#3quotes from Freire

One of the most valued books in my personal education library is Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. If you are a teacher but haven't yet read it, I thoroughly recommend it - this book is a game changer. Here I present some of my annotations to accompany three classic quotes from the book, to get you started:

Freire is critical of the transmission method found in schools, in which what he calls the 'banking concept', is consistently applied. This is where teachers play the role of the 'knowledgable', and students adopt the role of the 'ignorant'. It's a prevalent technique that teachers everywhere can fall into the trap of perpetrating on their students. He writes that this assumption

"... turns them into 'containers', into 'receptacles' to be 'filled' by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are." (p 53)

It's interesting to see how this approach in schools is currently welcomed and actively encouraged by governments who wish to see teaching 'done' to students, and to gather data about how much students can recall the information they have had deposited in their receptacles - as measures of 'effective' education. Freire isn't finished with his demolition of schooling though. He believes that the transmission method of education is undergirded by an ideology of control and oppression. It comes from assumptions that students are devoid of knowledge and that teachers are the arbiters of knowledge:

"Projecting an absolute ignorance on others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry." (p 53)

The tragedy of students accepting this passive recipient role, says Freire, is that they never discover that they are in turn educating their teacher. Education should be dialogical, he argues, for the benefit of all. As a desirable alternative to the transmission mode of teaching, Freire recommends dialogic, narrative forms of pedagogy and what he terms 'problem-posing education' where students are confronted with challenges to actively engage with. Freire is adamant that teaching and education should allow everyone to grow, and freely learn to reach their potentials, and in so doing shrug off oppression:

"The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught, also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow." (p 61)

I welcome this approach and the ethos that guides it.

NB: In upcoming posts I aim to feature #3quotes from several more of my favourite education classics.

Reference
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin.

#3quotes from Freire by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.