Tammy’s Reviews > The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation > Status Update

“Critically speaking … Ill literacy is one of the concrete expressions of an unjust, social reality. Ill literacy is not strictly linguistic or exclusively, pedagogical or methodical problem. It is a political, as in the very literacy through which we try to overcome ill literacy. Dwelling not evilly or Utley on intelligence does not affect in the least the intrinsic politics.“

“The illiterate is a ‘lost man.’ Therefore one must ‘save’ him, and his ‘ salvation’ consist of ‘ being filled’ with these words, mirror miraculous sounds offered or imposed on him by the teacher, who is often an unconscious agent of political policy inherent in the literacy campaign.“

“To study is not to consume ideas, but to create and re-create them.“

Introduction XXI
“Rather than casually, dispense knowledge, the grateful masses, intellectual’s fuse with the oppressed in order to make and remake the conditions necessary for a radical social project.

Introduction XXIII
“Like the Italian social theorist, Antonio Gramsci, Freire redefined the category of intellectual, and argues that all men and women are intellectual… Moreover, the oppressed need to develop their own organic and resistant intellectuals who can learn with such groups while simultaneously helping them to Foster, modes of self education and struggle against various forms of oppression.”

Introduction xvi
“…Freire linked the selection, discussion, and evaluation of knowledge to the bed ecological process that provided a context for such activity. In his view, it was impossible to separate one from the other, and any viable pedagogical practice had to link radical forms of knowledge with corresponding radical social practices.“

Introduction XV
“Rather than doing school knowledge as objective, as something to be merely transmitted to students, proponent of the new sociology of education argued that school knowledge was a particular representation of the dominant culture, one that was constructed through a selective process of emphasis and exclusions.“

Introduction, XV
“Against the conservative insistence that schools transmitted objective knowledge, radical critics, developed theories of hidden curriculum, as well as theories of ideology that identify the interest underline specific forms of knowledge.”