[iDC] Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education Is Being Taken Over by the Mega Rich

[Nagarjuna G]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 9:47 PM, Trebor Scholz <scholzt at newschool.edu> wrote:
> Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education Is Being Taken Over
> by the Mega Rich
>
> <http://www.truth-out.org/lessons-be-learned-from-paulo-freire-education-is-being-taken-over-mega-rich65363>
>
>
> Tuesday 23 November 2010
> by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
>
> “For Freire, pedagogy was central to a formative culture that makes both
> critical consciousness and social action possible. Pedagogy in this
> sense connected learning to social change; it was a project and
> provocation that challenged students to critically engage with the world
> so they could act on it.”
>
> “What Freire made clear is that pedagogy at its best is not about
> training in techniques and methods, nor does it involve coercion or
> political indoctrination. Indeed, far from a mere method or an a priori
> technique to be imposed on all students, education is a political and
> moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills and social relations
> that enable students to explore for themselves the possibilities of what
> it means to be engaged citizens, while expanding and deepening their
> participation in the promise of a substantive democracy.”
>
> “Critical pedagogy, for Freire, meant imagining literacy as not simply
> the mastering of specific skills, but also as a mode of intervention, a
> way of learning about and reading the word as a basis for intervening in
> the world.”
>

Indeed.  It makes sense to discuss how the post-industrial schools
have merely become factories for producing more and more
clerks/workers for filling in the vacancies the developing industrial
society required.  Paulo reminds us that delivering education in a
project mode or activity based education is not enough, we need to go
a step further and make it activist based education (political),
studying the actions of the ctor, motivations and consequences as
well.

--
Nagarjuna
http://lab.gnowledge.org/