Pedagogy Essay Example for Free

Pedagogy Essay Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Portuguese: Pedagogic do Proudly), written by educator Paulo Fire, proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society. It was first published in Portuguese in 1968, and was translated by Myra Ramose into English and published In 1970. [1] The book is considered one of the foundational texts of critical pedagogy. Dedicated to what Is called the oppressed and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Fire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between what he calls the colonizer ND the colonized. In the book Fire calls traditional pedagogy the banking model because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggy bank. However, he argues for pedagogy to treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge. The book has sold over 750,000 copies worldwide. [2] Translated into several languages, most editions of Pedagogy of the Oppressed contain at least one introduction/foreword, a preface, and four chapters. The first chapter explores how oppression has been Justified and how it is overcome through a mutual process between the oppressor and the oppressed (oppressors-oppressed distinction). Examining how the balance of power between the colonizer and the colonized remains relatively stable, Fire admits that the powerless in society can be frightened of freedom. He writes, Freedom Is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion. (47) According to Fire, freedom will be the result of praxis † Informed action † when a balance between theory and practice is achieved. The second chapter examines the banking approach to education † a metaphor used by Fire that suggests students are considered empty bank accounts that should remain open to deposits made by the teacher. Fire rejects the banking approach, claiming It results In the demutualization of both the students and the teachers. In addition, he argues the banking approach stimulates oppressive attitudes and practices in society. Instead, Fire advocates for a more world- mediated, mutual approach to education that considers people Incomplete. According to Fire, this authentic approach to education must allow people to be aware of their incompleteness and strive to be more fully human. This attempt to use education as a meaner of consciously shaping the person and the society is called centralization, a term first coined by Fire in this book. Dimensions of human praxis. This is in line with the Lavabo Viewer Pintos use of the word/idea in his Consciences Realized National which Fire contends is using the concept without the pessimistic character originally found in Jaspers (Note 15, Chapter 3) in reference to Karl Jaspers notion of Gratuitousness. The last chapter proposes dialogs as an instrument to free the colonized, through the use of cooperation, unity, organization and cultural synthesis (overcoming problems in society to liberate human beings). This is in contrast to antispasmodics which use conquest, manipulation, cultural invasion, and the concept of divide and rule. Fire suggests that populist dialogue is a necessity to revolution; that impeding dialogue dehumidifies and supports the status quo. This is but one example of the dichotomies Fire identifies in the book. Others include the student-teacher dichotomy and the colonizer-colonized dichotomy. In his article for the conservative-leaning City Journal, Sol Stern[3] notes that Pedagogy of the Oppressed ignores the traditional touchstones of Western education (e. G. , Rousseau, John Dewey, or Maria Interiors) and contains virtually none of the information typically found in traditional teacher education (e. G. , no discussion of curriculum, testing, or age-appropriate learning). To the contrary, Fire rejects traditional education as official knowledge that intends to oppress. Spread[edit]Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in Americas teacher-training programs, according to Sol Stern. A 2003 study looking at the curricula of 16 schools of education, 14 of them among the top in the country, found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned texts in their philosophy of education courses. Such course assignments are a large part of the reason the book has sold almost 1 million copies, which is a remarkable number for a book in the education field. [3] Influences[edit]The work was strongly influenced by Franz Fanons and Karl Marx. One of Firers dictums is that: there neither is, nor has ever been, an educational practice in zero space-time†neutral in the sense of being committed only to preponderantly abstract, intangible ideas. According to later critics, heirs to Firers ideas have taken it to mean that since all education is political, leftist math teachers who care about the oppressed have a right, indeed a duty, to use a pedagogy that, in Firers words, does not conceal † in fact, which proclaims † its own political