Unit Author: K. Anne Pyburn, Indiana University
Knowledge vs. Education
Background Information
Most students are accustomed to accepting education as a neutral experience. Even when it seems irrelevant to their own lives, they experience their education as simply education, not a kind of education. Similarly, they do not consider that the goal and the effect of education is to create a citizenry that views the world, its history and structure and their place in it in a way that serves the status quo. Although many students resist and resent the lessons and the structure of public education, few see it as indoctrination.
Paolo Freire has written lucidly about how education, as one of the “master’s tools” serves to build and maintain the master’s house. Freire, a Brazilian educational theorist and activist, wrote several influential books about how education oppresses people, including his most famous book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968). In this book he explains, among other things, the problem with certain kinds of education (“banking” in particular) and offers some alternatives.
Learning Goals
Students will become more aware of how the context of their education and the experiences and backgrounds of their teachers have impacted their learning. The goal is not to reject their education or to discount the knowledge of their teachers and texts, but to learn to think critically of all sources of information and to take responsibility for their own learning whoever the teacher and whatever the subject or the goals of the class.
Readings
Background reading for the instructor: Paolo Freire published Pedagogy of the Oppressed in English 1970 and it has been reprinted and revised several times.
Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 50th Anniversary Edition, Bloomsbury Academic, New York.
Activities and Assignments
Lecture
Introduce yourself very thoroughly to the class. Include your family background, residential history, parents’ nationalities and educations and professions, your family structure and the positions and experiences of your siblings, spouse or partner and offspring. Describe your education and your professional achievements. Use maps to explain your travels if you are a traveler, show slides of your family’s accomplishments if these are important to your life. Expose your political beliefs as gently as possible, e.g. I am a feminist; I am a liberal; I am a fiscal conservative; etc.
Explain to the class that although you make every effort to present information accurately and fairly, you are a human being with feelings and experiences and passions, just like everyone else, and that means that your perspective affects your teaching. If the class is a small seminar, encourage students to discuss how your perspectives will affect what you teach and how you teach it. This is not adversarial, the result should be that the students respect your honesty and realize that they must evaluate what you say to them for themselves in the light of what they know about you—and that this is what they must do with any source: textbooks, TV shows, museums displays…
If the class is a large lecture class, have the students break into small groups of 3 to 5 to list ways in which your perspective will affect the class. A few should be invited to present what their group discussed to the class. This is a delicate and very important exercise because it is up to you, the lecturer, to show that identifying the impact of your personality on the class is not insulting you, it is a normal aspect of learning that students should engage in consciously and respectfully. If you do not respond defensively but with humor and honesty and are careful not to counterattack, the class atmosphere will be very positive.
For example, if a student says “having 3 kids and a part-time job could make you a poor teacher,” then responding “we’re all busy,” or “the university doesn’t pay me enough,” or “does having 3 kids and a job make you a poor student,” are not very constructive answers. Instead, try something like “it certainly makes it hard for me to answer all my emails right away and sometimes I am slow to grade papers, but I think having a normal life makes me a better teacher in some ways. In the past, female schoolteachers were not allowed to marry and have children and were expected to survive on very little salary. I don’t think this made them better teachers. But it affects how I do things and I hope you take that into account, just as I try to take your own personal situation into account when I evaluate your learning.”
Class Assignment
Students should read Paolo Freire with an excerpt from Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Before class ask students to write a paragraph about the quote:
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
If you want to use a written assignment, ask the class to write a one paragraph reaction to Introducing and Disrupting the “Perfect Stranger” by Susan D. Dion [video]. If there is time, they can do this in class or as homework. Students might be encouraged to record their response instead of writing it; they could also choose to interview someone for their reaction to the video. This could be a relative, or someone who is not in the class, or two students could collaborate and make a video of their combined reaction to Susan Dion’s comments.