The Pedagogy of Hope

Extracts from Chapter 3 of Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of Hope:
   I have never labored under the misapprehension that social classes and the struggle between them could explain everything, right down to the color of the Sky on a Tuesday evening. And so I have never said that the class struggle, in the modern world has been or is "the mover of history". On the other hand, still today. and possibly for a long time to come, it is impossible to understand history without social classes, without their interests in collision.
   The class struggle is not the mover of history, but it is certainly one of them.
[...]
   In our making and remaking of ourselves in the process of making history - as subjects and objects, persons, becoming beings of insertion in the world and not of pure adaptation to the world - we should end by having the dream, too, a mover of history. There is no change without dream, as there is no dream without hope.
   Thus, I keep on insisting, ever since Pedagogy of the Oppressed: there is no authentic utopia apart from the denunciation of a present becoming more and more intolerable, and the "annunciation", announcement, of a future to be created, built - politically, esthetically, and ethically - by us women and men. Utopia implies this denunciation and proclamation, but it does not permit the tension between the two to die away with the production of the future previously announced. Now the erstwhile future is a new present, and a new dream experience is forged. History does not become immobilized, does not die. On the contrary, it goes on.
   The understanding of history as opportunity and not determinism, the conception of history operative in this book, would be unintelligible without the dream, just as the deterministic conception feels uncomfortable, in its incompatibility with this understanding and therefore denies it.
   Thus it comes about that, in the former conception the historical role of subjectivity is relevant, while in the latter it is minimized or denied. Hence, in the first, education, while not regarded as able to accomplish all things, is acknowledged as important, since it can do something; while in the second it is belittled.
   Indeed, whenever the future is considered as a pregiven - whether this be as the pure, mechanical repetition of the present, or simply because it "is what it has to be" - there is no room for utopia, nor therefore for the dream, the option, the decision, or expectancy in the struggle, which is the only way hope exists. There is no room for education. Only for training.
   As project, as design for a different, less-ugly "world", the dream is as necessary to political subjects, transformers of the world and not adapters to it, as - may I be permitted the repetition - it is fundamental for an artisan, who projects in her or his brain what she or he is going to execute even before the execution thereof.
   That is why, from the viewpoint of the dominant class interests, the less the dominated dream the dream of which I speak, in the confident way of which I speak, and the less they practice the political apprenticeship of committing themselves to a utopia, the more open they will become to "pragmatic" discourses, and the sounder the dominant classes will sleep.
[...]
   The assertion that an "ideological discourse" is a kind of natural clumsiness on the part of the Left, which insists on holding one when there are no ideologies anymore, and when, it is said, no one any longer wishes to hear an ideological discourse, is itself a cunning ideological discourse on the part of the dominant classes. What we have gotten over is not the ideological discourse, but the "fanatical", or inconsistent, discourse, which merely repeats clichés that never should have been pronounced in the first place. What is becoming less and less viable, fortunately, is verbal incontinence - discourse that loses itself in a tiresome rhetoric bereft of so much as sonority and rhythm.
   Any progressive, who, all afire, insists on this practice - at times in a tremulous voice - will be contributing little or nothing to the political advance of which we have need. But, then, to up and proclaim the era of "neutral discourse"? Hardly.
   I feel utterly at peace with the interpretation that the wane of "realistic socialism" does not mean, on one side, that socialism has shown itself to be intrinsically inviable; on the other, that capitalism has now stepped forward in its excellence one and for all.
   What excellence is this, that manages to "coexist with more than a billion inhabitants of the developing world who live in poverty,"*, not to say misery? Not to mention the all but indifference with which it coexists with "pockets of poverty" and misery in its own, developed body. What excellence is that sleeps in peace while numberless men and women make their home in the street, and says it is their own fault that they are on the street?
[...]
   To me, on the contrary, the element of failure in the experience of "realistic socialism", by and large, was not its socialist dream, but its authoritarian mold - which contradicted it, and of which Marx and Lenin are also guilty, and not just Stalin - just as what is positive in the capitalist experience has never been the capitalist system, but its democratic mold.
   In this sense, as well, the crumbling away of the authoritarian socialist world - which, in many aspects - if a kind of ode to freedom, and which leaves so many minds, previously calm and contained, stupefied, thunderstruck, disconcerted, lost - offers us the extraordinary, if challenging opportunity to continue dreaming and fighting for the socialist dream. Purified of its authoritarian distortions, its totalitarian repulsiveness, its sectarian blindness. This is why I personally look forward to a time when it will become even easier to wage the democratic struggle against the wickedness of capitalism. What is becoming needful, among other things, is that Marxists get over their smug certainty that they are modern, adopt an attitude of humility in dealing with the popular classes, and become postmodernly less smug and less certain - progressively postmodern.
   Let us briefly return to other points already mentioned:

Inasmuch as the violence of the oppressors makes of the oppressed persons forbidden to be, the response of the latter to the violence of the former is found infused with a yearning to seek the right to be.
Oppressors, wreaking violence upon others, and forbidding them to be, are likewise unable to be. In withdrawing from them the power to oppress and crush, the oppressed, struggling to be, restore to them the humanity lost in the use of oppression.
This is why only the oppressed, by achieving their liberation, can liberate the oppressors. The latter, as oppressing class [emphasis in the original], can neither liberate nor be liberated.**

* See Relatório sobre o Desenvolvimento Mundial [World Development Report], 1990, published for World Bank by Fundação Getulio Vargas
** Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 43.

The Pedagogy of the Oppressed

In January, I read CLR James' The Black Jacobins - Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, the definitive account of the uprising of the slaves of San Domingo (now Haiti) that led to the eventual abolition of slavery all over the world. I couldn't put it down - stayed glued to to it for two days straight. Intense experience. Obviously, I need to re-read it, this time in a calmer frame of mind.

In February, I read the first three chapters of Paulo Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I couldn't read the last chapter because it's not available online, so I'm at the mercy of a friend who has his own copy and has promised to photocopy the last chapter for me (the most resourceful book people in Lahore haven't been able to find a single copy for sale anywhere, though we did find out that an Urdu translation had been published but is now out of print). As I was telling a friend afterwards, this book answers all my questions about teaching methodology and quite a few also about communicating across boundaries of class and culture.

As I read through it, I had those ecstatic moments of recognition, of connection coming upon a line that linked me to a conversation with one or the other friend. I thought it'd be an interesting idea to record here some of the forwards I made out of the bits I cited:

1. To the doctor with the most eclectic taste in music ever: "reading this, listening to Explosions in the the Sky... it becomes possible to hope."

2. To the human rights worker who despises communism and generally favours property rights, who's gradually going cynical in the face of the horrors she sees:

But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or "sub-oppressors." The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of "adhesion" to the oppressor. Under these circumstances they cannot "consider" him sufficiently clearly to objectivize him — to discover him "outside" themselves. This does not necessarily mean that the oppressed are unaware that they are downtrodden. But their perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression. At this level, their perception of themselves as opposites of the oppressor does not yet signify engagement in a struggle to overcome the contradiction;[2] the one pole aspires not to liberation, but to identification with its opposite pole.

In this situation the oppressed do not see the "new man as the person to be born from the resolution of this contradiction, as oppression gives way to liberation. For them, the new man or woman themselves become oppressors. Their vision of the new man or woman is individualistic; because of their identification with the oppressor they have no consciousness of themselves as persons or as members of an oppressed class. It is not to become free that they want agrarian reform, but in order to acquire land and thus become landowners — or; more precisely, bosses over other workers. It is a rare peasant who, once "promoted" to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself. This is because the context of the peasant's situation, that is, oppression, remains unchanged. In this example, the overseer, in order to make sure of his job, must be as tough as the owner — and more so. Thus is illustrated our previous assertion that during the initial stage of their struggle the oppressed find in the oppressor their model of "manhood."

Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by establishing the process of liberation, must confront thus phenomenon. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly participate in revolution intend — conditioned by the myths of the old order — to make it their private revolution. The shadow of their former oppressor is still cast over them.

3. To some of my activist friends:

Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.

[...]

However, the oppressed, who have adapted to the structure of domination in which they are immersed, and have become resigned to it, are inhibited from waging the struggle for freedom so long as they feel incapable of running the risks it requires. Moreover, their struggle for freedom threatens not only the oppressor, but also their own oppressed comrades who are fearful of still greater repression. When they discover within themselves the yearning to be free, they perceive that this yearning can be transformed into reality only when the same yearning is aroused in their comrades. But while dominated by the fear of freedom they refuse to appeal to others, or to listen to the appeals of others, or even to the appeals of their own conscience. They prefer gregariousness to authentic comradeship; they prefer the security of conformity with their state of unfreedom to the creative communion produced by freedom and even the very pursuit of freedom.

azadi, azadi, azadi... nov 07 to may 08*... over and over again, we returned to the theme of freedom... instinctively, passionately, devotedly, in guilt even, in despair, back again with hope, over and over and over again.

* just the period of my active participation in protests

4. To a young telecommunications professor at a recently privatised university, who'd recently been telling me about his travails dealing with the after-effects of three years of incompetence in his department:

Reading the opening paragraph of Chapter 2 reminded me of your upcoming workshop:

A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.

The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration — contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.

The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. "Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem." The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of "capital" in the affirmation "the capital of Para is Belem," that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil.

5. To an ex-colleague, enraged at our complicity in the "War on Terror", at our pusillanimous acquiescence to all American demands, at our oh-so-fashionable buying into Sufism with its pacific message:

and these lines reminded me of you: "The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is a better "fit" for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it."

6. To the great Pink Floyd fan:

It's as if "The Wall" were just a transcription in another medium of Friere's ideas:

This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking* concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:

(a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
(b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
(c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
(d) the teacher talks and the students listen — meekly;
(e) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
(f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
(g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
(h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;
(i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
(j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

* He takes "banking education" to mean the kind in which the teacher merely deposits ideas and concepts in the minds of the students.

7. To an old friend who used to teach English and direct the school plays:
Also reminded me of your play Translations [an Anglo-Irish play about the cultural genocide practised by the English colonists in Ireland]

Aimé Césaire

...my Negritude is not a stone, its
deafness a sounding board for
the noises of the day
my Negritude is not a mere spot of
dead water on the dead eye of
the earth
my Negritude is no tower, no cathedral

it cleaves into the red flesh of the
teeming earth
it cleaves into the glowing flesh of
the heavens
it penetrates the seamless bondage of
my unbending patience

Hoorah for those who have never invented
anything
for those who never explored anything
for those who never mastered anything

but who, possessed, give themselves up
to the essence of each thing
ignorant of the coverings but possessed
by the pulse of things
indifferent to mastering but taking the
chances of the world...

Listen to the white world
its horrible exhaustion from its
immense labours
its rebellious joints cracking under
the pitiless stars
its blue steel rigidities, cutting
through the mysteries of the
flesh
listen to their vainglorious conquests
trumpeting their defeats
listen to the grandiose alibis of their
pitiful floundering
[...]
But in so doing, my heart, preserve
me from all hate
do not turn me into a man of hate of
whom I think only with hate
for in order to project myself into
this unique race
you know the extent of my boundless
love
you know that it is not from hatred
of other races
that I seek to be cultivator of this
unique race...
[...]
for it is not true that work of man
is finished
that man has nothing more to do in the
world but be a parasite in the world
that all we now need is to keep in step
with the world
but the work of man is only just beginning
and it remains to man to conquer all
the violence entrenched in the recesses
of his passion
and no race possesses the monopoly of beauty,
of intelligence, of force, and there
is a place for all at the rendezvous
of victory

-- Caheirs d'un retour au pays natal (Statement of a Return to the Country Where I was Born)

For more on Césaire: http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Cesaire.html