Pedagogy of Freedom: A Rough Essay
The last publication of the Brazilian writer before his passing, “Pedagogy of Freedom,” is a philosophical text concerning critical pedagogy, epistemology, and phenomenology. Much of the material is what has been covered in the early “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and other previous texts. However, this text takes on more of a scientific and theoretical approach to critical pedagogy. Mr Freire introduces us to the educational world of intersubjectivity, where humans are intrinsically bound and defined by dialogical interactions and interventions with the world and others. Much of his perspective and work in this text is directly from the scientific and philosophical studies of epistemology, phenomenology, and the works of Karl Marx.
An understanding of Mr Freire’s history allows us to understand the formation of critical pedagogy, as well as the attentiveness displayed toward the lower economic class. Experiences of poverty in the Northeast of Brazil, loss of a father, as well as a poor educational structure, seemed to have played an essential role in his future perspective. The period of exile, however, is most formative to his later worldview. Mr Freire was exiled after the 1964 U.S.-backed coup against the democratic government of João Goulart. There were efforts from the US government agency, USAID, to frame Mr Freire as a communist, invoking Cold War fears of authoritarianism. For the next 15 years, Mr Freire found himself in various impactful positions. After a brief stay in Bolivia, Mr Freire contributed to the Christian Agrarian Reform Movement in Chile for five years. His work in Chile and his first two published texts gained respect across all of Latin America. This effort would soon lead him to a visiting professorship at Harvard University. As a result of moving towards democratic leadership in Brazil during the late 1970s, Mr Freire’s exile was rescinded. Mr Freire moved back to Brazil and worked as the secretary for education for the Workers Party of São Paulo.
For Mr Freire, exile was not only a physical sense of homelessness but an existential one. It is in this experience that the concept of “Conscientization” was found. To understand one's economic, socio-political, geographical, physical, and genetic conditions that they are subject to. To view someone as an “other” and yourself as “yourself” and understand one's existence relies on the daological grasp and understanding of the “other”. In “Pedagogy of Freedom,” this concept is held together by the bounds called “ethics”. Mr Freire describes “ethics” as the diaological relation of humans; “ethics” are the bounds to our interactive world. To act as if humans are not intrinsically dialogical, and that our existence does not purely lie in dialogue, is to perform a transgression in the face of “ethics”. Mr Freire describes learning and teaching as an innate human trait grounded in “ethics” where one cannot exist without the other. It is through this understanding of “ethics” that Mr Freire sets the rubric for critical education. The responsibility of the teacher who engages in critical education is to refuse the “banking method” of education and focus on understanding the conditions that make up the student's ability to learn. Teachers are not entities of educational authority, they are advisers who aid the subject(student) to self-autonomy.
Mr Freire claims human existence is intersubjective, and so to act as if human existence is objective is to ignore human existence. Mr Freire expresses his dissent from the modern(at the time of publication, this would be the 1990s) institution's stance of “neutrality”. A position that academic institutions also take in their education. “Neutrality” is simply an affirmation of obedience to the elite class and their status quo. By taking a stance of “Neutrality,” we are accepting objectivity as a formal method of education. This means certain information is considered an eternal truth, and therefore not up for debate. Mr Freire does not agree with this method and expresses his abhorrence of it throughout the text, an abhorrence of Neo-liberalism. Information such as global unemployment is inevitable and globalization is inevitable are treated as natural occurrences, eternal truths when in fact they are simply stances taken by humans of high political power. We never hear that alleviation of the homeless is inevitable, or the economic improvement of the marginalized global south is inevitable. The dominant ideology of “Neutrality” naturalizes inequality while obscuring human agency. Through this treatment of the status quo as an eternal state where the future is already determined, we are taking an ahistorical stance where we strip away the historicity of the state and events, and also the historicity that follows our individual lives. With this objective method of education, where the future is already determined, individuals are forced to take a fatalistic stance, where their right to be angered by exploitation is taken away. A memorable passage from the text that features an individual stripped of historicity:
“A case in point is one I came across in a Catholic institution in California. A poor woman was telling me about her problems and difficulties, of how great an affliction she was suffering. I felt impotent. I did not know what to say. I felt indignation for what she was going through. In the end, I asked her: “Are you American?” “No,” she replied, “I am poor.” It was as if what was uppermost in her mind was a sense of being a failure. And that, that was her own fault. Something she almost had to ask pardon for from the society that she was part of, namely, North America. I can still see her blue eyes full of tears, tears of suffering and self-blame for having been a personal failure. People like her are part of a legion of wounded and marginalized who have not yet understood that the cause of their suffering is the perversity of the socio-political and economic system under which they live. As long as they think like this, they simply reinforce the power of this system. In fact, they connive, unconsciously, with a dehumanizing socio-political order.”(Freire 78)
With objectivity, the dominant ideology of “Neutrality” is able to thrive without dialogue aimed its way. A role of this ideology is to instill a sense of blame within the oppressed, a sense of inculpability for their situation. The suffocating grip that the dominant ideology has in our daily lives preemptively immobilizes revolutionary ideology.
In the modern age we do not live by a law of ethics, we live by the law of profit, the ethics of the market.