Freire Quote from "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

In his book, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," Paulo Freire argues that in traditional education, there is a narrator (the teacher) and a listening object (the students.)  "Education is suffering from narration sickness." (57) Freire insists that this situation minimizes students' creative power, and "serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed." They "react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality. (60)


My whole life I have heard it say that knowledge is power.  However, I have really never questioned how that knowledge is acquired until recently.  I had never heard of Paulo Freire, but reading his book has been a real eye opener for me.  It has given me a lot to think about in my dual roles as a teacher and a student.  How do I become an individual who helps to transform others and who is transformed at the same time?


Last semester, my class read Plato's "Crito" and Noam Chomsky's "Drug Policy As Social Control."
Students were asked to ponder several questions: What is the relationship of the individual to the state?  How much interest does society have in controlling individual behavior?  These are critical questions for any society.  However, for many of my students, critical thinking about these issues was transformation because they lived experiences .  I heard testimony about being "stopped and frisked" and the emotional toll it took on these young men.


In a sense of the "culture of silence" in which these students were submerged was brought to the surface through education and verbal and written dialog.  Students were able to look critically at their world and gradually come to perceive their own personal and social reality.  Through reflection and action or praxis.  The fact that they were able to do this by critically analyzing an ancient text is even more remarkable because they, you could argue, were able to use what could be perceived as the oppressor's text as a source of liberation.