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Paulo Freire had great faith in the minds and potential of humans; he saw education as a tool for liberating people and giving them the consciousness to recognise their place in what he saw as an oppressive society and their ability to change it. Freire believed that to be a liberating teacher you must have faith in human beings. Freire saw education as politics: it can be used to domesticate people to accept the status quo or can challenge people to question the status quo and realise that social change is possible. Freire?s pedagogy is revolutionary; it is a demand for human liberation not just educational reform.
The Freirian pedagogy would reinvent the education system as we know it. Freire wanted to transform classrooms from places where teachers teach and students passively listen, into places of where teachers pose problems in dialogue with their students. Freire argues that the traditional method of education, so far from empowering youth, actually stunts their potential in order to prepare them for a life of labour within an oppressive system.
Freire identifies three stages of consciousness, with the highest stage, ?critical consciousness?, as the goal of his pedagogy. The first stage is what Freire calls ?fatalistic? consciousness - thinking that your actions can change nothing, leaving your fate completely in the hands of luck or God ? the second stage is ?semi-transitive? consciousness, where people realise that they can make some kind of change but believe themselves to be relatively insignificant. These people will often look to charismatic leaders to solve society?s problems. Critical consciousness is a step above both of these it gives people the ability to critically think about the problems in society and to work effectively for social change, which means also recognising where power lies in society and who it is used in favour of.
There are four aspects of critical consciousness : Power Awareness, which is the understanding of how power is organised and used and realising that it can be remade by human action and by organised groups; Critical Literacy, which is the ability to think analytically and to apply meaning to your own context; Desocialisation, which is being able to recognise and challenge things that are learnt in mass culture, especially negative things like racism, sexism, homophobia, hero worship, consumerism, national chauvinism, individualism, militarism, and class bias; and Self Education or Organisation, which means taking an active role in your own education, overcoming the anti-intellectualism that is induced by mass education, and taking part in social change.
Freire also stresses the importance of what kind of relationship teachers have with their students. The Freirian classroom relies on real democracy, where teachers do not speak of democracy and then act in an authoritarian way and where students have an opportunity to decide what should be discussed and learnt. But Freire?s teachers would not just be equal participants, no different from their students; Freire insists on the academic rigour of classes and, interestingly, recommends that teachers dedicate themselves to the anthropological study of their students, learning their language and culture so that they can better relate to their students and not only teach them but learn from them also.
Freire?s pedagogy put simply is that students should be able to take an active part in their own education and learn through dialogue and problem posing with the teacher in a truly democratic setting and that this will give them, and their teachers, not only a fuller and more conscious education but the ability to question the status quo, question society and realise that they can take an active role in making it more democratic.
It is true though that the society that surrounds the education system can limit it and Freire himself realises that his pedagogy is restricted by this; ?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? only a revolutionary society can carry out this education in systematic terms
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The central question that Freire?s pedagogy poses is whether our society is oppressive, do we need liberating? There can be no doubt that the systematic oppression that Freire identified in Brazil is also a defining ? and worsening - feature of New Zealand society. The hierarchical nature of our society is distinguishable in many ways; in our ?democracy? the majority of people are given the opportunity to voice their opinions once every three years, we get the chance to vote our ?superiors? into government and what they do for the next three years is up to them or the business that funds them. On a more everyday level there are hierarchical systems like the work place and education where the majority of people have little or no say in their operation.
Issues that Freire described when talking about desocialisation are apparent in hierarchical societies like ours, where an unequal number of women and Maori are confined to the masses with little or no voice in society, racism and sexism is inevitable. Militarism runs riot, the United States is a prime example of how dangerous this can be; it is not a democratic society when one man, with very little sense and a lot of funding, can go against the obvious public opinion to declare war on a country. New Zealand too is guilty of militarism, sending troops to Iraq and to Afghanistan in fear of losing trade with more powerful nations.
The need for the liberating education that Freire describes in his pedagogy is necessary in our society, and the education that we receive can be identified with the ?banking style? education Freire criticises. Even at university students should be able to sympathise with Freire?s concerns, an example is the course reader for Education 101 - the sheer size of it holds true to Freire?s criticism that students are expected to be empty vessels to be filled with vast amounts of knowledge. Or the use of words like ?pedagogy? which very few people have heard before, let alone know how to pronounce, but which are known by the teacher alone to be learnt by the attentive student.
The economic pressures that are put on our already oppressive education system intensify its problems. Increasing class sizes make Freire?s concept of a problem posing education impossible, there is little opportunity for dialogue between students and with the teacher. Teachers have very little chance or time to relate to their students on a personal level, which is also why they are forced to revert to spoon feeding their classes with large quantities of information. Funding of education also limits the subjects that are available and even then students have virtually no say in the material that is taught.
Our society increasingly forces people and institutes into competition, by doing the same thing in education it further enforces oppression by destroying solidarity and understanding, which in a Freirian class would be enhanced.
Freire identifies the need for education to be a means for human liberation and a place for people to fully realise there place in society and their ability to change it. Freire?s pedagogy can not be read without reflecting on our own oppressive society and education system and our own individual need for critical consciousness.
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