#ctchat
By requiring a man to behave mechanically, mass production domesticates him. By separating his activity from the total project, requiring no critical attitude toward production, it dehumanizes him. By excessively narrowing a man’s specialization, it constricts his horizons, making of him a passive, fearful, naïve being.
” from Paulo Freire’s ‘Education vs. Massification’#democracy
Prescriptive #education (i.e., public education) serves to distance learners and teachers alike from their social reality. The needs of individuals and communities are never given the time of day, as we mindlessly accept curriculum from the State. Rather than educating our students critically, we busy their minds with distractions that will ultimately prevent them from ever completely participating in an open society. Until education seeks to help learners analyze their worlds critically, we will all remain passive victims of a distant ruling class.
0044: We need conversations, not evaluations
#teacher #teaching #edchat
I was formally evaluated the other day and met expectations in every single area. For starters, that is bullshit. I have become fairly effective at what I do. I’m professional, I’m abreast current trends in educational research, I follow policy, and even do some advocacy work from time to time. I “have it together”. I’m a good classroom manager, that is, I seldom send kids to the office because I handle problems internally. Good for me. But, does this shining evaluation reflect beyond the fact that I am liked by my principal? The form is simple, all it requires the evaluator to do is circle or check certain competencies. So, I perform a dog and pony show that is a version of what happens everyday in my classroom. Again, I “know how to teach”. But, these evaluations don’t reflect what always goes on in class. It doesn’t reflect the struggle to teach when things go awry. It doesn’t reflect the struggle to get a single point across, much less have students retain something when several students decide they’re not going to learn today. And most important, it doesn’t reflect my internal struggle. I love teaching and I hate it. I want to quit, but I don’t know what else to do. I want to stay, but I could do other things. I’m not challenged fully, but my hands are full. I’m frustrated, and angry, and joyful, and disgruntled. I’m fighting a losing battle and loving it. Who asks about this stuff? Why aren’t these things a part of evaluation?
I’m not knocking a good evaluation. I just wonder why. And what if I wasn’t liked? Teachers and principals need to be more interlinked. There needs to be an ongoing discourse that brings up problems and solves them collaboratively. These evals are just an extension of the banking model of education that plagues our education system. We need intimate conversation, not distant evaluation.
0041: An Educator’s Guide: Learning to consume together! (Hey, what about creating together?)
#teaching #edchat #rebellion #consumer
Each day students awaken from their sweet dreams in their rich and peaceful 3 car garage homes in white neighborhoods and come to schools where their reveries can continue. Because of their natural privilege they are allowed to enter classrooms that have a marvelous curriculum of consumption. Fortunate students are blessed to “sit-and-get” knowledge each day that will allow them to perform well on their standardized tests. These standardized tests allow them to be given numeric values as human beings. Note: there is nothing more humanizing than a numeric value. These numeric values allow them to be properly sorted for better processing. It helps the schools decide how much remediation material to purchase. Luckily, almost everyone needs remediation materials of some sort. Numbered people need remediation. Usually these remedial people have strange behavior patterns that must be managed. They often squirm around and try to force their teacher-depositor to chase rabbits. The chasing of rabbits is strictly prohibited, as it distracts from what is truly important. If these remedial humans continue to chase rabbits, they can be remediated with medication. Then they will no long distract from what is important. Sometimes the teachers need remediation, especially if they insist on wasting time with discussing and reteaching material that was already consumed at its determined time on the pacing guide. These teachers usually learn to behave with a simple reprimand, but many of them need to be put on improvement plans. We must accept that the curriculum is designed and scheduled by someone who is an absolute expert. They specialize in curriculum mapping. They know the curriculum. That’s their only job. They don’t have time to waste with students and pesky misbehaving teachers. Sometimes, too, principals try to interfere with the process of organizing the numbered individuals, by defending certain practices that rebellious teachers implement. These rogue principals can usually be reprimanded, or relocated, or terminated. So, there’s no need to worry there.
It’s of the utmost importance that we as educator-depositors remember to avoid collaboration and discussion with our peers. We have consumers to groom. We must model, by properly swallowing each pill we are given. Lead by example, they say. And, we shall! Be a leader. Lead by following. We have consumers to groom.
Finally, we must remember that the task of creation should always go to someone else. This could also be said for collaboration. Education should not concern itself with creation or collaboration. Consumption is the goal. Otherwise, our economy will fail and we will have to rely on one another. How awful.
Really?
![brunomarconi:
Theoretical contributions of Paulo Freire
“There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”—Richard Shaull, drawing on Paulo Freire[3]
Paulo Freire contributed a philosophy of education that came not only from the more classical approaches stemming from Plato, but also from modern Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers. In fact, in many ways his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) may be best read as an extension of, or reply to, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which emphasized the need to provide native populations with an education which was simultaneously new and modern (rather than traditional) and anti-colonial (not simply an extension of the culture of the colonizer).
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Freire, reprising the oppressors-oppressed distinction, differentiates between the two positions in an unjust society, the oppressor and the oppressed. Freire makes no direct reference to his most direct influence for the distinction, which stems back at least as far as Hegel in 1802, and has since been reprised by many authors including Engels, Marx, Lenin, Gramsci,Simone Weil and others.
Freire advocates that education should allow the oppressed to regain their humanity and overcome their condition. However, he acknowledges that in order for this to take effect, the oppressed have to play a role in their own liberation. As he states:
No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption (Freire, 1970, p. 54).[4]
Likewise, the oppressors must also be willing to rethink their way of life and to examine their own role in the oppression if true liberation is to occur; “those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly” (Freire, 1970, p. 60).
Freire believed education to be a political act that could not be divorced from pedagogy. Freire defined this as a main tenet of critical pedagogy. Teachers and students must be made aware of the “politics” that surround education. The way students are taught and what they are taught serves a political agenda. Teachers, themselves, have political notions they bring into the classroom (Kincheloe, 2008).[5]Freire believed that “education makes sense because women and men learn that through learning they can make and remake themselves, because women and men are able to take responsibility for themselves as beings capable of knowing — of knowing that they know and knowing that they don’t” (Freire, 2004, p. 15)[6]
Banking model of education
In terms of actual pedagogy, Freire is best-known for his attack on what he called the “banking” concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. He notes that “it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power” (Freire, 1970, p. 77). The basic critique was not new — Rousseau’s conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from tabula rasa (which is basically the same as the “banking concept”). In addition, thinkers like John Dewey were strongly critical of the transmission of mere facts as the goal of education. Dewey often described education as a mechanism for social change, explaining that “education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction” (1897, p. 16).[7] Freire’s work, however, updated the concept and placed it in context with current theories and practices of education, laying the foundation for what is now called critical pedagogy.
Student-teacher dualism
More challenging is Freire’s strong aversion to the teacher-student dichotomy. This dichotomy is admitted in Rousseau and constrained in Dewey, but Freire comes close to insisting that it be completely abolished. This is hard to imagine in absolute terms, since there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship, but what Freire suggests is that a deep reciprocity be inserted into our notions of teacher and student. He goes so far as to say that “Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously students and teachers” (Freire, 1970, p. 72). Freire wants us to think in terms of teacher-student and student-teacher – that is, a teacher who learns and a learner who teaches – as the basic roles of classroom participation. Freire however insists that educator and student, though sharing democratic social relations of education, are not on an equal footing, but the educator must be humble enough to be disposed to relearn that which s/he already thinks s/he knows, through interaction with the learner. The authority which the educator enjoys must not be allowed to degenerate into authoritarianism; teachers must recognize that “their fundamental objective is to fight alongside the people for the recovery of the people’s stolen humanity”, not to “win the people over” to their side (Freire, 1970, p. 95).
Culture of silence
According to Freire, the system of dominant social relations create a culture of silence that instills a negative, silenced and suppressed self-image into the oppressed. The learner must develop a critical consciousness in order to recognize that this culture of silence is created to oppress.[8] Also, a culture of silence can cause the “dominated individuals [to] lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture.”[9] Social domination of race and class are interleaved into the conventional educational system, through which the “culture of silence” eliminates the “paths of thought that lead to a language of critique”[10]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lt8py4uRIn1qj0y1to1_500.jpg)
Theoretical contributions of Paulo Freire
“There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”—Richard Shaull, drawing on Paulo Freire[3]Paulo Freire contributed a philosophy of education that came not only from the more classical approaches stemming from Plato, but also from modern Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers. In fact, in many ways his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) may be best read as an extension of, or reply to, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which emphasized the need to provide native populations with an education which was simultaneously new and modern (rather than traditional) and anti-colonial (not simply an extension of the culture of the colonizer).
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Freire, reprising the oppressors-oppressed distinction, differentiates between the two positions in an unjust society, the oppressor and the oppressed. Freire makes no direct reference to his most direct influence for the distinction, which stems back at least as far as Hegel in 1802, and has since been reprised by many authors including Engels, Marx, Lenin, Gramsci,Simone Weil and others.
Freire advocates that education should allow the oppressed to regain their humanity and overcome their condition. However, he acknowledges that in order for this to take effect, the oppressed have to play a role in their own liberation. As he states:
No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption (Freire, 1970, p. 54).[4]
Likewise, the oppressors must also be willing to rethink their way of life and to examine their own role in the oppression if true liberation is to occur; “those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly” (Freire, 1970, p. 60).
Freire believed education to be a political act that could not be divorced from pedagogy. Freire defined this as a main tenet of critical pedagogy. Teachers and students must be made aware of the “politics” that surround education. The way students are taught and what they are taught serves a political agenda. Teachers, themselves, have political notions they bring into the classroom (Kincheloe, 2008).[5]Freire believed that “education makes sense because women and men learn that through learning they can make and remake themselves, because women and men are able to take responsibility for themselves as beings capable of knowing — of knowing that they know and knowing that they don’t” (Freire, 2004, p. 15)[6]
Banking model of education
In terms of actual pedagogy, Freire is best-known for his attack on what he called the “banking” concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. He notes that “it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power” (Freire, 1970, p. 77). The basic critique was not new — Rousseau’s conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from tabula rasa (which is basically the same as the “banking concept”). In addition, thinkers like John Dewey were strongly critical of the transmission of mere facts as the goal of education. Dewey often described education as a mechanism for social change, explaining that “education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction” (1897, p. 16).[7] Freire’s work, however, updated the concept and placed it in context with current theories and practices of education, laying the foundation for what is now called critical pedagogy.
Student-teacher dualism
More challenging is Freire’s strong aversion to the teacher-student dichotomy. This dichotomy is admitted in Rousseau and constrained in Dewey, but Freire comes close to insisting that it be completely abolished. This is hard to imagine in absolute terms, since there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship, but what Freire suggests is that a deep reciprocity be inserted into our notions of teacher and student. He goes so far as to say that “Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously students and teachers” (Freire, 1970, p. 72). Freire wants us to think in terms of teacher-student and student-teacher – that is, a teacher who learns and a learner who teaches – as the basic roles of classroom participation. Freire however insists that educator and student, though sharing democratic social relations of education, are not on an equal footing, but the educator must be humble enough to be disposed to relearn that which s/he already thinks s/he knows, through interaction with the learner. The authority which the educator enjoys must not be allowed to degenerate into authoritarianism; teachers must recognize that “their fundamental objective is to fight alongside the people for the recovery of the people’s stolen humanity”, not to “win the people over” to their side (Freire, 1970, p. 95).
Culture of silence
According to Freire, the system of dominant social relations create a culture of silence that instills a negative, silenced and suppressed self-image into the oppressed. The learner must develop a critical consciousness in order to recognize that this culture of silence is created to oppress.[8] Also, a culture of silence can cause the “dominated individuals [to] lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture.”[9] Social domination of race and class are interleaved into the conventional educational system, through which the “culture of silence” eliminates the “paths of thought that lead to a language of critique”[10]
