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A review by jon24
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
3.0
This book represents a huge disappointment, because it could have been brilliant in its totality.
In a nutshell the book is about the methodology/means of libertarian education. How traditional teaching methods implicitly reproduce dominant ideology and instill passivity in their subjects. The means by which this is subverted, Freire suggests, is by rejecting teacher-student centred teaching, assessing and pushing the boundaries of learners conciousness through problem-posing. This develops education as a dialectial entity (rather than the static facts that are taught in schools), allows to unpick alot of ideological baggage and because its a group activity it builds a 'dialogue' in the oppressed (read class conciousness).
At its height the book has quite far-reaching implications in politics and education. The books scope isn't just just there though, were talking topics psychology, sociology, radical-theory, and probably a few others are all covered.
The problem with the book though is two-fold, firstly overuse of hegelian or academic style jargon and secondly being a product of the 70's left, its got weird baggage.
On the hegelian/academic front, it makes sense that dialectics would make an appearance in the book, its just kind of ironic that a book on teaching the downtrodden and poor is so overladdened with philosphical terms that just make you glaze over and would be beyond the means of someone who was not educated to university level. Its simply no exaggeration to state that 20-30 pages should have been edited out of existence on the account of being rather superfluous. And its worse that it brings only confusion and makes it tiresome to read.
Re: 70's radicalism. It makes no sense at all for 3/4 of the book to talk about the oppressed becoming self aware towards the goal of liberation, then for the last chapter to start discussing the relationship of the oppressed towards their leaders! Mao, Guevara, Castro, Lenin, Althusser and others all get quoted in what seems like a parody of the first half of the book. Only the optimistic heydays of the left could possibly talk up Castro and Guevara as being deeply implanted in the dialogue of the masses without drawing the worse kind of mockery. Yet its here, in a seminal text no less.
Would suggest its worth reading despite its rather skewed leftism and love of all things hegel. Possibly [b:Deschooling Society|223403|Deschooling Society (Open Forum)|Ivan Illich|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172853270s/223403.jpg|216356] might be an easier first read into this forray.
In a nutshell the book is about the methodology/means of libertarian education. How traditional teaching methods implicitly reproduce dominant ideology and instill passivity in their subjects. The means by which this is subverted, Freire suggests, is by rejecting teacher-student centred teaching, assessing and pushing the boundaries of learners conciousness through problem-posing. This develops education as a dialectial entity (rather than the static facts that are taught in schools), allows to unpick alot of ideological baggage and because its a group activity it builds a 'dialogue' in the oppressed (read class conciousness).
At its height the book has quite far-reaching implications in politics and education. The books scope isn't just just there though, were talking topics psychology, sociology, radical-theory, and probably a few others are all covered.
The problem with the book though is two-fold, firstly overuse of hegelian or academic style jargon and secondly being a product of the 70's left, its got weird baggage.
On the hegelian/academic front, it makes sense that dialectics would make an appearance in the book, its just kind of ironic that a book on teaching the downtrodden and poor is so overladdened with philosphical terms that just make you glaze over and would be beyond the means of someone who was not educated to university level. Its simply no exaggeration to state that 20-30 pages should have been edited out of existence on the account of being rather superfluous. And its worse that it brings only confusion and makes it tiresome to read.
Re: 70's radicalism. It makes no sense at all for 3/4 of the book to talk about the oppressed becoming self aware towards the goal of liberation, then for the last chapter to start discussing the relationship of the oppressed towards their leaders! Mao, Guevara, Castro, Lenin, Althusser and others all get quoted in what seems like a parody of the first half of the book. Only the optimistic heydays of the left could possibly talk up Castro and Guevara as being deeply implanted in the dialogue of the masses without drawing the worse kind of mockery. Yet its here, in a seminal text no less.
Would suggest its worth reading despite its rather skewed leftism and love of all things hegel. Possibly [b:Deschooling Society|223403|Deschooling Society (Open Forum)|Ivan Illich|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172853270s/223403.jpg|216356] might be an easier first read into this forray.