Often, I’m annoyed by community organizers and educators in America who romanticize Popular Education. My problem is not with Paolo Freire. I get annoyed because these folk morph his thinking into a philosophical system that ends up being more about the educator’s own struggle to be less oppressive (perhaps that is why Popular Education is standard fare for cool non-Latino guys and gals working in Latino communities) than it is about actual pedagogy.
Freire is to blame in some ways because he viewed his pedagogical principles as humanizing lampposts in a fog of oppression. He held up revolutionary movements and supported revolutionary figures–hence, there is a sexy quality to his thinking that beats the crap out of Dewey! But whether you think Popular Education is sexy or liberating or whatever, Freire never set up a model! He clearly said this in numerous articles and interviews. His last work, Pedagogy of Freedom, also drove that point home. Yet American organizers keep talking about the Popular Education model (maybe because some funders have responded well to it) and in the process they have built up an unreasonable expectation that Freire’s thinking is an alternative to other models.
This expectation was especially high for Sol Stern in a recent article in City Journal. Stern goes on and on about Freire’s support of revolutionary movements and makes the judgment that Freire’s influence is “another reason why U.S ed. schools are awful.” While it was refreshing to be annoyed by someone who is NOT a self-titled Freire supporter, I was shocked at Stern’s utter lack of anlaysis of Popular Education principles–a lack of analysis shared by the very supporters he condemns.
I won’t bore you with the complicated concepts of conscientization or praxis, but I will offer my own thoughts regarding how Freire’s principles can be applied to organizing Latinos. Having been trained as a community organizer in what people call the Alinsky model (badly named since the model really was developed after his death), I always felt that while some of the curriculum was immensely powerful and liberating, certain aspects of the delivery (especially via the Gamaliel Foundation where I was first exposed to a version of it) felt like brainwashing. This is universally a problem with training that involves deep reflection and sharing (in Gamaliel’s case it borders on cultish catharsis), but with Latino immigrants it is particularly problematic.
Latino immigrants (not all but many) in America are often hard-working people with little formal education–in some cases not even middle school. I of course believe that all people are capable of learning and participating in society (why else would I choose this vocation?). But many immigrants with limited education often internalize the idea that they are somehow less prepared or less capable of participating in society. To we the educated they say: “tu que estas preparado–hazlo tu, yo no se nada (you are prepared/educated–you should do it, I don’t know anything).” This deference is not a merely a function of self-confidence. There is a culture of deference in many rural parts of Latin America where the teacher, the priest, and even the bureaucrat are considered specialists who know better than everyone else. While this attitude is not necessarily bad–many a schoolteacher would love such respect and reverence–it is something that can create an obstacle in training environments.
Most Western education has some lecture component. This perhaps goes as far back as the Scholastics. Freire frowned upon the stereotypical Western educator that spews her knowledge on students and requires them to regurgitate back on a test. This banking method as he called it where students are treated like accounts that receive deposits does not feed a person’s need to be a critical thinker that can act in the world. Freire especially hated this method as it worked in Latin America because of the fact that all education systems pass on shared traditions and usually reflect some status quo (e.g. in the U.S. almost all children learna about the greatness of the Founding Fathers and not about the greatness of King George). This truth coupled with the banking method creates a stuation that prevents the oppressed from critically challenging the colonial or imperial standing of the dominant classes.
That insight is usually what confuses people who only have a superficial knowledge of Freire’s thinking (partly becuase they only read part of Pedagogy of the Oppressed without looking at his other writings). People make the non-sequitur conclusion that any form of conveying content in the medieval-scholastic sense is bad and that all education should be discovered jointly among teachers and students. In Pedagogy of the Freedom, Freire refutes this point. He basically says that if a teacher has nothing to transmit (e.g. experience and learned research) then that person is not a teacher at all.
This of course is what Stern is railing against in the City Journal. It is also what cool non-Latinos (in some cases privileged Latinos as well) latch on to in forming their community organizer identities (I’m not going to be “that guy,” i.e. an imperialist conduit of instutional history–I’ll avoid any implementing of my view and will only facilitate dialogs).
Freire is heplful to me as I organize with Latino immigrants, by forcing me to be conscious of my power as a teacher/organizer in leadership development situations. Instead of creating a cultish catharsis environment where I step in to provide a path out if only one accepts my organizing philosophy, I try dialog with people immediately until they begin to generate their own solutions to better their community. Once leaders actually internalize that they have the capacity to get involved in policy decisions that affect them, then and only then, do I offer my quasi-expert opinion. At this stage, they are also ready to sit through an advanced lecture-type training without agreeing that the organizer is right and that they need only do everything he or she says in order for life to get better. They will instead challenge and question the trainer and the material with the same critical attitude that the formally educated organizer once did when he or she went to school. Ultimately, the romanticizing of Freire deprives people of the opportunity for an intense education like the one “we” have received. It’s a lot like a rich person telling a poor person that “money isn’t everything”–easy for them to say!
What organizers qua educators should do is make sure that they are creating environments where community people can develop a questioning, critical attitude coupled with a stronger sense of self. Once this is done, then there is no reason to keep them from learning in other environments whether it be through Alinsky workshops or formal schooling. If the organizer/educator does his or her job–a community leader will be perfectly able to absorb what is useful from those “other” workshops while discarding what is not.
Freire’s unique contribution to education is not the idea that the classroom or organizing project should support revolution (this has always been said during during revolutionary times). His contribution is–contra Sol Stern–perfectly pedagogical: the teacher/organizer should take into account power differentials when shaping a learning environment so as not to merely transmit information that reinforces the status quo and in the process stifles critical thinking. This pedagogy includes dialog and consciousness raising but it need not be tied to a specific ideology. Freire asks us to notice little things like whether we speak from a podium (or via a power point), creating a expert-trainee relationship (even dependence) in our first encounter with people or whether we dialog with them as capable human beings creating a mutual learning environment. This does not replace other ways of educating people, but it does signal pitfalls to us that we can avoid in any pedagogy.
Cockroach People 