Pedagogy of the Heart

Paulo Freire

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350190276
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education Theory & Practice

Pedagogy of the Heart represents some of the last writings by Paulo Freire. In this work, perhaps more so than any other, Freire presents a coherent set of principles for education and politics. For those who have read Freire's other works the book includes new discussions of familiar subjects including community, neoliberalism, faith, hope, the oppressed, and exile. For those coming to Freire for the first time, the book will open up new ways of looking at the interrelations of education and political struggle. Freire reveals himself as a radical reformer whose lifelong commitment to the vulnerable, the illiterate and the marginalised has had a profound impact on society and education today. The text includes substantive notes by Ana Maria Araújo Freire, a foreword by Martin Carnoy, a preface by Ladislau Dowbor, as well as a substantive new introduction by Antonia Darder, who holds the Leavey Presidential Endowed Chair in Ethics and Moral Leadership in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University, USA. Translated by Donaldo Macedo and Alexandre Oliveira.

UNDER THE SHADE OF A MANGO TREE

Solitude–Communion

The search that brings me to the comforting shade of this mango tree^* could be of little interest to most people. I find refuge under its shade when I am there alone, secluded from the world and others, asking myself questions, or talking to myself. My talks are not always triggered by my questions.

There has to be an a priori reason that has been lost in the pleasure of finding refuge under the shade of this tree. What I should do is to totally let myself be taken by the feelings of being under it, to live it, and to make this experience more and more intense to the extent that I prove its existence.

To come under the shade of this mango tree with such deliberateness and to experience the fulfillment of solitude emphasize my need for communion. While I am physically alone proves that I understand the essentiality of to be with. It is interesting for me to think now how important, even indispensable, it is to be with. To be alone has represented for me throughout my lifetime a form of being with. I never avoid being with others as if I am afraid of company, as if I do not need others to feel fulfilled, or as if I feel awkward in the world. On the contrary, by isolating myself I get to know myself better while I recognize my limits, and the needs that involve me in a permanent search that would not be viable through isolation. I need the world as the world needs me. Isolation can only make sense when, instead of rejecting communion, it confirms it as a moment of its existence.

A negative isolation is to be found in those who timidly or methodically look to find some refuge in being alone. A negative isolation is characterized by those who selfishly require that everything revolves around them so as to meet their needs. This form of solitude is often required by those who only see themselves even when they are surrounded by a multitude of people. These individuals can only see themselves, their class, or their group due to their greed, which suffocates the rights of others. These types of people are characterized by the feeling that the more they have, the more they want to have—and it does not matter what means they use to achieve their ends. These are insensitive people who add arrogance and meanness to their insensitivity. These are the people who when they are in a good mood, call the popular classes “those people,” and when they are in bad mood, refer to them as “trashy people.”

Let me first make it clear that I refuse to accept a certain type of scientistic criticism that insinuates that I lack rigor in the way I deal with these issues or the overaffective language I use in this process. The passion with which I know, I speak, or I write does not, in any way, diminish the commitment with which I announce or denounce. I am a totality and not a dichotomy. I do not have a side of me that is schematic, meticulous, nationalist, and another side that is disarticulated or imprecise, which simply likes the world. I know with my entire body, with feelings, with passion, and also with reason.

I have been always engaged with many thoughts concerning the challenges that draw me to this or that issue or to the doubts that make me unquiet. These doubts take me to uncertainties, the only place where it is possible to work toward the necessary provisional certainties. It is not the case that it is impossible to be certain about some things. What is impossible is to be absolutely certain, as if the certainty of today were the same as that of yesterday and will continue to be the same as that of tomorrow.

In being methodical concerning the certainty of uncertainties does not deny the isolation of the cognitive possibility. The fundamental certainty is that I can know. I know that I know. In the same way, I also know that I do not know, which predisposes me to know the following: first, that I can know better what I know; second, that I can know what I do not know yet; third, that I can produce forms of knowledge that do not exist yet.

In being conscious that I can know socially and historically, I also know that what I know cannot be divorced from the historical continuity. Knowledge has historicity. It never is, it is always in the process of being. But this does not at all diminish, on the one hand, the fundamental certainty that I can know; on the other hand, it does not diminish the possibility of knowing with more methodological rigor that would enhance the level of the accuracy of the findings.

In order to know better what I already know implies, sometimes, to know what before was not possible to know. Thus, the important thing is to educate the curiosity through which knowledge is constituted as it grows and refines itself through the very exercise of knowing.

An education of answers does not at all help the curiosity that is indispensable in the cognitive process. On the contrary, this form of education emphasizes the mechanical memorization of contents. Only an education of question can trigger, motivate, and reinforce curiosity.

It is obvious that the mistake inherent in an education that forms only in giving answers does not reside in the answer itself but in the rupture between the answer and the question. The mistake lies in the fact that the answer is given independently from the question that triggers it. By the same token, an education of answer would be wrong if the answer is not perceived as part of the question. To question and to answer represent a constitutive path to curiosity.

It is necessary that we should always be expecting that a new knowledge will arise, transcending another that, in being new, would became old.

History, like us, is a process of being limited and conditioned by the knowledge that we produce. Nothing that we engender, live, think, and make explicit takes place outside of time and history. To be certain or to doubt would represent historical forms of being.

Life Support and the World

It would be unthinkable to have a world where the human experience took place outside of a continuity, that is, outside of history. The often-proclaimed “death of history” implies the death of women and men. We cannot survive the death of history: while it is constituted by us, it makes and remakes us. What occurs is the transcendence of a historical phase for another that does not eliminate the continuity of history in the depth of change itself.

It is impossible to change the world into something that is unappealingly immobile, within which nothing happens outside of what has been preestablished, to thereby create a world that is plane, horizontal, and timeless. The world, in order to be, must be in the process of being. A world that is plane, horizontal, and timeless could even be compatible with animal life but it remains incompatible with human existence. In this sense, the animals usually adapt to the life-support world, while human beings, in integrating themselves to their contexts so that they can intervene in them, transform the world. It is for this reason that we can tell stories about what happens in the life-support world, we talk about various forms of life that are formed in it. However, the history that is processed in the world is what is made by human beings.

If communication and intercommunication represent processes that speak to life about the support system, in the existential experience they acquire a special connotation. In this instance, both communication and intercommunication involve the comprehension of the world. The life-support world does not imply a language or the erect posture that permitted the liberation of the hands. The life-support becomes world and life becomes existence to the degree that there is an increasing solidarity between the mind and the hands. In other words, this change depends upon the proportion to which the human body becomes a conscient body that can capture, apprehend, and transform the world so it ceases being an empty space to be filled by contents.^*

The process through which humans became erect, produced instruments, spoke, developed understanding, and began to communicate with one another represents tasks that involve solidarity and, simultaneously, imply cause and effect due to the presence of humans and their invention of the world as well as their domination over the life support. To be in the world necessarily implies being with the world and with others. For those beings who are simply in the life support, their activities in the life support represent a mere meddling; in the world with its social, historical, and cultural context, human beings interfere more than just merely meddle with the world.

In this sense, the shift from life support to world implies technical inventions and instruments that make the intervention in the world easier. Once these instruments are invented, men and women never stop the process of creating and reinventing new techniques with which they perfect their presence in the world. All operations in the world necessarily involve their comprehension, a knowledge about the process to operate in the world, an inventory about the findings but, above all, a vision with respect to the ends proposed in these operations. The creation intensifies to the degree that the rhythm of change is accelerated by developed techniques, which become more and more adequate to deal with these challenges.

The time period between significant changes in the world diminishes increasingly. In certain fields of science and the present technology, it takes a mere few months for the procedure to become obsolete. Sometimes, for reasons that are purely economic, these procedures have “a longer shelf life.” This has to do with the resources spent in the development of a particular technological procedure or instruments that have not yet been operated, and, even though these procedures or instruments become obsolete, they continue to be considered efficient.

The ability to reflect, to evaluate, to program, to investigate, and to transform is unique to human beings in the world and with the world. Life becomes existence and life support becomes world when the conscience about the world, which also implies the conscience of the self, emerges and establishes a dialectical relationship with the world. The question between conscience/world that involves their mutual relations led Sartre to observe that “conscience and world take place at the same time.” The relations between them are naturally dialectical, regardless of the school of thought and the philosophy that one studies. If one is a mechanist or an idealist, one cannot alter the dialectic conscience/world and subjectivity/objectivity. This does not mean that one mechanistic or idealistic practice is freed from its fundamental error. The plans of action that are based on the conception that conscience is the arbitrary maker of the world, and that defend the idea that before changing the world the moral conscience must be purified, will usually end up in a great failure. By the same token, projects that are based on a mechanistic vision in which the conscience is a mere reflex of the objective materiality cannot escape the punishment of history.

Many possible dreams end up not being viable due to the excess of certainty of their agents; and the capriciousness with which they pretended to mold history instead of making it with others would lead to a remaking of one another in the process. If history is not a superior entity that is above our heads and possesses us, it also cannot be reduced to an object to be manipulated.

By rejecting the dialectical tension between conscience/world, both idealists and mechanists, in their own way, become obstacles to connect intelligence of the world. This has been a theme that has always challenged me, one I have always attempted to address coherently with my democratic dream. Rarely do I find myself under the shadow of my mango tree without feeling unquiet and not thinking about this.

I am not a being in the life support but a being in the world, with the world, and with others; I am a being who makes things, knows and ignores, speaks, fears and takes risks, dreams and loves, becomes angry and is enchanted. I am a being who rejects the condition of being a mere object. I am a being who does not bow before the indisputable power accumulated by technology because, in knowing that it is a human production, I do not accept that it is, in and of itself, bad. I am a being who rejects a view of technology as a demon’s deed designed to throw out God’s work.^*

It is not enough for me to ask: “What can one do? Technology necessarily engenders automatism, which leads to unemployment. The unemployed must change: they should seek leisure, a fundamental theme of postmodernity.” No: I do not accept this form of fatalism.

The state cannot be so liberal as the neoliberals would like it to be. It behooves the progressive political parties to fight in favor of economic development and the limitation of the size of the state. The state should neither be an almighty entity nor a lackey that obeys the orders of those who live well. The projects of economic development cannot exclude men and women of history in the name of any fatalism.

My radical posture requires of me an absolute loyalty to all men and women. An economy that is incapable of developing programs according to human needs, and that coexists indifferently with the hunger of millions of people to whom everything is denied, does not deserve my respect as an educator. Above all, it does not deserve my respect as a human being. And it is not well to say, “Things are the way they are because they cannot be different.” They cannot be different because if they were, they would be in conflict with the interests of the ruling class. This cannot, however, be the determining essence of the economic practice. I cannot become fatalistic in order to meet the interests of the ruling class. Neither can I invent a “scientific” explanation to cover up a lie (see note 1, here).

The power of those in power always aims to decimate the powerless. But, alongside material power, there was always another force—ideology—which is also material and strengthens the power structure. Technological advances enhance with great efficiency the ideological support of material power.

One of the most important tasks for progressive intellectuals is to demystify postmodern discourses with respect to the inexorability of this situation. I vehemently reject such immobilization of history.

The affirmation that “Things are the way they are because they cannot be otherwise” is hatefully fatalistic since it decrees that happiness only belongs to those in power. The poor people, the disinherited, and those who have been excluded, were destined to die of cold no matter if they are from the South or the North of the world.

If the economic and political power of the ruling class denies the powerless the minimum space to survive, it is not because it should be that way. It is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice. For this to happen, a total denouncement of fatalism is necessary. We are transformative beings and not beings for accommodation.

We cannot reject the struggle for the exercise of our capacities and our rights to decide. In this way, I insist that history is possibility and not determinism. We are conditioned beings but not determined beings. It is impossible to understand history as possibility if we do not recognize human beings as beings who make free decisions. Without this form of exercise it is not worth speaking about ethics.

My First World

Because I am a being in the world and with the world, I have not a little piece of the life-support world, but I possess my more immediate and particular world: the street, the neighborhood, the city, the country, the yard of the house where I was born, where I learned to walk and to speak, where I had my first scares and fears. One day, when I was ar...