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“Critical pedagogy, for Freire, meant imagining literacy as not simply the mastering of specific skills, but also as a mode of intervention, a way of learning about and reading the word as a basis for intervening in the world.”
Notional Slurry
Pontification without all the gritty gravitas
I’ve seen first-hand what happens when Freire is taught in a school of education: the revolutionary message is eviscerated. His methodology becomes just another trendy slang that must be parroted so that education grad students can get their meaningless PhD to that they can become administrators and make even MORE money in a state-run, bureaucratized system that does its best to stamp out anything like real critical thought.
I was asked to copyedit a PhD dissertation written by a sweet, well-meaning grad student who could neither write a decent sentence nor think straight. She parroted Freire but when it came to her own course on “ethnicity,” she didn’t accept anything from her students save the answers SHE wanted. Conclusion of her thesis: her course was a success, because she thought it was, and because in the required end-of-the-year papers, her students told her what a great teacher she was and how much they had learned in her course.
Just how many high school students will write papers critical of the one with the power to grade?