Pedagogy of Solidarity by Freire Paulo;Freire Ana Maria Araújo;de Oliveira Walter;Giroux Henry A.;

Author:Freire, Paulo;Freire, Ana Maria Araújo;de Oliveira, Walter;Giroux, Henry A.; [Freire, Paulo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4 For a Pedagogy of Solidarity

Walter Ferreira de Oliveira

DOI: 10.4324/9781315422817-4

To doubt what is right and not what is questionable, here is wisdom.

Celestin Freinet

Fatalism and Compliance: Pedagogy of Oppression

Paulo Freire’s work repeatedly invites us to reflect on the identity of the educational process. It is not uncommon in our society to hold a vision of education strictly as a set of learning mechanisms with their valuation strongly linked to the formal, and valued usually only when it is education “acquired” at school—the courses offered by formally accredited educational institutions. But, from Freire’s view the educational process is much more than the knowledge acquired didactically in formal institutions. Education is for him a key to the management of our own dilemma of human existence, a transcendent phenomenon—both a tool and a field of creation. It can be used as an adaptation scheme or can be exercised as a locus of personal maturation, which involves the exchange of knowledge and the creation of a social dynamic for building new knowledge. In this sense, education is an epiphenomenon, a reflection of the cultural, social, and political through interpersonal relationships, communities and institutions.

Education is thus a transforming agent of these structures. It is not a neutral activity, but a territory of development and mobilization where intense clashes and conflicts are experienced. The question of identity is intertwined with the teaching of the fundamental questions of epistemology. Melvin Rader (1976) helps us to locate these questions: “How do we know? How can we know? How do we know this? How can we distinguish between appearance and reality? What is the nature of the truth and how do we distinguish what is true from what is false?” This approach includes education with, in the words of Rader “undying issues,” the main problems of philosophy, the questions that insist on not being ignored.

To examine human existence in its knowledge, structures, interrelations, intricacies, nuances, and idiosyncrasies; to decipher meanings, symbolism, representations, and practices; and to study societies, forms of association between people, organizations, movements, and institutions as well as models, paradigms, and ways of life, this is the crux of education, and it can be considered the heart of the social sciences and humanities. The object of education is the study of the system of relationships, human and environmental, whose balance and harmonization is defined by the conjunction and application of knowledge.

For the inevitably central object of study of these relationships one returns to education and pedagogical processes. Our institutions, our professional actions, our customs, and much of our mental life are conditioned by social and educational processes experienced in school environments—vocational and academic—as well as through social and educational structures external to formal education. Most of these educational relationships take place informally, in the context of social and cultural influences that also constitute teaching and function as shared teaching and learning.

The analysis of this social and cultural process we call education triggers knowledge beyond the technical and expands the universe of knowledge. It allows us, for example,

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