Reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy
of the Oppressed is probably one of the most important works that I
have read so far in the Language and Literacy program, for it provides an
ideological framework for the kind of transformative learning that is necessary
to help liberate students and teachers from oppressive power structures.
Freire's claims are not for the faint at heart. He is a revolutionary and
fearless. For anyone who is really interested in the liberatory aspects of
education, Freire is a must-read.
When you get down to it,
learning to read and write, and thus raising the consciousness of illiterate
students is really important work. It’s political work. It’s subversive
in that it helps foster “an attitude of creation and re-creation, a
self-transformation producing a stance of intervention in one’s context”
(49). In other words, literacy provides a mechanism for students to find
the wherewithal within themselves to change their circumstances. In that
sense, Freire’s approach is conservative. It relies on a kind of spiritual
consciousness-raising that does not emanate from “the top down, but only from
the inside out” (49). Perhaps, this awakening is exemplified in Sherman
Alexie’s “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me.” In this short
story, Alexie writes about his life as Indian boy and how learning to read
shaped his entire world. Living on an Indian reservation, Alexie was
expected to fail and remain uneducated. He writes, “A smart Indian is a
dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by Indian and non-Indians
alike. I fought with my classmates on a daily basis. They wanted me to
stay quiet when the non-Indian teacher asked for answers, for volunteers, for
help. We were Indian children expected to be stupid” (17). Freire, in what I
think is one of the most important points in his essay, discusses the need of
the oppressor to silence others. He says, “Human beings are not built in
silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection” (88). That’s why
dialogue is so important. Teachers need to help students to find their voice,
to call a spade a spade, and to help them to develop vocabulary that they can
use to express their condition.
Yet, although
Alexie grows up on an Indian reservation and is pressured to ignore school and
learning, Alexie still strives to succeed, to save his own life. Many of
his fellow classmates flunk out and try to force him to do the same. His
classmates are dull and monosyllabic in class, while they are very lively and
great storytellers once home. Sherman Alexie tells of how he kept reading
no matter where he was, and his only goal, his only motivation, was to save his
life. In this sense, Alexie’s fight to save his own life is in a sense an
example of what Freire’s calls “problem-posing education”—a coming to terms
with the effects of racism, poverty and annihilation and a willingness to fight
vestiges of them.
In concluding his story, Alexie
admits that he is surprised he became a writer. He had never learned
about writing novels or poetry, but merely read. When he goes back to his
reservation, he sees many children trying to be like him, trying to save their
own lives, but also many of the same children ignoring learning. Near the end
of the essay, he says that “I was trying to save my life” (Alexie 18). Alexie’s theme of saving his life
through reading and writing is so powerful. It is one of the “generative
themes” in his essay which is essentially a reflection on what it means to be
an Indian in today’s America.
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