Monday, February 6, 2017

PAULO FREIRE: CHAPTER 2 OF PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED

It is sickening. Sickening that educating has become so much an “industry” to forsake the very meaning of the term in its core, leaving nothing but an empty shell, a nobody. The oppression of the industry of educating is adequately explored in this chapter. It’s a nonsensical idea to be so absolutely deceived that your very role as an educator means depriving the less knowledgeable of the just opportunity to progress towards understanding or functioning in a meaningful way and becoming a contributing member of the social construct of humanity.  

“The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration -- contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.” (Paulo Freire).

This is not education. This is indeed oppression; it is an assembly line of pointless existence where the existence of the teacher is contrived only on the ineptness of the student body. To educate means more than just “depositing” arbitrary facts and dictations into the “receptacle” of the students’ minds. Education means to give purpose to those who have yet to discover theirs. To provide students with the tools and developmental progression to apply what they know and how they perceive the world to the environment and social connections that involve their lives. Education means to connect with others through understanding each other, whether they be student or teacher. The idea that an educator is meant to “Know everything” and that a student is meant to “know nothing” defeats the reasoning behind any such connection.

To educate means to learn indefinitely. 

http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/philosophy/education/freire/freire-2.html

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