Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

While reading the Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire I found myself feeling rather angry and frustrated with the article. It presented the classroom as this horrible, awful place in which there are only two realities “those that serve and those that are served”. The ideas behind this article reminded me of bad villains in movies in which that belief system justifies their terrible behaviors. I do not think this is representative of the world, and certainly not the classroom. I don’t subscribe to this form of thinking in any sense of the manner and quite frankly, being forced to read something so… dark made me angry. Partially because since the Renaissance, this idea has not represented the art classroom, my main setting for teaching. It is, outside of the artisan guild technique (“you draw this exactly as I am, and you don’t get to create or sell your own works until you’ve spent your entire contract here”), nearly impossible to have an art classroom that looks like as Freire described, “projecting an absolute ignorance onto others negates education and processes of inquiry”. Art is, definitively a form of problem solving, inquiry, exploration. Because students spend the class time doing, creating, there is no such thing as a lack of understanding about what makes things true or how they work. Students learn that intimately through creation of their own works. I truly think of the arts as a form of problem solving. As for the English classroom? While the content does not require it to be an investigative classroom, my ELA classroom will reflect a problem-solving based classroom. In the last reading, we explored what we value in literature. I value analysis and the exploration of big-picture things like themes. I will teach with that in mind, and I do not believe that true analysis can occur unless students have the ability to think for themselves and go beyond the basic, rote answer or ideas. Furthermore, I do not feel that Freire’s impression of the average classroom is at all representative of the latest research and best practices in education that I am learning and practicing myself. Nor is it something that I see in any of the classes I have had the chance to observe. To me that makes this article null, and irrelevant which makes sense given that it was written in 1993, over 20 years ago.

            That being said, I will recognize that this form of pedagogy is representative of an old model of education, one that should never come to light again. It is not beneficial to students or really the teachers in general. Perhaps there are some teachers out there who have been teaching for 40 years that still subscribe to this mode of thinking and format of a classroom, but I imagine that those are in the minority, particularly in a state like Washington that has one of the better education systems in the country.