CONF 730: STRUCTURAL SOURCES OF CONFLICT

Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Chapter Three:

The Word- Two components, action and reaction. "There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world" (68).

Dialogue-Dialogue is the process through which the world is transformed. For dialogue to exist, there must be four components-love, humility, faith, and hope.

Education- For education to occur there must be communication, and dialogue is the cornerstone of communication. Freire resists the "banker" method of education, in which knowledge the teacher has is deposited into the minds of the students. Education must involve all parties. "It is not our role to speak to the people about our own view of the world, nor to attempt to impose that view on them but rather to dialogue with the people about their view and ours. We must realize that their view of the world, manifested variously in their action, reflects their situation in the world. Educational and political action which is not critically aware of this situation runs the risk either of "banking or of preaching in the desert" (77).

Freire writes, "Thus it is not the limit-situations in and of themselves which create a climate of hopelessness, but rather how they are perceived by women and men at a given historical moment: whether they appear as fetters or as insurmountable barriers (80)."

Once people become conscious of these limit-situations and perceive them as barriers to their humanization, "they begin to direct their increasingly critical actions toward achieving the untested feasibility implicit in that perception" (83). However, the people who are served by the present limit-situations will fight to maintain the status quo.

Friere devotes the rest of the chapter to talking about the search for the thematic present in a population.

The first stage of thematic investigation is "decoding," in which investigators observe life in the area.

The next stage is "evaluation," in which various members of the investigation team bring together their observances and combine them to come closer to the thematics. "The rnore the group divide and reintegrate the whole, the more closely they approach the nuclei of the principal and secondary contradictions which involve the inhabitants of the area" (93).

Next, once these contradictions have been revealed, the investigators study the extent to which the inhabitants are aware of these contradictions.

Next, there is codification; in which the investigators choose "the best channel of communication for each theme and its representation" (102) .

These codification's can be simple or compound--visual images, verbal descriptions, or a combination of these.

"The important thing, from the point of view of libertarian education, is for the noble to come to feel like masters of their thinking by discussing the thinking and views of the world explicitly or implicitly manifest in their own suggestions and those of their comrades" (105).

Chapter Four:

Chapter four begins with a reiteration of some of the themes introduced in earlier chapters: the importance of dialogue, the importance of action and reflection taking place simultaneously, participation of the oppressed in all aspects of the revolutionary process, etc.

Friere discusses the importance of revolutionary leaders in this chapter.   "Authentic revolution attempts to transform the reality which begets this dehumanizing state of affairs. Those whose interests are served by that reality cannot carry out this transformation; it must be achieved by the tyrannized, with their leaders. This truth, however, must become radically consequential; that is, the leaders must incarnate it; through communion with the people. In this communion both groups grow together, and the leaders, instead of being simply self-appointed, are installed or authenticated in their praxis with the praxis of the people" ( 111) .

He never discusses how these leaders emerge.

Freire distinguishes between thinking without the people and for the people, or with the people. Revolutionary leaders, he says, must think with the people.

"Although revolutionary leaders may have to think about the people in order to understand them better, this thinking differs from that of the elite; for in thinking about the people in order to liberate (rather than dominate) them, the leaders give of themselves to the thinking of the people.  One is the thinking of the master, the other is the thinking of the comrade" (113).

Freire discusses four types of antidialogical action that are used to oppress the people: conquest, divide and rule, manipulation, and cultural invasion.

In conquest, the conqueror, "imposes his objective on the vanquishes, and makes of them his possession" (119).

It is impossible for the oppressed to completely destroy the oppressed, so to maintain their dominance they mythicize the world to keep the oppressed from questioning reality.

In divide and rule, the oppressed minority attempts to keep the oppressed majority from becoming unified, because they see unity as a threat to their dominance. Freire says that they are right to see unity as a threat to their dominance.

On the threat of unity to the oppressors, Freire writes "every move by the oppressed towards unity points towards other actions, it means that sooner or later the oppressed will perceive their state of depersonalization and discover that as long as they are divided they will always be easy prey for manipulation and dominance {126).

Freire gives the example of leadership training courses, which rather than training the whole population," seek to train "leaders" of the oppressed population. These leaders often return to oppress the population themselves.

The leaders trying to divide the population often portray themselves as the defenders or saviors of the oppressed.

The third antidialogical action taken by the oppressors is manipulation.  In it, "the dominant elites try to conform the masses to their objectives"(128).

Manipulation allows the elites to lead the people into a false form of organizing, one that keeps them dehumanized and prevents their liberation.

Freire says that one of the tools of manipulation used by elites is to "inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success" (130).

According to Freire, revolutionary leaders should show the contradiction of manipulation to the oppressed by posing it as a problem, and use this as a tool for real organizing.

In cultural invasion, oppressive invade existing society and force their own world-view and values on it.

He gives the example of what he calls the "rigid relationship structure emphasized by the school" which leads the professionals who come out of this schooling to "repeat the rigid patterns in which they were educated" (136).

These professionals have a dual status as oppressed and oppressor, Freire writes.

The response to cultural invasion is "cultural revolution," which "takes the total society to be reconstructed, including all human activities, as the object of its remolding action" ( 119). The culture which is being effected is the "fundamental instrumlent for this reconstruction" (139).

Freire discusses development, which he argues cannot be achieved in the context of cultural invasion. Any development in an oppressed society will only benefit the oppressors.

Freire then distinguishes between two statesof oppression. In the first, the oppressor is inside the oppressed population, and "their resulting ambiguity makes them fearful of freedom" ( 144 ); In the second case, the people have perceived the dominant elites as the oppressors, and Freire writes that once they have begun to "localize the oppressor outside themselves, they take up the struggle to surmount the contradiction in which they are caught" (145).

Freire discusses four aspects of dialogical action: cooperation, unity for 1iberation, organization, and cultural synthesis.

About cooperation, Freire writes that "In the theory of dialogical action there is no place for conquering the people on behalf of the revolutionary causes, but only for gaining their adherence" (149).

Unity of the population is a requirement for achieving liberation. This will be difficult, he writes, because the dominate elites perceive this unity as a threat and will organize to stop it.

Organization is a facet of unity, revolutionary leaders attempt to unify the people will necessarily involve them organizing the people.

Organization requires authority, he says, but not authoritarianism.

Cultural synthesis is the opposite of cultural invasion. In cultural invasion, outsiders come in to teach their world view and values to the population. In cultural synthesis, outsiders come to learn from the population and the population learns from them.

"Cultural synthesis, (precisely because it is a synthesis) does not mean that the objective of revolutionary action should be limited by the aspirations expressed in the world view of the people.  If this were to happen (iin the guise of respect for that view), the revolutionary leaders would be passively bound to that vision. Neither invasion by the leaders of the people's world view nor mere adaptation by theleaders to the (often naive) aspirations of the people is acceptable (163).

Freire gives the example of people who demand higher salaries.  "The leaders muston on the one hand identify with the people's demand for higher salaries, while on the other they must pose the meaning of that very demand as a problem" (164).