Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Bloomsbury Revelations) by Paulo Freire

Author:Paulo Freire [Freire, Paulo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

* See, among others, Sartre, Fanon, Memmi, and Freire.

* See, in this regard, Eduardo Nicol, Los principios de la ciencia (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1965).

† Paulo Freire and Sérgio Guimaraes, Sobre educação—diálogos (Rio de Janeira: Paz e Terra, 1984).

* Franz Fanon, Os condenados da Terra; Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press).

* Neil Postman, Technopoly—the Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Knopf, 1992).

Chapter 5

One day I received a phone call at my home in Geneva. It was a Sunday morning, a very cold, cloudy morning, and the French mountains you can see in the distance were swathed in clouds. A typical Swiss January Sunday.

The call was from a Spanish guest worker, who asked if he and two of his companions might drop in for an interview with me some evening in the coming week. He told me they wanted to talk about a children’s education program they had planned and were setting up. He mentioned that they were reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and that they would like to talk about that too. “Who knows,” he said, “—if you were to have time, and were interested, we might meet more than once.”

We agreed on a day, and, at the scheduled time, they arrived with certain documents and certain children’s exercises.

We chatted a bit about the climate, and the hard winter. They told me about Spain and asked me about Brazil. Then they broached the question that had brought us together. However, to be methodical, they had to introduce that question with an introduction explaining their political option, their activism. They spoke of their experience as guest workers, of the restrictions on their right to have their families with them to which so many of them were subjected, of the obligation imposed on them, simply because they had been in Switzerland for a year, to go back to Spain and renew (or fail to renew) their privilege of spending another one-year term here the following year.

This legal determination, besides relieving the Swiss government of the burden of expenditures for education and health, not to mention other considerations, obliged them to live in a state of constant tension. Their vital insecurity was one more “why” for the “existential weariness” I have talked about. They gave examples. Many of their companions found themselves on an emotional roller coaster, living in a present that, despite their now having the work that they had been without in their own country, was a today with a doubtful, too doubtful, tomorrow. It was a today in which, missing the love and tenderness, as well as physical presence, of their families, they found their activity, their strength, their resistance, all undermined. Many among them, then, awash in “existential weariness” and “historical anesthesia,” simply gravitated around their personal problems and concerns of the moment, unable to glimpse the “untested feasibility” that lay beyond the “limited situation” in which they found themselves immersed.* Hence also the difficulty of moving them out of their “historical

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.