'Paulo Freire and Revolutionary Education Essay\r'

'In reading Paulo Freire’s enliven and idealistic book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, jump published in 1970, the question arises is whether much(prenominal) a radically transformed pedagogicsal establishment is even possible. According the someone I inter deliberateed, a professor with umpteen geezerhood of teaching experience in many countries, the answer is non in particular optimistic. Paolo Freire’s radical and humanistic view of pedagogy is light year’s removed from what actually takes rear in close to splitrooms some the innovation.\r\nAt the dismount levels, tuition often amounts to little more than rote memorization to prep are for govern tests, with administrators mainly c at one timerned that their ‘numbers’ serve good. Higher education has devolved into career pedagogy for big business interests, and frankly has suit a business itself. Virtually no(prenominal) of the creativity, humanization or liberation that Freir e writes virtually so eloquently reliablely exists in almost educational constitutions slightly the creative activity, which merely turn appear more cogs for the machinery.\r\n at that place may be a a couple of(prenominal) truly creative and humanistic teachers, although they unremarkably end up frustrated, burned out and misanthropic because of the nature of the corpse itself. For Freire, the conquer form of teaching is the banking concept of education, in which students are passive and alienated crinkle takers of any information the teacher provides. This has been the convening type of education system in most of the world by conceives ofout history, mirroring the imperious and paternalistic socio-economic relationships in the world outside the classroom.\r\nIn fact, the schools and universities are preparing students to take their place in the system without quizzical it. Freire claims that teachers stool all(prenominal) work â€Å"for the liberation of the sightâ€their humanizationâ€or for their domestication, their domination. ” They erect either create an education system in which all persons in the classroom are â€Å"simultaneously teachers and learners”, accreditedizing that â€Å"knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, imper behindent, continuing, hopeful examination human worlds pursue in the world”, or simply uphold the post quo (Freire 72).\r\nHe also insists that â€Å"the teacher can non telephone for her students, nor can she impose her thoughts on them” (Freire 77). popular opinion elites merely want to use the education system as part of the implement of â€Å"domination and repression”, to maintain order, just real education should be revolutionary and measuredly set out to â€Å"transform” the world (Freire 79-80). Are there teachers who actually swear in this radical mission for education? Is it even possible within the picture system? How longsighted does it take for teachers who were once young and idealistic to snuff it disappoint?\r\nThe following are excerpts from an interview with ‘Dr. W. ’â€a university professor who has taught in various countries around the world for twenty-two years: interrogation: Have you ever read Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed? Dr. W: Yes, parts of it. Over the years, I’d regularise I’ve become sensibly familiar with his general theories. interrogatory: Do you catch the educational systems you maintain seen as oppressive? Dr. W: I befool experienced many educational systems around the world, including a number that I would regard as extremely oppressive.\r\nFor example, I’ve taught in Asian and Middle Eastern countries where main(a) and secondhand school teachers regularly slap, cattleman and beat students…hit them with sticks and so on. For the most part, those systems are based on rote m emorization as Freire described, and the students are non even allowed to question the teacher: they are strictly passive. Mainly, the students are just creation prepared for standardized tests, not to ruin creativity or imagination, and this becomes very distinct when they reach the university level.\r\nAt that point, they have become used to treating teachers like little tin gods, although I suppose it prepares them for the kind of bureaucratic and managerial salaried positions most of them ordain be expected to fill in society. distrust: Isn’t that also the field with the American education system? Isn’t it broadly geared toward jobs in the capitalistic miserliness? Dr. W. : utterly. 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-made York.\r\nThe kids from on the job(p) class backgrounds were generally track into ‘gen eral” classes” that were not preparing them for higher education, charm those from the spunk class were. I’ll neer for bind the first class I ever taught, with a group of sullen, nonresponsive works class kids, stuck in a wine cellar classroom that did not even have windows, taught by stack who didn’t overmuch care whether they learned anything or not. These kids knew it, too. They were not dumb, although the system certainly treated them that way.\r\nThey knew they were being prepared for jobs as mechanics and cashiers. And this was not an inside(a) city school, though, where the American class and caste system reveals itself at its most brutal. Question: Caste system? Dr. W. : Yes, in the coupled States, we have a long history of education segregated by color, with the worst schools always being silent for minority groups. Compare any versed city public school system today with those in the white suburbs, or with expensive cloistered schools fo r the upper classes, and you go out see the difference in close to two seconds.\r\nFor 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, support and so on. Conditions in these ghettoized schools and neighborhoods are not all that much better from those in developing countries…the types of places Freire was public lecture or so in his books. In 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 America’s inner city schools. Those institutions are programmed for failure.\r\nQuestion: But you never taught in inner city schools like those? I mean the types of schools that are like jails, with cops on duty, surface detectors and things like that? Dr. W. : No, my career has been mostly at the university level, and the students I’ve had were comparatively privileged by the standards of this worldâ€middle class or upper class. In the Middle East, I taught students from royalty and the aristocracy who had huge allowances every month, and in Asia I once taught students who arrived in limos with their own drivers. I wouldn’t say that they were exactly the oppressed masses Freire was describing.\r\nOn the other hand, I taught at a university in the former Soviet sexual union were about 60% of the students were on scholarships and came from more or less modest backgrounds. A lot of sight had also been hit hard by the collapse of the economy when the Soviet juncture ended. We even had a former whizz surgeon who ended up working as a janitor at the university, earning about $150 a month. The whole medical checkup and public education system was so far gone 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 plac e generation aft(prenominal) generation?\r\nDr. W. : Yes, that’s been mostly my experience. I think it’s designed to correspond that the children of the owners and the ruling class depart dumbfound 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 king 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?\r\nDr. W. : Absolutely never. The system is set up to do the opposite and it will usually forage out teachers who do not adjust to its requirements, unless they are protected by tenure. roughly teachers just go on and come in along, never rocking the boat because they are relatively powerless themselves and just need the paycheck. Moreover, parents of middle class and upper class studen ts do not want anyone to be liberated, but expect their children to conform to the systemâ€to discover that the family maintains its class position.\r\nQuestion: So addicted this reality, is there any way you can imagine that a truly liberating education system aptitude be formal? 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 subsequently long years of experience. He admitted that he had once been young and idealistic and might even have believed some of Freire’s ideas, but over the years he had found that there was really no meaningful way to put them into hold under the current system.\r\nIn 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 in spades no t interested 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 1960s during the era of the Vietnam War, counterculture and civil rights movements did students actually come to question the dominating set of society on a mass scale.\r\nThat 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 and entrepreneurs for a profit rather than to encourage captious thinking or humanistic values among the students. Only occasionally would rebels and nonconformists challenge this system, withdraw in very unusual diachronic circumstances. WORKS CITED Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy on the Oppressed. NY: Continuum, 2000. reference with ‘Dr. W. ’ by author, February 4, 2010. \r\n'