lies the potential that education can offer, to equip people/one with access to ways of thinking about the world in order to be able to transforms it through critical education.[34] The education which will only equips one to understand the gap between the ways the world is and the way the world should be, the reasons for this gap, and the means to act to overcome this gap. However, just taking an ideological stand and not reaching to the level of transformation – the level of praxis, will only prolong and maintain the gap, or in other words the status-quo.
My memory is often painted by the picture of a system that is largely characterized by teacher-centered classrooms, where students are generally discouraged from asking questions but encouraged to memorize information, focus on examinations where one will have to regurgitate this information, knowledge are measured, quality over quantity, prejudice among the teacher, etc. This practice has largely enslaved a significant part of the population through educational experiences.
Thus, educational reform through critical consciousness in an attempt to erase one of the few spots of the exclusory education system of India is a must and is relevant to the approach of Paulo Freire.
16.2. Education: A tool for Oppression
As noted, Jotiba Phule (1827-1890) was a pioneer in Indian society in launching a historical-materialist critique of caste and Brahminism, and in launching a subsequent movement for the liberation of India‘s masses from caste oppression. One of India‘s prominent 19th century social reformers, he saw Brahminism as an ―ideological and institutional system of monopolizing knowledge and power by a particular class which uses these to exclude, divide and dominate other groups in society having a close relationship between knowledge and power, and saw education as a key tool used by Brahmins to perpetuate their hegemony.
During that time, stress were made on the need to democratize education, based on the belief that the illiteracy and educational disabilities of the lower castes due to their social and material conditions were being reinforced by the power structure of the Brahmins as well as the Imperial government. Witnessing the exclusion from knowledge as the main cause behind women‘s subordination as well, and education as the main resource to liberate them thereby establishing the first girls‘school in India in 1848, in his native city of Pune.
As clear, the Dominant groups in India have used education as a tool of oppression not only by withholding access to education in general, but also access to critical literacy in particular within education. They are the one who created and rewrite history and its ill effect are still in the limelight of the society. Classical example can be that the North-East states of India are never included in the Indian History and as well in the movement for Independence.
As stated, the first to the liberation of the lower castes and tribes from the domination will be to bring out of the ideologies of Brahmanism, for which access to knowledge was an essential prerequisite. This will then be followed by an attitudinal change leading to a kind of Cultural Revolution for social change, or social transformation in Paulo Freire’s term.
Media-centered entertainment-Education Intervention are seldom designed, owned and operated by the people themselves. Moreover, most media initiatives are designed and implemented by the so-called “Experts” for a specific target audience or group thereby leaving little room for the dynamic dialogic pedagogy as proposed by Paulo Freire. The one-way nature of mass media interventions, as also the desire of development officials and agency to reach large audiences with time-bound implementation, relegate the relatively smaller-reach theater based/mass media interventions to the sidelines of most development programs and the participation of the target group (the masses in general).
The dialogical pedagogy as proposed by Paulo Freire can be supported for more consciously adding participatory intervention in the field of theater based/mass media. This would give enormous upliftment of the people in terms of their participation and importantly to transform entertainment-education interventions from being one-way (monologue) in to a two-way process (dialogue) between the audience (the general mass/target group) and the actors. It should necessary entail that the mass media-based entertainment-education initiatives should go hand-in-hand with engaging participatory initiatives and each supplementing the other. As the field of entertainment-education initiatives continues to evolve, grow and re-invent itself, this participatory strategies for empowering the masses can yield positive results. Classical example can be initiatives for community radio or video.
[1] Cited in , Literacy Discussion, Spring 1974
[2] It is through which “man, not as recipient but as a knowing subject, reaches a deeper awareness both of the socio-cultural reality on which life is built and his ability to transform that reality.”
[3] Cited in Freire, P., (1970)
[4]The study of the effects of perceptions, beliefs, and intentions on human consciousness.
[5] Subject of examination
[6] Freire, P., (1970)
[7] Cited in Frankenstein, M & Powell, A.B.
[8] Freire, P. (1982),
[9] Freire, P., (1973), pp. 101
[10] Freire, P., 1970, pp. 35-36
[11] Freire, (1970)
[12] Glass, R.D., (2001)
[13] Freire, P., (1970)
[14] Freire, P., (1972), pp. 52
[15] Freire, P., (1973)
[16] Freire, P., (1970) pp. 69-70
[17] Freire, P., (1970) pp. 26
[18] Freire, P., (1973), pp. 03
[19] Freire, P., (1970), pp. 06
[20] Freire, P., (1973), pp. 04
[21] Freire, P., (1970), pp. 76
[22] Cited in Morrow, R.A. and Torres, C.A., (2002)
[23] Freire, P., (1970), pp. 79-80
[24] Freire, P., (1970)
[25] Ibid., pp.31
[26] Freire, P., (1970), pp. 36
[27]Freire, P., (1973)
[28] Freire, P., (1982)
[29] Freire, P., (1982)
[30] Ibid., (1973)
[31] Freire, P. (1982)
[32] Freire, P., (1973)
[33] Reality of the Indian Educational System including TISS
[34] In the same line to what Paulo Freire proposed for educational reform
18. References
18.1. Articles
- Frankenstein, M & Powell, A.B., “Paulo Freire’s Contribution to an Epistemology of Ethnomathematics”
- Gerhardt, H. P. (1993), “Paulo Freire (1921 – 97),” Prospects: the quarterly review of comparative education, vol. XXIII, no. 3/4, pp. 439 – 458.
- Giroux, H.A. (1979), “Review: Paulo Freire’s Approach to Radical Educational Reform,” Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Autumn), pp. 257-272.
- Glass, R.D., (2001), “On Paulo Freire’s Philosophy of Praxis and the Foundations of Liberation Education”, Educational Researcher, Vol. 30. No. 2, pp. 15-25, March.
- Hederman, M.P. (1982), “Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” The Crane Bad, Vo.l. 6, No. 2, Latin-American Issue, pp. 58-63.
- Hodgkins, A. P. (2008), “a critical Analysis of Freirean Pedagogy: The Case of Development in Northern Canada,” Journal of Transformative Education; 6; 302.
- Lloyd, A.S., (1972) “Freire, Conscientization, and Adult Education,” Adult Education, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, pp. 3-20.
- McLaren, P. (1999), “A Pedagogy of Possibility: Reflecting upon Paulo Freire’s Politics of Education: In Memory of Paulo Freire,” Educational Researcher, Vol. 28, No. 2 (March), pp. 49-56.
- McLaren, P., (2001) “Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Politics of Hope: Reclaiming Critical Pedagogy,” Critical Methodologies; 1; 108.
- Monteith, M.K., “Paulo Freire’s Literacy Method”, Journal of Reading, Vol. 20, No. 7 (April, 1977), pp. 628-631.
- Morrow, R.A. and Torres, C.A., (2002), “Critical Pedagogy and Transformative Social Change”, Teachers College Press.
- Patrick, Q. (1982), “Education and the Transformation of society,” The Crane Bag, Vol. 6, no. 2, Latin – American Issue, pp.53 – 57.
- Paulo Freire: Literacy through Conscientization, Literacy Discussion, Spring 1974, The International Institute for Adult Literacy Method, Government of Inran, 1968.
- Zacharakis-Jutz, J. (1988), “Post-Freirean Adult Education: A Question of Empowerment and Power,” Adult Education Quarterly; 39; 41.
18.2. Books
- Freire, P., (1970), “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” The Continumm Publishing Company, London.
- Freire, P., (1973), “Education for critical consciousness”, New York: Seabury.
- Freire, P. (1974), “Education: The Practice of Freedom”, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, London.
- Freire, P., (1978), “Pedagogy in Process – The Letters to Guinea-Bissau”, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, London.
- Freire, P. (1982), “Education for critical consciousness”, Boston College, July 5-15
- Freire, P., “Cultural Action for Freedom”.
- Freire, P., “Pedagogy of Hope”
- Ryan, John, W., Ed. (1974), “Literacy Through Conscientization”, International Institution for Adult Literacy, Teheran, Iran.