Chapter 2 of Pedegogy of the Oppressed

             Based on our class discussions so far, primarily of giving our students a voice and the teacher learning right along with the students, this is a very appropriate reading.  Chapter 2 of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed gives a highly contrarian view of our first reading, Discussion in a Democratic society.  Freire’s reading is a direct contradiction to discussion in a classroom, where full participation by each student is strongly encouraged.  I don’t believe that any teacher in America will seek to “dehumanize” their students this way, nor see them as depositories of information given by the “authority,” the teacher.  Freire’s reading, however, does highlight the need for us as teachers to allow our students to think critically, and to be cognizant learners and not “passive” entities.

                Being apparently from an oppressive society, Freire uncovers the dark world where young minds are not nurtured, but instead “adapted.” Where reality is a given, and not explored.  Fortunately, the United States is too advanced and liberalized to devolve in to this kind of oppression.  He gives us concepts that we here in the US take for granted, such as “teacher-student with students-teachers” through dialogue.  He calls the opposite of this the teacher-student contradiction to where “the teacher knows everything and the student knows nothing,” and how that must be reconciled.  He gives a pretty chilling example of what an oppressed person would say on page 7, where the peasant replies, “There would be no one to say: ‘This is a world.’”

                Paulo Freire validates this “problem-posing” education that we seem to already do in abundance in America, to aspiring teachers.  Problem-posing education, as opposed to the banking system of educating that he criticizes, develops in the students their power to perceive critically, to stimulate their critical faculties.  He vividly illustrates that the banking method “directly or indirectly reinforces men’s fatalistic perception of their situation.”  A very dark and frightening world of no hope if allowed to persist.  The much more enlightened and liberating problem-posing method, on the other hand, presents the fatalistic perception as a problem, an object of the learner’s cognition, and how to move against it.