s
education a one-way traffic? The
teacher will gorge out something
from his memory or from his notebook and the students will listen to
him like some dumb dudes? If this is education practiced in
one-way-traffic module, what is destined to happen is happening all
over the world and most predictably the so-called educated people have
been turned into dumb dudes. They have fallen a victim to ''
culture of
silence''. This ''culture of silence'' is the way of life that the
powers-that-be have intelligently instilled into the mindset of the
common denominators and that is what they want.Paul Freire in
his seminal book Pedagogy of The Oppressed says that it is not
education. Conventional education is mechanical and parroting to the
point of being corrupted to the core in so far as it tends to exert
pressure on the common people to eat the humble pie of existence. It
cannot enlighten the students with new visions and thoughts. According
to his opinion, proper education should be dialogical and interactive
between the teacher and the students. Only that way education can
become pro-active in the sense that proactivity with the existing
standard of life would interact with the way we should live.So,
education''s sole objective should be to educate the mass of people how
to
change this world. To change the world, people have to
know the
actual reality of the world in due perspective and thereby to transcend
that reality. If they know it, they will automatically want to change
the undesirable societal condition of the world. On that condition, the
teacher cannot parrot some methodological ideas which are barren and
inefficacious. From the teacher a student will learn something and then
he should be prompted to ask questions one after another to get
plausible answers themselves with the aiding and abetting with the
proper help and guidance from the attending teacher.That is a
two-way traffic and two-way-traffic education is truly dialogical and
interactive. And interactive and dialogical education is the only
proper way to educate the mass of people who are burning within
themselves to change the unjust world. To reiterate it again, first and
foremost they should know and be of the firm conviction that the world
they live in is utterly an unjust one. Gaining this conviction is not
just gaining in knowledge but remould one''s mindset with a vision, a
vision that shows the new light at the end of the tunnel at the
crossroad of life''s one and only true mission.Freire is a
Brazilian educator who conducted many educational workshops among the
poor and illiterate peasants and factory workers of Latin American
countries to lend a hand to their political education so that they
could know the world better. And he returned with immense and
enthusiastic responses from them. He says in his book, "In the midst of
the argument a man who previously had been a factory worker for many
years spoke out : ''Perhaps I am the only one here of working class
origin. I can''t say that I''ve understood everything you''ve said, but I
can say one thing - when I begin this course I was naive, and when I
found how naive I was, I started to get
critical...'' "And
getting critical is the bottomline of Freire''s pedagogy as far as the
liberating education is concerned. It generates critical consciousness
and that "conscientization" then cries for freedom from all shackles of
oppression prevalent in the society. Freire says : "Freedom is acquired
by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and
responsively. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it
an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition
for the quest for the human completion."Now let us briefly
point to the "culture of silence" which shackles the mindset of the
wretched of the earth. The oppressors of the world do not like the idea
that the wretched people never raise their voice agor their legitimate demand of freedom. It is rather that they
remain "dumb dudes" meekly surrendering themselves to their existential
fatalism. They should not get critical of their essences of existence
reverberating in their political consciousness. And here lies the crux.
As long as the oppressed people eschew the "culture of violence", their
juggernaut of economic appropriation and political shenanigans will
roll on undisturbed and uninterrupted.So, let them sing the songs of silence!
More summaries about the Poor Man''s Education : Pedagogy of The Oppressed