Pedagogy of Indignation
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Pedagogy of Indignation

Paulo Freire

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eBook - ePub

Pedagogy of Indignation

Paulo Freire

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About This Book

This is the first English translation of the last book written by Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of Indignation delves ever deeper into the themes that concerned him throughout his life. The book begins with a series of three deeply moving reflective "pedagogical letters" to the reader about the role of education for one's development of self. He also speaks directly to the reader about the relationship to risk in one's life and he delves deeper than before into the daily life tensions between freedom and authority. Building on these interconnected themes, Freire sharpens our sense of the critical faculties of children and how a teacher may work with children to help them realize their potential intellectually and as human beings. Subsequent chapters explore these topics in relation to the wider social world: the social constitution of the self in the work of educators; critical citizenship; and the necessity of teaching "from a position" about the world that goes beyond literacy programs to include the legacy of colonialism in peoples' resistance movements today. The book's poignant interludes, written by Ana Maria Araujo Freire, reveal Paulo's thoughts about the content of this book as he was completing it during the last weeks and days of his life.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2015
ISBN
9781317254423
Edition
1
PART I
PEDAGOGICAL LETTERS
1
FIRST LETTER
ON THE SPIRIT OF THIS BOOK
Image
To me, it brings a feeling of pity and concern, when I interact with families who experience the “tyranny of freedom,” in which children can do everything: They scream, write on walls, threaten guests, because of the complacent authority of parents who actually think of themselves as champions of freedom.
Paulo Freire
For a while a purpose had been disquieting me: to write a few pedagogical letters, in light style, whose reading might interest both young fathers and young mothers and, perhaps, teenaged sons and daughters, or teachers who, called to reflection by the challenges of their teaching practice, would find in the letters elements capable of helping them develop their own answers. In these pedagogical letters, I would address problems, visible or hidden ones, present in relationships with sons and daughters or pupils within day-to-day experience. These would be problems that had not existed for the young father or mother or the young teacher, in the recent experience of their own adolescence, or ones that, if existent then, were dealt with differently. We live in a time of more and more radical transformations in the most dynamic urban centers. In our seventies, we surprise ourselves by dressing in ways we did not do in our forties. It is as if today we were younger than we were yesterday. Therefore, one of the most urgent qualities we must forge within ourselves in the passing days—one without which we could hardly be more or less on a par with our own times or able to understand teenagers and the young—is that of critical intelligence, a never “somnolent” but always wakeful capacity for comprehending the new. The unexpected, the out-of-the-ordinary, may frighten or bother us, but it should not, for this reason alone, be considered of lesser value. This critical intelligence results in a knowledge as fundamental as it is obvious: There is no culture or history that is immobile. Change is a natural realization of culture and of history. It so happens that there are stages, within cultures, when change takes place at an accelerated pace. That is what we see today. Technological revolutions are shortening the elapsed time between one change and the next. At the end of the last century, a great-grandchild largely reproduced the cultural forms of valuating, of expressing the world, and of speaking, of his or her great-grandparent. Today in the more complex societies, within one single family the youngest child does not reproduce the oldest, making the relationship between fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons more difficult.
There could not be culture or history without innovation, without creativity, without curiosity, without freedom being exercised, or without freedom, which when denied, one must fight for. There could not be culture or history without risk, taken or untaken—that is, risk of which the subject is more or less conscious. I may not know what risks I run now, but I know that, as a presence in the world, I run them. The fact is that risk is a necessary ingredient in mobility, without which there is no culture or history. Therefore, it is important that education, rather than trying to deny risk, encourages men and women to take it. It is by taking on risk, its inevitability, that I become prepared to take this given risk that challenges me now, and to which I must respond. It is fundamental that I know that there is no human existence without risk, of greater or lesser danger. Objective as it is, risk implicates the subjectiveness of the one who runs it. In that sense, I must first realize that our condition as existent beings subjects us to risks; secondly, I must lucidly seek to know and to recognize the risk I run, or that I may come to run, in order to proceed effectively in my relationship with it.
Without allowing myself to fall into the temptation of aggressive rationalism, where once “mythified,” reason “knows” and “can” do everything, I must insist on the importance of critically apprehending the reasons behind the facts we become involved in. The closer I come to the object I seek to know, as I “epistemologically distance” myself from it, the more effectively I operate as a cognizant subject, and even better, I come, for this very reason, to take responsibility for myself as such.1 What I mean to say is that, as a human being, while intervening in the world, I should not and cannot abdicate the socially and historically built possibility in our existential experience to comprehend it and, as a consequence, express that comprehension. Intelligence about the world, which is as much apprehended as it is produced, and the communicability of that intelligence are tasks for the subject, who in the process, must become more and more critically capable. He or she must become more and more attentive to the methodological rigor of his or her curiosity, as he or she approaches different objects. This methodological rigor in one’s curiosity is what gradually brings greater precision to one’s findings.
If change is a necessary part of cultural experience, outside of which we cannot exist, it becomes a requirement that we seek to understand change and its reason or reasons for being. In order to accept it or negate it, we must understand it, while knowing that, if we are not solely its object, change itself is not the result of wishful decisions by individuals or groups either. That fact undoubtedly means that, in the face of changes in understandings, in behaviors, in tastes, and in light of the negation of previously respected values, we must neither simply become resigned, nor rebel in a purely emotional manner. It is in this sense that radical, critical education must never lack a lucid perception of change, which itself reveals the intervening presence of human beings in the world. Part of this lucid perception of change is the political and ideological nature of our stance toward it, regardless of whether we are aware of that fact or not. That is so with respect to changes in processes, in customs, in aesthetic tastes in general, in the plastic arts, in music be it classical or popular, in morals—especially toward sexuality, in language, and in the historically necessary change in the power structures of society, one that still says no to backward forces. One historic example of backwardness is the perverse struggle against agrarian reform, where powerful landowners, who seek to remain also the owners of people, lie and kill with impunity. They kill rural workers as if they were damned beasts and make statements of terrifying cynicism. “Our security men didn’t shoot the trespassers; some hunters that were in the area did.” The contempt for public opinion revealed in this discourse speaks to the arbitrary nature of power and to the safety the powerful find in impunity. This is still going on at the end of the second millennium. Meanwhile, the landless get accused of being bullies and troublemakers, because they accept the risk of concretely denouncing and announcing. They denounce the immoral reality of land possession among us, and they announce a new country. Due to their historic experience, the landless know very well that had it not been for their political actions, agrarian reform would have advanced very little if at all. In the privacy of their camps, they must feel really touched with the sensibility of a power so concerned with hearing and following the Pope’s appeals
.
What I mean to say is this: To the extent that we become capable of transforming the world, of naming our own surroundings, of apprehending, of making sense of things, of deciding, of choosing, of valuing, and finally, of ethicizing the world, our mobility within it and through history necessarily comes to involve dreams toward whose realization we struggle. Thus, it follows that our presence in the world, which implies choice and decision, is not a neutral presence. The ability to observe, to compare, and to evaluate, in order to choose, through deciding, how one is to intervene in the life of the city and thus exercise one’s citizenship, arises then as a fundamental competency. If my presence in history is not neutral, I must accept its political nature as critically as possible. If, in reality, I am not in the world simply to adapt to it, but rather to transform it, and if it is not possible to change the world without a certain dream or vision for it, I must make use of every possibility there is not only to speak about my utopia, but also to engage in practices consistent with it. I feel it is essential to underscore, within the scope of my understanding of a human being as a presence in the world, that we, men and women, are a great deal more than beings adaptable to the objective conditions in which we find ourselves. To the very extent that we become able to recognize our ability to adapt to concreteness in order to better operate, it becomes possible to take responsibility for ourselves as transformer beings. In our very condition as transformers we realize that our possibility to adapt does not exhaust within us our being in the world. It is because we can transform the world that we are with it and with others. We would not have gotten past the level of pure adaptation to the world if we had not reached the possibility, while thinking about adaptation itself, of also using it to program transformation. For this reason, progressive education, whether at home or at school, must never, in the name of discipline, eradicate the learner’s sense of pride and self worth, his or her ability to oppose, by imposing on him or her a quietism which denies his or her being. That is why one must work out the unity between one’s discourse, one’s actions, and one’s motivating utopia. In this sense, one must take advantage of every opportunity to give testimony to one’s commitment to the realization of a better world—a world more just, less ugly, and more substantively democratic. In this sense, also, it is as important to underscore to the child who for any reason is angry, throwing tantrums, and abusing those who try to come close, that there are limits which regulate one’s will, as it is to encourage autonomy and self-affirmation in a timid or inhibited child.
It is even necessary to make clear, through lucid discourse and democratic practices, that will is only authentic within the actions of subjects who take responsibility for their limits. A will without limits is a despotic will, one negating of other wills and, ultimately, negating of itself. Such is the illicit will of the “owners of the world,” who selfishly and arbitrarily can only see themselves.
To me, it brings a feeling of pity and concern, when I interact with families who experience the “tyranny of freedom,” where children can do everything: They scream, write on walls, threaten guests, because of the complacent authority of parents who actually think of themselves as champions of freedom. At the other extreme, children subjected to the limitless rigor of arbitrary authority experience strong obstacles to their learning about decision, about choice, about rupture. How can one learn how to decide when forbidden from speaking the word, from questioning, from comparing? How can one learn democracy within a permissiveness devoid of limits, where freedom acts at will, or within an authoritarianism devoid of space, where freedom is never exercised?
I am convinced that no education intending to be at the service of the beauty of the human presence in the world, at the service of seriousness and ethical rigor, of justice, of firmness of character, of respect for differences—no education intending to be engaged in the struggle for realizing the dream of solidarity—can fulfill itself in the absence of the dramatic relationship between authority and freedom. It is a tense and dramatic relationship in which both authority and freedom, while fully living out their limits and possibilities, learn, almost without respite, to take responsibility for themselves as authority and freedom. It is by living lucidly the tense relationship between authority and freedom that one discovers the two need not necessarily be in mutual antagonism. It is from the starting point of this learning that both authority and freedom become committed, within educational practice, to the democratic dream of an authority zealous in its limits interacting with a freedom equally diligent of its limits and possibilities.
There is something else of which I have become convinced in my long life experience, an important part of which I spent as an educator. The more authentically we have lived the dialectic tension between authority and freedom, the better we will have equipped ourselves to reasonably overcome crises, which are more difficult to resolve for those who have surrendered to permissive excesses or have been subjected to the rigors of despotic authority. The disciplining of will and of desire, the well-being that results from engaging in this necessary, if difficult, practice, the recognition that what we have done is what we should have done, the refusal to fall for the temptation of self-complacency—all these experiences forge us into ethical subjects, ones neither authoritarian nor submissive nor permissive. They make us into beings better prepared to confront limit situations.
The freedom that derives from learning, early on, how to build internal authority by introjecting the external one is the freedom that lives out its possibility fully. Possibility derives from lucidly and ethically assuming limits, not from fearfully and blindly obeying them.
As I write now, I remember an episode that serves as an example of an excessively permissive understanding of freedom. I was twelve years old and lived in Jaboatão. A couple, friends of the family, were visiting with their six- or seven-year-old son. The boy climbed on the chairs and threw pillows right and left, as if at war against invisible enemies. The parents’ silence revealed their acceptance of everything their son did. Then, there was some peace in the living room; the boy disappeared out into the backyard, but soon returned with a chick about to asphyxiate in his tight grasp. He marched into the room victorious, showing off the object of his guile. Shy, the mother ventured a pale defense of the little chick, while the father lost himself in substantive silence. “Speak again,” said the boy decisively, in charge of the situation, “and I’ll kill the chick.” The ensuing silence, which took hold of all, saved the little chick. Freed, shaken and discombobulated, it left the room as best it could. It crossed the terrace and went to take cover under the foliage of my mother’s prized avencas. I never forgot the vow I took in the presence of such permissiveness: “If I ever come to be a parent, I will never be one like these.”
To me, it brings a feeling of pity and concern as well when I interact with families that live the other tyranny, that of authority, where quiet, “well-behaved” children, with their heads down, are submissive and can do nothing.
How misguided fathers and mothers are, or how unprepared they are in their exercise of fatherhood and motherhood, when, in the name of respect for their children’s freedom, they allow children to be at the mercy of themselves, of their own whims and desires. How misguided fathers and mothers are when, feeling guilty for having been, they think, almost mean because they said a necessary no to a child, proceed to immediately shower the child with affection, an expression of regret for something they should not regret having done. The child tends to associate that affection with a nullification of the authority’s previously restrictive conduct. The child comes to understand the affection as a “discourse” of excuses dispensed to him or her by the authority. Consistently showing affection is necessary, fundamental—but not affection as a form of regret. I must not apologize to my child for having done something I should indeed have done. It is as harmful as not explaining what I feel with respect to a mistake I have made. That is why I cannot tell my child no for everything or for nothing, as that no would only serve my taste for arbitrariness. I must be as consistent about saying no as I must be about encouraging my child with yes.
Mutually exclusive as these ways are, the authoritarian and the permissive, they work against the urgent need for education, and the no less urgent need for developing a democratic mentality among us. I am convinced that the first condition for being able to accept or reject one form or another of manifesting change is being open to the new, to the different, to innovation, to doubt. These are attributes of a democratic mentality that we very much need and ones to which the models discussed above pose a great obstacle.
I have no doubt that my primary task as a father, one freedom-loving but not permissive, and one diligent in my authority but not authoritarian, is not to manage my children’s political, religious, or professional choices, seeking to “guide” them toward this or that party, church, or profession. Quite the contrary, while not excluding them from my political and religious options, what is up to me is to provide testimony of my profound love of freedom, my respect for the limits without which my freedom perishes, my acceptance of their freedom in learning, so that tomorrow they can make full use of it in the political domain as well as in that of faith. It seems fundamental to me, from the democratic mentality standpoint, not to emphasize automatically the importance of fathers’ and mothers’ testimony in their children’s formative process. Surreptitiously or overtly, we almost always do it. What would be ideal to me is to know how to use it, and the best way to take advantage of the power of my testimony as a father is to provide my child with exercises in freedom, nurturing the development of his or her own autonomy. The more children become “their own beings,” the more they make themselves capable of reinventing their parents, as opposed to simply copying them or, at times, angrily and disdainfully negating them.
I...

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