Pedagology of the Oppressed Essay

A c atomic number 18ful analysis of the larner-student dealingship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundawork forcetally account character. The relationship involves a narrating re beat (the teacher) and patient, listening inclinations (the students). The confine, whether values or empirical di handssions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. fostering is suffering from narration sickness.The teacher dialogue about reality as if it were motionless, static, com partmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to fill the students with the contents of his narration contents which argon detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them signifi kindlece. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.The outstanding characteri stic of this account study, then, is the sonority of words, non their transforming power. Four times four is sixteen the capital of Par is Belm. The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really doer, or realizing the true signifi hindquartersce of capital in the affirmation the capital of Par is Belm, that is, what Belm means for Par and what Par means for Brazil. reading (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into containers, into receptacles to be filled by the teacher. The more than than completely he fills the receptacles, the better a teacher he is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqus and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the banking model of upbringing, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends yet as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. unless in the eventually analysis, it is men themselves who are filed away done the lack of creativity, transformation, and k outrightledge in this (at best) misguided outline. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, men can non be truly hu piece being. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the reality, with the hu small-arms and with each other.In the banking purpose of preparation, knowledge is a largess bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nonhing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto othe rs, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates bringing up and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own organism. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teachers existence still, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.The raison dtre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must(prenominal) begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by cooperative the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and workouts, which mirror oppressive companionship as a w holea) the teacher teaches and the students are taught b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing c) the teacher thinks and the students are suasion about d) the teacher talks and the students listen meekly e) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply g) the teacher acts and the students have the fondness of acting through the action of the teacher h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the exemption of the students j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students impart at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they larn the crit ical brain which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive character reference imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented experience of reality deposited in them.The capability of banking education to disparage or annul the students fictive power and to stimulate their credulity actions the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their humanitarianism to pre table service a profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in changing the spirit of the loaded, not the situation which oppresses them1 f or the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this end, the oppressors use the banking concept of education in conjunction with a paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of welfare recipients.They are treated as individual cases, as marginal men who deviate from the general configuration of a good, organized, and just society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society, which must because adjust these incompetent and lazy folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be integrated, incorporated into the healthy society that they have forsaken.The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not marginals, are not men living outside society. They have always been inside inside the structure which made them beings for others. The solution is not to integrate them into the structure of oppression, but to tra nsform that structure so that they can become beings for themselves. Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors purposes hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to bar the threat of student conscientizaco.The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never propose to students that they critically consider reality. It will deal instead with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat, and insist upon the importance of learning that, on the contrary, Roger gave green grass to the rabbit. The humanism of the banking approach masks the attack to turn men into automatons the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human. They may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation. If men are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the postulate for their liberation.But the humanist, subversive educator cannot wait for this possibility to materialize. From the outset, his efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in men and their creative power. To achieve this, he must be a partner of the students in his relations with them.The banking concept does not admit to such partnership and necessarily so. To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to exchange the role of depositor, prescriber, domesticator, for the role of student among students would be to undermine the power of oppression and serve the cause of liberation.Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between man and the world man is merely in the world, not with the world or with others man is spectator, not re-creator. In this view, man is not a conscious being (corpo consciente) he is quite an the possessor of instinct an empty reason passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside. For example, my desk, my books, my coffee cup, all the objects before me as bits of the world which surrounds me would be inside me, exactly as I am inside my study right now. This view makes no distinction between being accessible to consciousness and entering consciousness. The distinction, however, is essential the objects which surround me are simply accessible to my consciousness, not located within it. I am aware of them, but they are not inside me.It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educators role is to regulate the way the world enters into the students. His task is to organize a process which already occurs spontaneously, to fill the students by making deposits of data which he considers to constitute true knowledge.2 And since men receive the world as passive ent ities, education should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated man is the adapted man, because he is better fit for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquillity rests on how well men fit the world the oppressors have created, and how small they question it.The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant minority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their own purposes), the more easily the minority can broaden to prescribe. The theory and practice of banking education serve this end quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements,3 the orders for evaluating knowledge, the distance between the teacher and the taught, the criteria for promotion everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to egest thinking.The bank-clerk educator does not realize that there is no true security in his hypertrophied role, that one must seek to live with others in solidarity. unitary cannot impose oneself, nor even merely co-exist with ones students. Solidarity requires true communication, and the concept by which such an educator is guided fears and prescribes communication.Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teachers thinking I authenticated only by the authenticity of the students thinking. The teacher cannot think for his students, nor can he impose his thought on them. true(p) thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.Because banking education begins with a false understanding of men as objects, it cannot promote the development of what Fromm calls biophily, but instead produces its opposite necrophily.While life is characterized by growth in a struct ured, functional manner, the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the entrust to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things.Memory, rather than experience having, rather than being, is what counts. The necrophilous person can relate to an object a flower or a person only if he possesses it hence a threat to his self-command is a threat to himself if he loses possession he loses contact with the worldHe loves crack, and in the act of controlling he kills life.4Oppressionoverwhelming controlis necrophilic it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men to adjust to the w orld, and inhibits their creative power.When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find themselves unable to use their faculties, men suffer. This suffering due to impotence is rooted in the very circumstance that the human equilibrium has been disturbed.5 But the inability to act which causes mens anguish also causes them to reject their impotence, by attemptingto restore their capacity to act. But can they, and how? unmatchedway is to submit to and identify with a person or group having power.By this symbolic participation in another persons life, men havethe illusion of acting, when in reality they only submit to andbecome a part of those who act.6Populist manifestations perhaps best exemplify this type of behaviour by the oppressed, who, by identifying with charismatic leaders, come to touch that they themselves are active and effective. The rebellion they express as they emerge in the historical process is motivated by that desire to act effectively. The dominant elites consider the remedy to be more domination and repression, carried out in the name of freedom, order, and social peace (that is, the peace of the elites). Thus they can condemnlogically, from the point of viewthe violence of a strike by workers and can call upon the state in the same breath to use violence in putting down the strike.7Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. This electric charge is not made in the nave hope that the dominant elites will thereby simply abandon the practice. Its objective is to call the attention of true humanists to the fact that they cannot use banking educational methods in the pursuit of liberation for they would only negate that very pursuit. Nor may a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society. The revolutionary society which practices banking edu cation is either misguided or mistrusting of men. In either event, it is threatened by the spectre of reaction.Unfortunately, those who espouse the cause of liberation are themselves surrounded and influenced by the climate which generates the banking concept, and often do not perceive its true significance or its dehumanizing power. Paradoxically, then, they utilize this same instrument of alienation in what they consider an effort to liberate. Indeed, some revolutionaries brand as innocents, dreamers, or even reactionaries those who would challenge this educational practice. But one does not liberate men by alienating them.Authentic liberationthe process of humanizationis not another deposit to be made in men. Liberation is a praxis the action and reflection of men upon their world in order to transform it. Those truly committed to the cause of liberation can accept neither the mechanistic concept of consciousness as an empty vessel to be filled, not the use of banking methods of domination (propaganda, slogansdeposits) in the name of liberation.Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of man as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and tack it with the posing of the problems of men in their relations with the world. Problem-posing education, responding to the essence of consciousnessintentionalityrejects communiqus and embodies communication. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian splitconsciousness as consciousness of consciousness.Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far from being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actorsteacher on the one hand and stu dents on the other. Accordingly, the practice of problem-posing education entails at the outset that the teacher-student contradiction be resolved. Dialogical relationsindispensable to the capacity of cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable objectare otherwise impossible.Indeed, problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical patterns characteristic of banking education, can fulfil its function as the practice of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction. finished dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges teacher-student with student-teachers. 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. In this process, arguments based on authority are no longer valid in order to function, authority must be on th e side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. Men teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are owned by the teacher.The banking concept (with its tendency to dichotomize everything) distinguishes two stages in the action of the educator. During the first, he cognizes a cognizable object while he prepares his lessons in his study or his laboratory during the second, he expounds to his students about that object. The students are not called upon to know, but to memorize the contents narrated by the teacher. Nor do the students practice any act of cognition, since the object towards which that act should be directed is the property of the teacher rather than a medium evoking the critical reflection of both teacher and students. Hence in the name of the preservation of culture and knowledge we have a system which achieves neither true knowledge nor true culture.The problem-posing method do es not dichotomize the activity of the teacher-student he is not cognitive at one point and narrative at another. He is always cognitive, whether preparing a project or engaging in dialogue with the students. He does not regard cognizable objects as his hidden property, but as the object of reflection by himself and the students. In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The studentsno longer docile listenersare now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers his earlier considerations as the students express their own. The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos.Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness the last mentioned strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and make to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed.Education as the practice of freedom as opposed to education as the practice of domination denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart f rom men. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without men, but men in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it.La conscience et le monde sont dorms dun meme coupextrieur par essence la conscience, le monde est, paressence relative elle.8In one of our culture circles in Chile, the group was discussing (based on a codification9) the anthropological concept of culture. In the midst of the discussion, a peasant who by banking standards was completely ignorant said Now I see that without man there is no world. When the educator responded Lets say, for the sake of argument, that all the men on earth were to die, but that the earth itself remained, together with trees, birds, animals, rivers, seas, the starswouldnt all this be a world? Oh no, the peasant replied emphatically. There would be no one to say This is a world.The peasant wished to express the idea that there would be lacking the consciousness of the world which necessarily implies the world of consciousness. I cannot exist without a not-I. In turn, the not-I depends on that existence. The world which brings consciousness into existence becomes the world of that consciousness. Hence, the antecedently cited affirmation of Sartre La conscience et le monde sont dorms dun m coup.As men, simultaneously reflecting on themselves and on the world, increase the scope of their cognition, they begin to direct their observations towards previously inconspicuous phenomenaThat which had existed objectively but had not been perceived in its deeper implications (if indeed it was perceived at all) begins to stand out, assuming the character of a problem and therefore of challenge. Thus, men begin to single out elements from their background awarenesses and to reflect upon them. These elements are now objects of mens consideration, and, as such, objects of their action and cognition.In pr oblem-posing education, men develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. Although the dialectical relations of men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action men adopt is to a large result a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-student and the student-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action. at a time again, the two educational concepts and practices under analysis come into conflict. Banking education (for obvious reasons) attempts, by mythicizing reality, to conceal certain facts which explain the way men exist in the world proble m-posing education sets itself the task of demythologizing. Banking education resists dialogue problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality.Banking education treats students as objects of assistance problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers. Banking education inhibits creativity and domesticates (although it cannot completely destroy) the intentionality of consciousness by isolating consciousness from the world, thereby denying men their ontological and historical vocation of becoming more fully human. Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of men as beings who are authentic only when prosecute in inquiry and creative transformation. In sum banking theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating forces, fail to acknowledge men as historical beings problem-posing theory and practice take mans historicity as their starting point.Problem-posing education affirms men as beings in the process of becoming as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality. Indeed, in contrast to other animals who are unfinished, but not historical, men know themselves to be unfinished they are aware of their incompletion. In this incompletion and this awareness lie the very roots of education as an exclusively human manifestation. The unfinished character of men and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.Education is thus constantly remade in the praxis. In order to be, it must become. Its duration (in the Bergsonian meaning of the word) is found in the interplay of the opposites permanence and change. The banking method emphasizes permanence and becomes reactionary problem-posing educationwhich accepts neither a well-behaved present nor a predetermined futureroots itself in the dynamic present and becomes revolutionary.Problem-p osing education is revolutionary futurity. Hence it is prophetic (and, as such, hopeful). Hence, it corresponds to the historical nature of man. Hence, it affirms men as beings who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, for whom immobility represents a inglorious threat, for whom looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future. Hence, it identifies with the movement which engages men as beings aware of their incompletionan historical movement which has its point of departure, its Subjects and its objective.The point of departure of the movement lies in men themselves. But since men do not exist apart from the world, apart from reality, the movement must begin with the men-world relationship. Accordingly, the point of departure must always be with men in the here and now, which constitutes the situation within which they are submerged, from which they emerge, and in which they intervene. Only by starting from this situationwhich determines their perception of itcan they begin to move. To do this authentically they must perceive their state not as fated and unalterable, but merely as limitingand therefore challenging.Whereas the banking method directly or indirectly reinforces mens fatalistic perception of their situation, the problem-posing method presents this very situation to them as a problem. As the situation becomes the object of their cognition, the nave or witching(prenominal) perception which produced their fatalism gives way to perception which is able to perceive itself even as it perceives reality, and can thus be critically objective about that reality.A deepened consciousness of their situation leads men to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation. Resignation gives way to the drive for transformation and inquiry, over which men feel themselves to be in control. If men, as historical beings necessaril y engaged with other men in a movement of inquiry, did not control that movement, it would be (and is) a violation of mens humanity. Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important to alienate men from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.This movement of inquiry must be directed towards humanizationmans historical vocation. The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity therefore it cannot expand in the antagonistic relations between oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so. Attempting to be more human, individualistically, leads to having more, egotistically a form of dehumanization. Not that it is not implicit in(p) to have in order to be human. Precisely because it is necessary, some mens having must not be allowed to constitute an obstacle to others having, must not consolidate the power of the former to crush the latter.Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as fundamental that men subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation. To that end, it enables teachers and students to become Subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and an alienating intellectualism it also enables men to overcome their false perception of reality. The worldno longer something to be described with deceptive wordsbecomes the object of that transforming action by men which results in their humanization.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? While only a revolutionary society can ladder out this education in systematic terms, the revolutionary leaders need to take full power before they can employ the method. In the revolutionary process, the leaders cannot utilize the banking method as an interim measure, justified on grounds of expediency, with the intention of later behaving in a genuinely revolutionary fashion. They must be revolutionarythat is to say, dialogicalfrom the outset.