Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor. No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why?
Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated.
Implicit in the banking concept [of education] is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others…In this view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty “mind” passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside.
https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf
I have a somewhat tortured relationship with Freire as a teacher.
I think it’s important theory, and really helpful for thinking about what education might look like under socialism. However, it’s also big in “progressive” education circles (I first encountered it in my Masters program), and they are totally unwilling to grapple with the contradictions of what it means to practice a “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” while teaching under capitalism. Friere was writing about education in a revolutionary context and that’s not easily separable from the theory. Very annoying to watch a bunch of libs fail to understand this in real time and be like “Wow, maybe we can have some more student-led discussions!”
That seems like entirely a problem with the reception of the work and not the work itself. Have you tried explaining to these teachers that he very explicitly means something more radical than the practices of some hippy liberal arts college?
Have you ever tried explaining something to a liberal?
But yeah this is not a criticism of the work itself
I have, and I often fail but I still succeed like 20% of the time if they can be moved to take an interest in the subject, and I succeed closer to half the time if I carefully rein in the scope of my claims.
related to this, I feel like hexbear lemmy outreach should focus harder on exposing Adrian Zenz and less on defending China as a whole to people who are not yet open to that.
the last time I tried it I was upvoted in the thread and the person I was talking to seemed to take it to heart
Yeah, you need to have focus, not because the bigger position is unreasonable but because it opens up a thousand different tangents that you will get people going on and the conversation can never productively resolve. Instead, just undermine the more important of those tangents one at a time in a very deliberate way, setting up the scope of your claims so it is very clear what you are saying and not saying and dismissing subjects (for the time being) that exceed that scope. You can transform the way someone views the general subject over time without ever needing to address it because that general subject is an accumulation of the more specific ones.