PEDAGOGY OF FREEDOM- PAULO FREIRE
About the book...
At the end of the Editor's notes it ends with a quote by Joseph Campbell- “say yes to life, yea to it all”, and to participate with joy, humility, indignation, and gratitude in the adventurous struggle to remake the world each and every day.
Scientism- mechanization of the intellectual work cultivated by specialist, which often leads to the fragmentation of knowledge.
Objectivity always contains within it a dimension of subjectivity, thus it is dialectical.
“Teaching requires a recognition that education is ideological” teaching always involves ethics, teaching requires a capacotu to be critical, teaching requires the recognition of our conditioning, teaching requires humility, and teaching requires critical reflection.
An empirical study that neglects to incorporate in its design the cruel reality as it is, will never be able to fully explain the reasons behind the reasons of such performances.
By locking children in material conditions that are oppressive and deshumanizing we are invariably guaranteeing that they will be academically underachievers.
Empirical studies that are disconnected from the socio-cultural reality that informs the study to begin with—feeds direcltly to sterotypes. This process most of the time takes away the human face of the study and distorts and falsifies reality.
We have become a people without a sense of history. We accept the present as given. Because we have so little comprehension of our past, we have no appreciation of its meaningful interrelation with the present.
Man of action- one who draws his lessons from experiences.
From not theorizing their practice, they shield themselves from self-criticism reflection that would interrogate, how the maintance of their privilege invariably makes them complicit with the dominant ideology that creates the need for them to engage in various forms of practice in oppressed communities.
What should be contrasted with practice is not theory, but the nonsense of imitative thinking.
“At risk”
Education should be at the core an activity of self-exploration in which, through intellectual and affective encounters, the student attempts to discover her own subjectivity.
The teacher becomes the instrument of approved intellectual and moral culture, charged with the task of expunging destructive impulses and fueling the empty mental tank.
Education is that specifically human act of intervening in the world.
Freire believes that the emancipation of men and women is rooted in an “Existential” commitment to an ethical ideal rather than to historical inevitability.
Scientism- mechanization of the intellectual work cultivated by specialist, which often leads to the fragmentation of knowledge.
Objectivity always contains within it a dimension of subjectivity, thus it is dialectical.
“Teaching requires a recognition that education is ideological” teaching always involves ethics, teaching requires a capacotu to be critical, teaching requires the recognition of our conditioning, teaching requires humility, and teaching requires critical reflection.
An empirical study that neglects to incorporate in its design the cruel reality as it is, will never be able to fully explain the reasons behind the reasons of such performances.
By locking children in material conditions that are oppressive and deshumanizing we are invariably guaranteeing that they will be academically underachievers.
Empirical studies that are disconnected from the socio-cultural reality that informs the study to begin with—feeds direcltly to sterotypes. This process most of the time takes away the human face of the study and distorts and falsifies reality.
We have become a people without a sense of history. We accept the present as given. Because we have so little comprehension of our past, we have no appreciation of its meaningful interrelation with the present.
Man of action- one who draws his lessons from experiences.
From not theorizing their practice, they shield themselves from self-criticism reflection that would interrogate, how the maintance of their privilege invariably makes them complicit with the dominant ideology that creates the need for them to engage in various forms of practice in oppressed communities.
What should be contrasted with practice is not theory, but the nonsense of imitative thinking.
“At risk”
Education should be at the core an activity of self-exploration in which, through intellectual and affective encounters, the student attempts to discover her own subjectivity.
The teacher becomes the instrument of approved intellectual and moral culture, charged with the task of expunging destructive impulses and fueling the empty mental tank.
Education is that specifically human act of intervening in the world.
Freire believes that the emancipation of men and women is rooted in an “Existential” commitment to an ethical ideal rather than to historical inevitability.
Chapter 1: Introductory Reflections
What forms education and becoming a teacher?
Reflection on edcative practive from a progressive point of view.
Teachers preparation should go beyond the technical preparation of teachers and be rooted in the ethical formation both of selves and of history.
--universal human ethics
-not afraid of condemn the manipulation that makes a rumor into truth and truth into a mere rumor.
A capacity to live with and learn from what is different.
We can only consider ourselves to be the subjects of our decisions, our searchings., our capacity to choose- as historical subjects, as people capable of transforming our world—if we are grounded ethically.
There are two things:
I am a conscious presence in the world therefore I take full responsibility of my actions and decisions in the world.
But, if I am a product of cultural, genetic, class determination, I have no responsibility of my action in the world, and therefore it is not possible for me to speak of ethics.
We know ourselves to be conditioned but not determined.
History is time filled with possibility and not inexorably determined- that the future is problematic and not already decided, fatalistically.
Reflection on edcative practive from a progressive point of view.
Teachers preparation should go beyond the technical preparation of teachers and be rooted in the ethical formation both of selves and of history.
--universal human ethics
-not afraid of condemn the manipulation that makes a rumor into truth and truth into a mere rumor.
A capacity to live with and learn from what is different.
We can only consider ourselves to be the subjects of our decisions, our searchings., our capacity to choose- as historical subjects, as people capable of transforming our world—if we are grounded ethically.
There are two things:
I am a conscious presence in the world therefore I take full responsibility of my actions and decisions in the world.
But, if I am a product of cultural, genetic, class determination, I have no responsibility of my action in the world, and therefore it is not possible for me to speak of ethics.
We know ourselves to be conditioned but not determined.
History is time filled with possibility and not inexorably determined- that the future is problematic and not already decided, fatalistically.
Chapter 2; There is no teaching without Learning
In the practice of sailing, all these kinds of knowledge are either confirmed, modified, or amplified.
-theory does nothing, compare to what practice, and personal experience can teach you.
To teach is not to transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge.
Time of education—ongoing
My teacher is the subject in relation to whom I consider myself to be the object
If I am an object who can be shaped by the subject, I am just a mere reproduction of further objects.
Teacher is always being reformed by the things he teached, and the person who is being thought forms himself in the process.
Whoever teaches learns the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.
TEACHING that does not emerge from the experience of learning cannot be learned by anyone!!!
The more critically one exercises one’s capacity for learning, the greater is one’s capacity for constructing and developing “epistemological curiosity” without which it is not possible to obtain a complete grasp of the object of our knowledge.
Flame of resistance that sharpens their curiosity and stimulates their capacity for risk, for adventure.
Conditions in learning: imply and demand anxious curiosity to explore the limits of creativity, persistent in the search, and courageously humble in the adventure.
Teachers—careful for the mindset of “correct thinking”
One of the necessary requirements for correct thinking is a capacity for not being overly convinced of one’s own certitudes.
Research
I do research so as to know what I do not yet know and to communicate and proclaim what I discover.
“common sense”: it is knowledge extracted from pure experience,
respect for what the student knows:
combination of intimate connection between basic knowledge to all schools with the experiences of the lives of the students?
A capacity to be critical:
Ingenious curiosity while remaining curious, becomes capable of self-criticism.
Curiosity as restless questioning, as movement toward the revelation of something hidden, as a questions verbalized or not, as search for clarity, as a moment of attention, suggestion, and vigilance, constitutes an integral part of the phenomenon of being alive. There could be no creativity without the curiosity that moves us and sets us patiently impatient before a world that we did not make, to add to it something of our own making.
It is in our becoming that we constitute ourselves as ethical beings
To educate is essentially to form- the teaching of contents cannot be separated dform the moral formation of the learners.
Risk, acceptance of what is new and descrimination:
Willingness to risk, welcome the new,
The old is capable of remaining new when it remains faithful through time to the experience of original and founding intuitions and inspirations.
Right thinking belongs intimately to right doing- not only by saying, but to be done and lived.
A correct way of thinking goes through communication and takes shape of a dialogue,
Critical reflection on practice:
Doing-and reflection on doing
Through reflection on a given practice, ingenuous curiosity perceive itself as such so as to advance to the critical stage.
Thinking critically about practice, of today or yesterday, makes possible the improvement of tomorrow’s practice. – should be concrete enough to be identifiable with practice
“the more I acknowledge my own process and attitudes, and perceive the reasons behind these, the more I am capable of changing and advancing from the stage of ingenuous curiosity to epistemological curiosity.
When I assume consciously the danger represented by XX, I am then moved to reflect on its consequences and to engage in a decision-making process, leading to a break, an option, which becomes concretized, materially speaking, in the practice of “not XX”, a practice grounded on the risk to health and life implicit in XX.
How to teach on the basis of caring!!
In a dialogue, people learn, because they all bring their knowledge to others. When they are two dialoguing, and one of the objects of the pedagogic process is to explore what each knows and what they can teach each other. A second object is to foster reflection on the self as actor in the world in consequence of knowing.
Reflection is an occasion for the student’s intervention in examining and changing life.
Why people fear the freedom that comes with knowing/acting in the world?
Source in the oppression and an obstacle to the formation of the subject.
People are conditioned but not determined to their circumstances
Educational formation becomes scientific when the learner grasps the link between theory and practice through a process whose assumption is that the individual is, in every respect, unfinished.
A humanized society requires cultural freedom- the ability of the individual to choose values and rules of conduct that violate conventional social norms, and in political and civil society requires the full participation of all of its inhabitant in every aspect of public life.
Harder questions- why-what?
The whole stone of the whole educational process is HUMAN CURIOSITY.
CURIOSITY- is what makes us question, know, act, ask again, recognize.
A learner that has reached this has the ability to demand power, which is the object of any pedagogy of freedom.
Emotions:
The kind of education that does not recognize the right to express appropriate anger against injustice, against disloyalty, against the negation of love, against exploitation, and against violence fails to see the educational role implicit in the expression of these feelings.
Cultural identity:
One of the most important tasks of critical educational practice is to make possible the condition in which the learners, in their interaction with one another and with their teachers, engage in the experience of assuming themselves as social, historical, thinking, communicating, transformative, creative pesons; dreamers of possible utopias, capable of being angry because of a capacity to love.
Cultural identity in relation to both individuals and classes among the learners and for which respect is absolutely fundamental.
This is connected directly to the challenge of assuming who we are, which is what objective grammatical vision of education can’t do.
Become a subject- not an object.
Notice about gestures- which can be very profround to the child’s education.
Education is something that man and women discover experimentally, in the course of history.
Our capacity to teach arose from our capacity to learn , we would take more seriously everyday experience. Be aware of our surroundings, and daily day life,
Recognition of the value of emotions, sensibility affectivity and intuition.
We must build our intuitions and submit them to methodological and rigorous analysis so that our curiosity becomes epistemological.
Chapter 3; Teaching is not just Transferring Knowledge
To teach is to be create possibilities for the construction and production of knowledge rather than to be engaged simply in a game of transferring knowledge.
Necessary to being a teacher
1. open to questions
2. open to ideas
3. open to the curiosities of the studesnts as well as their inhibitions
4. it must be something witnessed, lived.
Causality- because …
Relationshop of adversity.- but
Finality- so that
Integration- that
As the human body becomes aware of the capacity to capture, learn, transform and to create beauty, it ceased to be simply empty space to be filled in with contents.
What makes humans ethical is their capacity to spiritualize the world, intervene, to compare, to judge, decide, choose.
It is impossible to humanly exist without assuming the right and the duty to opt, decide, to struggle, to be political.
My destiny is something that needs to be constructed and for which I must assume responsibility.
Future- constructed through trial and error.
****Material-social-political-cultural-ideological- conditions generate divisions to construct our ideals of change and transformation, obstacles are not eternal.
We are having so many troubles around the world in this time because of this 4 conditions that keep us dividing more as humanity.
How can this be solved?
In a way we want more individuality, but also aim to a common end?- world peace.
How can we arrive at that level, if we share different backgrounds?
What do we have in common as humans?
Absolute necessity of concientization
The world of culture, which is also the world of history, is the world where freedom, choice, decision, and possibility are only possible, or refused.
Because of our determination of unfinishedness we are capable to be ethical.
Humans in dialogue learn and grow by confronting their differences.
Rupture of “right thinking”.
Common sense
We normally confuse authority and authoritarianism, freedom and license.
The more we practice our questioning, compare, doubt, and to weigh, the more efficaciously curious we become and the more attuned becomes our good sense.
Good sense is not enough to orient or ground my tactics for any struggle, but it can have a fundmental role of my evaluation of the scene, with the ethical implications that are integral to it.
Something to learn from fear- will tell you that there is something you must know.
Those who exercise the art of teaching must have integrity and a clear sense of what is right and just.
Humility, Tolerance, and the Struggle for the Rights of Educators
Have genuine humility and a convinced understand of the role of the unknown in the process of researching the known.
Afraid of revealing one’s own ignorance.
Capacity to apprehend reality
In order to complete our incompletednees our inner curiosity moves in a way to become aware of the world but leads us to a thorough, scientific knowledge of it, not only to adapt but to intervene, re-create and transform it.
Grasp the substantiveness/essence of the object of our knowing. Mere memorization is not true learning- this is the result of people who are passive transferring knowledge only.
For us to learn is to construct, re construct, to observe with a view to changing to the adventure of the spirit.
Heteronomy-autonomy
Teacher is always alert that his actions/reactions impede/help the students in their search for knowledge.
assent the student’s the right to compare, choose, to rapture, to decide.
The immorality and lack of ethics rest with those who want to maintain an unjust order.
Accepting my limitations but conscious about the necessary effort to overcome them and aware that I cannot hide them- that would be failure to the students and himself as a teacher.
Joy and Hope
Movement of search-hope
My right to be angry presupposes that the historical experience in which I participate tomorrow is not a given but a challenge and a problem.
The problem of seeing reality as unchangeable and that nothing can be done to fix it because we are determined, is sad to humanity, because that’s a silence to the things that can be changed.
WE NEED Conviction that change is possible
The future is seen as something that is constructed by people engaged together in life, in history.
The world is not finished, it is always in the process of becoming
I am someone who has an input into what happens in the world, I am not just a recorder.
By our capacity to register facts and occurrences, we become capable of intervention.
To discuss the inherent openness of the future.
Our comprehension of the world to be dynamic and be convinced that our vocation for greatness and not mediocricity is an essential expression of the process of humanization in which we are inserted.
Transformatior of the world implies a dialectic between the two actions: denouncing the process of dehumanization and announcing the dream of a new society.
The thing is to work in a given area- to awake the conscience of each group, in a constructive, critical manner, about the violence and extreme injustice of this concrete situation.
Whom should have shame is the people who live comfortable not doing anything to change the misery that surrounds them.
The experience that makes possible the breakthrough is a collective experience.
Self blame comes from the invasive oppressor that inhabits the psyche of the oppressed. Once it is expelled, it needs to be substituted in the oppressed by a sense of autonomy and responsibility.
Men and women attempt to get outside the socio-historical context to find themselves and fiind completedness to become more.
Teaching requires curiosity
The construction or production of knowledge of the object to be known implies the exercise of curiosity in its critical capacity to distance itself from the object, to observe it, to delimit it, to divide it up, to close in on it, to approach it methodically to make comparisons, to ask questions.
What is meant with this or that question, is fundamental to curiosity.
Curiosity is what makes me question, know, act, ask again, recognize.
Be aware of your curiosities, and debate the various types of curiosity and their implications and consequences.
The exercise of curiosity convokes imagination, emtoions, and the reason to be compared with the tracing of a profile from the object to be known.
Explore the tension involved in the confrontation between authority and freedom.
-mutual respect: only road to authenticity.
Necessary to being a teacher
1. open to questions
2. open to ideas
3. open to the curiosities of the studesnts as well as their inhibitions
4. it must be something witnessed, lived.
Causality- because …
Relationshop of adversity.- but
Finality- so that
Integration- that
As the human body becomes aware of the capacity to capture, learn, transform and to create beauty, it ceased to be simply empty space to be filled in with contents.
What makes humans ethical is their capacity to spiritualize the world, intervene, to compare, to judge, decide, choose.
It is impossible to humanly exist without assuming the right and the duty to opt, decide, to struggle, to be political.
My destiny is something that needs to be constructed and for which I must assume responsibility.
Future- constructed through trial and error.
****Material-social-political-cultural-ideological- conditions generate divisions to construct our ideals of change and transformation, obstacles are not eternal.
We are having so many troubles around the world in this time because of this 4 conditions that keep us dividing more as humanity.
How can this be solved?
In a way we want more individuality, but also aim to a common end?- world peace.
How can we arrive at that level, if we share different backgrounds?
What do we have in common as humans?
Absolute necessity of concientization
The world of culture, which is also the world of history, is the world where freedom, choice, decision, and possibility are only possible, or refused.
Because of our determination of unfinishedness we are capable to be ethical.
Humans in dialogue learn and grow by confronting their differences.
Rupture of “right thinking”.
Common sense
We normally confuse authority and authoritarianism, freedom and license.
The more we practice our questioning, compare, doubt, and to weigh, the more efficaciously curious we become and the more attuned becomes our good sense.
Good sense is not enough to orient or ground my tactics for any struggle, but it can have a fundmental role of my evaluation of the scene, with the ethical implications that are integral to it.
Something to learn from fear- will tell you that there is something you must know.
Those who exercise the art of teaching must have integrity and a clear sense of what is right and just.
Humility, Tolerance, and the Struggle for the Rights of Educators
Have genuine humility and a convinced understand of the role of the unknown in the process of researching the known.
Afraid of revealing one’s own ignorance.
Capacity to apprehend reality
In order to complete our incompletednees our inner curiosity moves in a way to become aware of the world but leads us to a thorough, scientific knowledge of it, not only to adapt but to intervene, re-create and transform it.
Grasp the substantiveness/essence of the object of our knowing. Mere memorization is not true learning- this is the result of people who are passive transferring knowledge only.
For us to learn is to construct, re construct, to observe with a view to changing to the adventure of the spirit.
Heteronomy-autonomy
Teacher is always alert that his actions/reactions impede/help the students in their search for knowledge.
assent the student’s the right to compare, choose, to rapture, to decide.
The immorality and lack of ethics rest with those who want to maintain an unjust order.
Accepting my limitations but conscious about the necessary effort to overcome them and aware that I cannot hide them- that would be failure to the students and himself as a teacher.
Joy and Hope
Movement of search-hope
My right to be angry presupposes that the historical experience in which I participate tomorrow is not a given but a challenge and a problem.
The problem of seeing reality as unchangeable and that nothing can be done to fix it because we are determined, is sad to humanity, because that’s a silence to the things that can be changed.
WE NEED Conviction that change is possible
The future is seen as something that is constructed by people engaged together in life, in history.
The world is not finished, it is always in the process of becoming
I am someone who has an input into what happens in the world, I am not just a recorder.
By our capacity to register facts and occurrences, we become capable of intervention.
To discuss the inherent openness of the future.
Our comprehension of the world to be dynamic and be convinced that our vocation for greatness and not mediocricity is an essential expression of the process of humanization in which we are inserted.
Transformatior of the world implies a dialectic between the two actions: denouncing the process of dehumanization and announcing the dream of a new society.
The thing is to work in a given area- to awake the conscience of each group, in a constructive, critical manner, about the violence and extreme injustice of this concrete situation.
Whom should have shame is the people who live comfortable not doing anything to change the misery that surrounds them.
The experience that makes possible the breakthrough is a collective experience.
Self blame comes from the invasive oppressor that inhabits the psyche of the oppressed. Once it is expelled, it needs to be substituted in the oppressed by a sense of autonomy and responsibility.
Men and women attempt to get outside the socio-historical context to find themselves and fiind completedness to become more.
Teaching requires curiosity
The construction or production of knowledge of the object to be known implies the exercise of curiosity in its critical capacity to distance itself from the object, to observe it, to delimit it, to divide it up, to close in on it, to approach it methodically to make comparisons, to ask questions.
What is meant with this or that question, is fundamental to curiosity.
Curiosity is what makes me question, know, act, ask again, recognize.
Be aware of your curiosities, and debate the various types of curiosity and their implications and consequences.
The exercise of curiosity convokes imagination, emtoions, and the reason to be compared with the tracing of a profile from the object to be known.
Explore the tension involved in the confrontation between authority and freedom.
-mutual respect: only road to authenticity.