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
of course it’s selfish. being alive under capitalism is selfish. it’s not a useful moral observation unless you are willing to go ahead and accept the Puritan premise that feeling nice things is bad. The observation that having kids is selfish is going to always lead to reactionary and individualized prescription for inaction unless you can couple it to a feeling that kids are a dialectal synthesis of human being, something that is both the self and greater than the self. me being alive rn creates the same amount of carbon etc. and by that logic, i should kill myself and everyone around me.
It definitely leads to a lot of reactionary emotions if left unchecked and ultimately the root of existentialism as you bring up in the question “why shouldn’t I kill myself”
To me I see it as a decision that hasn’t already been made (having a kid) vs one that has (already existing as a person), but ultimately if I see carrying capacity and overpopulation arguments as bunk then even Western population growth should be viewed through the same lense. It’s a problem created via capitalism that individuals are then punished for or expected to respond to via individual action.
My biggest difficulty is understanding internally where the delineation between the hyperbolic metaphor of driving a big truck vs biking is from an environmental perspective with regards to kids and other ostensibly “bad” for the environment activities