Paulo Freire and Revolutionary Education Essay Example for Free

Paulo Freire and Revolutionary Education Es speculateIn meter reading Paulo Freires inspiring and idealistic book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in 1970, the question arises is whether such a floorly transformed procreational system is even possible. According the person I interviewed, a professor with many years of teaching experience in many countries, the answer is not especially optimistic. Paolo Freires radical and humanistic view of precept is light years removed from what truly takes rear end in close manakinrooms around the manhood.At the lower levels, education often amounts to little more than rote memorization to prepargon for standardized tests, with administrators mainly c erstwhilerned that their summates look good. Higher education has devolved into c areer training for big business interests, and frankly has become a business itself. Virtually no(prenominal) of the creativity, humanization or liberation that Freire writes roughly so eloq uently really exists in most educational systems around the world, which barely turn out more cogs for the machinery.There may be a some truly creative and humanistic teachers, although they usually end up frustrated, burned out and cynical because of the temper of the system itself. For Freire, the worst form of teaching is the banking concept of education, in which students are passive and alienated production line takers of any information the teacher provides. This has been the normal type of education system in most of the world throughout history, mirroring the authoritarian and paternalistic socio-economic relationships in the world outside the classroom.In fact, the schools and universities are preparing students to take their place in the system without questioning it. Freire claims that teachers can either work for the liberation of the the great unwashedtheir humanizationor for their domestication, their domination. They can either create an education system in which all persons in the classroom are simultaneously teachers and learners, realizing that knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, imper contributeent, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings heed in the world, or simply uphold the status quo (Freire 72).He also insists that the teacher cannot calculate for her students, nor can she impose her thoughts on them (Freire 77). Ruling elites merely indirect request to use the education system as part of the apparatus of domination and repression, to maintain order, but real education should be revolutionary and on purpose set out to transform the world (Freire 79-80). Are there teachers who actually believe in this radical mission for education? Is it even possible within the present system? How long does it take for teachers who were once young and idealistic to become disillusioned?The following are excerpts from an interview with Dr. W. a university professor who has taught in various countries around the world for twenty-two years query Have you ever read Paulo Freires book Pedagogy of the Oppressed? Dr. W Yes, parts of it. Over the years, Id say Ive become fairly familiar with his general theories. Question Do you regard the educational systems you have seen as oppressive? Dr. W I have experienced many educational systems around the world, including a number that I would regard as extremely oppressive.For example, Ive taught in Asian and Middle Eastern countries where capital and secondary school teachers regularly slap, punch and beat studentshit them with sticks and so on. For the most part, those systems are found on rote memorization as Freire described, and the students are not even allowed to question the teacher they are strictly passive. Mainly, the students are just being prepared for standardized tests, not to develop creativity or imagination, and this becomes very clear when they reach the university level.At that point, they have become used to treating teachers identical little tin gods, although I suppose it prepares them for the kind of bureaucratic and parcel outrial salaried positions most of them will be pass judgment to fill in society. Question Isnt that also the case with the American education system? Isnt it mostly geared toward jobs in the capitalist economy? Dr. W. Absolutely. The American education system is also a class system, and this is already the case in primary and secondary schools. My first job was as a student teacher in a high school in New York.The kids from working class backgrounds were generally tracked into general classes that were not preparing them for higher education, while those from the middle class were. Ill neer for abide the first class I ever taught, with a group of sullen, nonresponsive working class kids, stuck in a basement classroom that did not even have windows, taught by people who didnt such(prenominal) care whether they learned anything or not. These kids knew it, too. They we re not dumb, although the system certainly treated them that mode.They knew they were being prepared for jobs as mechanics and cashiers. And this was not an familiar city school, though, where the American class and caste system reveals itself at its most brutal. Question Caste system? Dr. W. Yes, in the United States, we have a long history of education segregated by color, with the worst schools always being reserved for minority groups. Compare any inner city public school system today with those in the white suburbs, or with expensive toffee-nosed schools for the upper classes, and you will see the difference in about two seconds.For the poor and minority groups in the inner cities, the teachers and facilities are much worse than in the suburbs, as is the housing, health care, nutrition and so on. Conditions in these ghettoized schools and neighborhoods are not all that much better from those in developing countriesthe types of places Freire was talking about in his books. I n those countries, the oppression is very real indeed, and the students are being prepared for lives as peasants, workers or simply part of the marginalized economy and society, like kids in Americas inner city schools. Those institutions are programmed for failure.Question But you never taught in inner city schools like those? I mean the types of schools that are like jails, with cops on duty, metal detectors and things like that? Dr. W. No, my career has been mostly at the university level, and the students Ive had were relatively privileged by the standards of this worldmiddle class or upper class. In the Middle East, I taught students from royalty and the grandeur who had huge allowances every month, and in Asia I once taught students who arrived in limos with their own drivers. I wouldnt say that they were exactly the oppressed masses Freire was describing.On the other hand, I taught at a university in the precedent Soviet Union were about 60% of the students were on schola rships and came from fairly modest backgrounds. A lot of people had also been hit hard by the collapse of the economy when the Soviet Union ended. We even had a former brain surgeon who ended up working as a janitor at the university, earning about $150 a month. The whole medical and public education system was so far kaput(p) that she could make more money that way. Question So you basically see the education system as being unequal, designed to keep people in their place generation after generation?Dr. W. Yes, thats been mostly my experience. I think its designed to insure that the children of the owners and the ruling class will bank check at the same level as their parents, while the children of the middle class will continue to manage and administer the system for them, and the children of workers will continue to be mostly worker bees, although a few top executiveiness be allowed up into the middle class. Question So in all your years of experience, you never experienced education as being liberating in the way Freire describes?Dr. W. Absolutely never. The system is set up to do the opposite and it will usually weed out teachers who do not conform to its requirements, unless they are protected by tenure. Most teachers just go along and get along, never rocking the boat because they are relatively powerless themselves and just need the paycheck. Moreover, parents of middle class and upper class students do not want anyone to be liberated, but expect their children to conform to the systemto insure that the family maintains its class position.Question So given this reality, is there any way you can imagine that a truly liberating education system might be established? Dr. W. (laughs) I think to do what Freire was talking about would require a revolution. Clearly, then, Dr. W. was a case of someone who had become cynical about the education system after long years of experience. He admitted that he had once been young and idealistic and might even h ave believed some of Freires ideas, but over the years he had found that there was really no meaningful way to put them into practice under the current system.In addition, he thought that most students simply went along with this system because that was what their parents expected, especially when they were paying private schools and universities to provide certain services. They were most definitely not fire in making students more humanistic, rebellious or questioning of authority, but only to prepare them for careers and to get ahead in life. Only in rare cases in American history, such as the sixties during the era of the Vietnam War, counterculture and civil rights movements did students actually come to question the dominant values of society on a mass scale.That has most certainly not been the case in recent decades, at least not in the United States, nor in most other countries that Dr. W. had experienced. He had come to regard education as a business, run by bureaucrats a nd entrepreneurs for a profit rather than to encourage critical thinking or humanistic values among the students. Only occasionally would rebels and nonconformists challenge this system, except in very unusual historical circumstances. WORKS CITED Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy on the Oppressed. NY Continuum, 2000. Interview with Dr. W. by author, February 4, 2010.