Provocation: On Freirien Pedagogies for Liberation in the academy and our movements

It’s an understatement to state that the opening chapters of Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed resonated with me on multiple intersecting levels; a reflection of my own philosophical underpinnings and life experience growing up in a working poor family in Newark, NJ, as a long-time organizer of low-wage workers and presently as a non-traditional doctoral student with aspirations to engage in critical “big-picture” labor and working class education – like many others with ambitions to foster  “critical reflection” as the basis for praxis, “reflection and action upon the world in order to change it.” (51)  It is difficult to hone in on just a few points about a treatise as essential as Freire’s but here are some observations from my standpoint both as a long-term organizer and experience and aspirations as an educator within labor and social movements and in the academy.

Freire delineates the painstaking process through which the oppressed may overcome norms and structures of dehumanization and attain genuine agency; for the oppressed to be able to “wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform” (49) Making  this consciousness-raising (conscientizacao) possible requires overcoming internal and external obstacles faced by the oppressed.  Internal obstacles include their own self-depreciation, humility and fatalism, the tendency to assume the interests of their oppressors as their own and to compete with rather than join together with others of the oppressed in the effort to elevate their own status.  At the same time as the oppressed may fatalistically accept and blame themselves for their own lot, for the oppressors, “having more is an inalienable right, a right they acquired through their own “effort,” with their “courage to take risks.” (59)  And as Freire observes even those of the “oppressor” class that seek to stand on the side of justice often adopt an approach more of charity than solidarity – believing themselves better situated to assume leadership rather than trusting the ability of oppressed peoples to possess knowledge, engage in critical reflection and take ownership over their own movements.

Anybody that has spent any time organizing understands these barriers as well as the capacity of people to transcend them.  Freire draws out these processes and the necessity of employing a humanizing pedagogy constructed upon critical reflection, experiential knowledge, and the engaged action of the oppressed as the only means of undoing systems of oppression and making humanization possible.  “It is only when the oppressed find the oppressor out and become involved in the organized struggle for their liberation that they begin to believe in themselves. This discovery cannot be purely intellectual but must involve action; nor can it be limited to mere activism, but must include serious reflection: only then will it be a praxis. Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried on with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation.” (65)

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3 thoughts on “Provocation: On Freirien Pedagogies for Liberation in the academy and our movements

  1. Thank you for the thoughtful post, Lynne. As I read, I was struck by two ideas: 1. it is not uncommon for certain teachers to teach as if it were an act of charity (as opposed to teaching in solidarity)–something to mull; 2. the need to be able to teach as we know is best becomes a key argument in the fight to keep tenure as a professional right.

  2. Hello,

    Below is not a response to the provocation but to Freire’s work in general. I had this particular problem enter my head repeatedly during the reading. Please, feel free to share your thoughts either in response to the work or the critique I present here. Thanks!
    ———————————————————————————————————-
    Despite the particular problem addressed by Pedagogy of the Oppressed, i.e. adult education in poor communities, I couldn’t help but find an entirely different institutionalized system of oppression calling out from every other sentence. The regime to which I am referring is the massive agricultural and livestock industries that function on the exploitation of living beings for public consumption in the form of food or other goods. Freire repeatedly alludes to the oppressors as favoring death over life, as dehumanizing the oppressed, and attempting to extend ownership over all things. He writes: “This tendency of the oppressor consciousness to ‘in-animate’ everything and everyone it encounters, in its eagerness to possess, unquestionably corresponds with a tendency to sadism.”
    He then quotes Eric Fromm: “The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform a man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life—freedom.”
    Freire’s depiction of the oppressed population as being incapable of turning against their oppressors for various reasons is an apt explanation of how it is that our current agricultural practices continue to be defended by the very public that this system harms. The oppressed are imbued with the ethics of the oppressor and consequently fail to challenge the oppressive regime and, even, supporting it. The livestock industry is invested in the consumption of products that inflict harm on the general population by way of direct and indirect consequences of seemingly limitless proportions due to the massive scale on which this industry operates. These consequences include various health related side effects in humans, the perpetual torment of livestock, a tremendous amount of land and natural resources devoted to a largely inefficient transformation of one foodstuff into another, a substantial risk in meeting the nutritional needs of a growing global population. Yet, despite these consequences of exploiting life itself – as well as the environment and the general population – the various members of the livestock industry continue to hold great power in resisting public opinion and political action that aims to undermine them.
    Laws that punish abuse on farms are few (often only targeting the most extreme cases) and are juxtaposed with contradictory restrictions on whistleblowers exposing said abuse. Practices that qualify as cage-free, free range, or organic are typically motivated in assuaging the concerns of the consumer who is at risk of being swayed away from animal products, and are based on requirements that only marginally improve the conditions for the livestock. Furthermore, the actual guidelines for these practices – as well as the animal cruelty laws – are created with direct participation by the livestock lobby, all of which suggests that these instances of “progress” are not made in solidarity but, as Freire puts it, self-interest masked as charity.
    However, just as I have pointed out above, there are many who defend these industries and practices, and who may see the movement to restrict and oversee the livestock industry as itself being oppressive. In fact, who is perceived to be the oppressor and the oppressed is difficult to define objectively when we attempt to position Freire’s argument outside of the context of Marxist class struggle through the particular lens of education. Freire’s argument is based on the foundation that society purports existing social, cultural, and institutional systems and that this phenomenon is the vehicle for oppression; This is true if a) we regard those existing systems as being contrary to the beliefs or wants (and, thus oppressive) of some minority. To argue that education is the means by which oppression exercises its control is astute but is also too general in its depiction of oppression in-and-of-itself. While it is true that oppression of the poor by the rich is conducted through social infrastructures such as the public school system or the academy, the strength of Freire’s argument is, in my opinion, greatly weakened if the definition of what it means to be oppressed isn’t as granular in its specificity as he portrays it. That is, if we do not make the assumption that oppression is only evident as the relationship between the rich and the poor, it becomes increasingly difficult to make a clear distinction who is being oppressed or what oppression even is.

  3. Hello,

    Below is not a response to the provocation but to Freire’s work in general. I had this particular problem enter my head repeatedly during the reading. Please, feel free to share your thoughts either in response to the work or the critique I present here. Thanks!
    ———————————————————————————————————-
    Despite the particular problem addressed by Pedagogy of the Oppressed, i.e. adult education in poor communities, I couldn’t help but find an entirely different institutionalized system of oppression calling out from every other sentence. The regime to which I am referring is the massive agricultural and livestock industries that function on the exploitation of living beings for public consumption in the form of food or other goods. Freire repeatedly alludes to the oppressors as favoring death over life, as dehumanizing the oppressed, and attempting to extend ownership over all things. He writes: “This tendency of the oppressor consciousness to ‘in-animate’ everything and everyone it encounters, in its eagerness to possess, unquestionably corresponds with a tendency to sadism.”

    He then quotes Eric Fromm: “The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform a man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life—freedom.”

    Freire’s depiction of the oppressed population as being incapable of turning against their oppressors for various reasons is an apt explanation of how it is that our current agricultural practices continue to be defended by the very public that this system harms. The oppressed are imbued with the ethics of the oppressor and consequently fail to challenge the oppressive regime and, even, supporting it. The livestock industry is invested in the consumption of products that inflict harm on the general population by way of direct and indirect consequences of seemingly limitless proportions due to the massive scale on which this industry operates. These consequences include various health related side effects in humans, the perpetual torment of livestock, a tremendous amount of land and natural resources devoted to a largely inefficient transformation of one foodstuff into another, a substantial risk in meeting the nutritional needs of a growing global population. Yet, despite these consequences of exploiting life itself – as well as the environment and the general population – the various members of the livestock industry continue to hold great power in resisting public opinion and political action that aims to undermine them.

    Laws that punish abuse on farms are few (often only targeting the most extreme cases) and are juxtaposed with contradictory restrictions on whistleblowers exposing said abuse. Practices that qualify as cage-free, free range, or organic are typically motivated in assuaging the concerns of the consumer who is at risk of being swayed away from animal products, and are based on requirements that only marginally improve the conditions for the livestock. Furthermore, the actual guidelines for these practices – as well as the animal cruelty laws – are created with direct participation by the livestock lobby, all of which suggests that these instances of “progress” are not made in solidarity but, as Freire puts it, self-interest masked as charity.

    However, just as I have pointed out above, there are many who defend these industries and practices, and who may see the movement to restrict and oversee the livestock industry as itself being oppressive. In fact, who is perceived to be the oppressor and the oppressed is difficult to define objectively when we attempt to position Freire’s argument outside of the context of Marxist class struggle through the particular lens of education. Freire’s argument is based on the foundation that society purports existing social, cultural, and institutional systems and that this phenomenon is the vehicle for oppression; This is true if a) we regard those existing systems as being contrary to the beliefs or wants (and, thus oppressive) of some minority. To argue that education is the means by which oppression exercises its control is astute but is also too general in its depiction of oppression in-and-of-itself. While it is true that oppression of the poor by the rich is conducted through social infrastructures such as the public school system or the academy, the strength of Freire’s argument is, in my opinion, greatly weakened if the definition of what it means to be oppressed isn’t as granular in its specificity as he portrays it. That is, if we do not make the assumption that oppression is only evident as the relationship between the rich and the poor, it becomes increasingly difficult to make a clear distinction who is being oppressed or what oppression even is.

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