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Total: Up to 20 (depending on who wins)
Introducing Friere
The class has addressed many themes, but the core issues:
1) Drawing from ALL class material: What is justice? To answer this means
that we must, by now, also be able to defend our views on a philosophical AND
down-to-earth level.
2) What are the sources of injustice? Bad leadership? Public apathy?
Social structure? Cultural factors?
3) What can we do about injustice? Is education the SOURCE OF or SOLUTION
TO injustice? (That is, why do we read Friere for this class?)
4) Is Friere's view just foggy-minded liberalism that, through education,
recreates ruling class ideas?
5) What is "emancipatory pedagogy?"
Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed examines several issues pertaining
to education, one of which is the notion that the current structure of
classrooms today, in the United States and many other countries, operate to
both oppress the students and the teacher. At the root of this oppression is a
relationship between the teacher and students that involves a narrating
subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students).
This relationship is particularly problematic because it also prevents,
according to Freire and other scholars, education from achieving it's true
potential, which is to free both students and teacher from this oppression."
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This is from the text:
"Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate
the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present
system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes "the practice of
freedom," the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively
with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their
world."
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THE TEAM EXERCISE: EDUCATION - BOON OR BANE?
We will have another team debate, focusing on the role of education in
social change. Is education an emancipatory tool, or is it a tool of
dominant groups to maintain their powerful position?
Here are the issues to think about:
1) What does Friere mean by "the practice of freedom" (in the quote above,
but also elaborated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
2) How would you assess classes at NIU as either a "practice of freedom"
or as instrument of oppression?
3) Would Friere see this class, Soci 452, as "emancipatory" or oppressive?
To address this, it is helpful to also read Kafka, Camus and Sartre,
because these lie at the heart of social change, human agency, and
justice.
The debate for Thursday:
RESOLVED: SOCI 452 IS ULTIMATELY OPPRESSIVE, BECAUSE IT REFLECTS THE
DOMINANT VALUES, IDEOLOGY AND MIND-SET THAT RECREATES SYSTEMS OF DOMINATION!
(What would Friere say?)
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Page maintained by: Jim Thomas - jthomas@sun.soci.niu.edu