Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom

     Eleştirel Günlük'ün bir önceki yazıma yaptığı yorumda verdiği adresteki Henry Giroux'nun "Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy" başlıklı yazısından çok önemli bulduğum iki farklı alıntı yapmak istiyorum. İlk kısım yazının içinde Stanley Aronowitz'e ait ayrı bir alıntıdan oluşmaktadır. Yazının genelinde katılmadığım birkaç ufak kısım da bulunmakla beraber okunmasını herkese tavsiye ederim. (Alıntılara vurgular eklenmiştir).

   (...) Thus, for Freire literacy was not a means to prepare students for the world of subordinated labor or "careers," but a preparation for a self-managed life. And self-management could only occur when people have fulfilled three goals of education: self-reflection, that is, realizing the famous poetic phrase, "know thyself," which is an understanding of the world in which they live, in its economic, political and, equally important, its psychological dimensions. Specifically "critical" pedagogy helps the learner become aware of the forces that have hitherto ruled their lives and especially shaped their consciousness. The third goal is to help set the conditions for producing a new life, a new set of arrangements where power has been, at least in tendency, transferred to those who literally make the social world by transforming nature and themselves. [*] (...)

     (...) Education is not neutral. It is always directive in its attempt to teach students to inhabit a particular mode of agency; enable them to understand the larger world and one's role in it in a specific way; define their relationship, if not responsibility, to diverse others and to presuppose through what is taught and experienced in the classroom some sort of understanding of a more just, imaginative, and democratic life. Pedagogy is by definition directive, but that does not mean it is merely a form of indoctrination. On the contrary, as Freire argued, education as a practice for freedom must attempt to expand the capacities necessary for human agency and, hence, the possibilities for democracy itself. Surely, this suggests that at all levels of education from the primary school to the privileged precincts of higher education, educators should nourish those pedagogical practices that promote "a concern with keeping the forever unexhausted and unfulfilled human potential open, fighting back all attempts to foreclose and pre-empt the further unraveling of human possibilities, prodding human society to go on questioning itself and preventing that questioning from ever stalling or being declared finished."[**] In other words, critical pedagogy forges both an expanded notion of literacy and agency through a language of skepticism, possibility and a culture of openness, debate and engagement - all those elements now at risk because of the current and most dangerous attacks on public and higher education. This was Paulo's legacy, one that invokes dangerous memories and, hence, is increasingly absent from any discourse about current educational problems. (...)  

[*] Stanley Aronowitz, "Forward," "Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibilities," ed. Sheila L. Macrine, (New York, New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2009) pp. ix. 


[**] Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, "Conversations With Zygmunt Bauman" (Malden: Polity Press, 2001), p. 4.