_Pedagogy of the Oppressed_ -- essentially reflections on Paulo Freire's experiences of adult education (educators working with mainly illiterate peasants struggling to break out of the culture of silence and dependency as co-investigators of the fetters on liberation) that are only possible in a context of social movements aiming for revolutionary transformation of society -- can inspire a tragicomedy in an American classroom, of the sort that Amardo Rodriguez evokes below:
<blockquote>Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of The Oppressed is a romantic book. It is laden with romantic images about teaching and the potential of teaching to change the world. Reading Freire is a rite of passage for those of us who enter academe with grand ambitions to save the world through education. But then we enter the classroom and meet the oppressed. It is rarely a pleasant experience. I hear endless complaints from colleagues of your apathy and indifference to the world. They say that you are especially hostile to readings that expose your racial and gender privilege. My colleagues are adamant about neutralizing your privilege in their classrooms. They warn that your privilege would be exposed. They are determined to create a safe space in their classroom for women and minorities. I empathize for I know exactly what their anguish is about. At the same time, you complain to me about my colleagues. You constantly feel like you are being attacked in the classroom, that you must apologize for who you are and what you happen to be believe and value. You are afraid of saying the wrong thing. You fear retribution from the class for your ignorance. You are afraid of being labeled something horrible. So you remain quiet in the classroom and let those who agree with my colleagues speak. But you remain resentful for being attacked for you are and what you believe. The classroom has become a site of aggression. How quickly has Freire been forsaken. For where is Freire's notion that no dialogue can occur in the classroom outside of love for the world and you? Or that in the face of your mistrust and suspicion it is still my responsibility "to seek out true avenues of communion" with you? Or that "the full pursuit of full humanity . . . cannot unfold" in a context of antagonism between you and I? ("Searching For Paulo Freire: Classnotes For My Students," _Radical Pedagogy_, 2005, <http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue6_2/rodriguez.html>)</blockquote>
While Freire's criticism of the banking model of education is widely applicable, including in the United States, a classroom in the United States usually cannot be a space for practicing Freire's pedagogy, for his pedagogy depends upon teachers and students sharing the aim of abolishing oppressions and transforming the world through social and cultural revolution -- the shared aim that does not exist in a classroom in the US education system today.
The best that professional teachers in the humanities and social sciences manage to do tends to be either to "teach the conflicts" in the fashion that Gerald Graff recommended (cf. _Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education_, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992) or to communicate their own love of subjects they teach or both. Both approaches have their merits, and I'm sure that some students get something out of either type of teaching.
>It seems to me that there was a unique moment in the history of this
>country, after WWII, when ordinary people had access to the kind of
>education previously reserved for the privileged few, brought real
>demands to the table, and forced reach change, became of force of
>democratization. It's not a coincidence that, according to public
>opinion surveys, Americans were most informed about social issues in
>the 60s (the tipping point was 1967).
The long thirties and sixties saw upsurges of class struggle and social movements, which impacted education, including post-secondary education, as well. While class struggle and social movements have never ceased to exist, we aren't exactly on the offensive today, which, too, limits what can be done, including in the educational system.
>If education were free (or close to it)
It isn't, but it should be. The United States has the most expensive post-secondary education system among rich nations: "Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Wales and Scotland - charge no fees at all. Tuition costs at public institutions in France were the equivalent of just $US 124 in the 2000/01 academic year. The remaining nations charged fees ranging from $US 1,375 in the Netherlands to over $US 3,500 in the United States. Amongst this group, Canada charged the third highest tuition fees" ("University Tuition Fees in Canada, 2003," _CAUT Education Review_ 5.1, <http://www.caut.ca/en/publications/educationreview/educationreview5-1.pdf>, September 2003, p.4). I'd recommend that teachers who read Freire quit talking mainly about their students' privileges and start discussing the problem of ever-rising tuitions and student debts inside and outside classrooms.
>Why now (and why here) all the apologetics over a dismal situation?
It's important to debunk the narrative of educational decline and "skills mismatch" theory as told by liberals and rightists, who have misrepresented facts to suit their political aim of further privatizing public education and justifying widening economic inequality.
lbo at inkworkswell.com lbo at inkworkswell.com,Sat Mar 5 13:20:45 PST 2005:
>IF schools are getting worse, they might say, that's all the more
>reason why schools need better funding. By drawing on comparative
>statistics, they could show that, say, Sweden does better because
>they spend more.
Comparative statistics on per-pupil expenditure on education and educational expenditure as percentage of GDP isn't particularly useful:
<blockquote>Compared to other countries, the United States spends the same amount per-student as France, less than Sweden and Canada, and more then Japan and West Germany. However, there is much range within the states. Alaska, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, for example all spend more than Sweden and Germany. Mississippi spends about as much as the countries who spend the least: Japan, Australia, Spain, and Hungary.
Another way of looking at the figures is to compute the amount of money spent on education as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product in other G-7 countries. In the primary and secondary level, the United States and France spent about 4.6 percent of GDP in 1994-95. Canada spent 6.1 percent. Japan spent the least: 3.1 percent. The distribution of levels of expenditure across states and countries was quite similar. Montana, Canada, West Virginia, Vermont, and New Mexico had the highest levels of educational expenditure as a percentage of GDP (6.0 percent or above). The lowest levels were found in Japan, Nevada, West Germany, and Delaware (3.3 percent or less). ("School Funding," <http://www.pbs.org/newshour/backgrounders/school_funding.html>)</blockquote>
What's wrong in the United States is radical economic inequality -- which in itself would have deleterious impacts on education of working-class children even if schools they attended were the best funded in the world and getting better every year -- and radical inequality in school funding (through localized property taxes) and creeping privatization (shifting the costs of post-secondary education from the public to individual students). The former has even more negative impacts on working-class children than the latter. Focus on actually existing inequalities for which we have plenty of evidence. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>