Education In Modern Society Education and U.S. Society: Provenzo Chapter 4 Education as Cultural Action for Freedom -- Paulo Freire

In the fall of 2000: 3.3 million elementary and secondary school teachers in public and private schools 2.9 million in public schools 0.4 million in private schools. 2.0 million at elementary level 1.3 million at the secondary level

Yesterday and today, schools: trained people for the world of work. communicated to people their status within society and what was expected of them.

Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup Poll (1999)… Strong support for local schools General dissatisfaction with the schools nationally Perceived biggest problems: use of drugs (46%) lack of discipline (18%)

Traditionally, we have assumed… What if the society is unjust? Inequitable? Would the educational system help to perpetuate a society that needs to be changed or redefined? the necessity of education in defining a society. Yet if education recreates the society of which it is a part, we face dilemmas:

“Much of what goes on in the schools on a day-to-day basis is archaic, and often education is dehumanizing.” --J. Kozol

Teachers live and work “in somewhat the state of mind as intellectual guerillas, determined somehow to awaken students, to spark their curiosity and to open their minds, yet no less determined to remain as teachers in the schools.”

Education and Power “The idea of power has lain more completely neglected in educational studies than in any other field of thought that is of fundamental social interest…. One is more likely to hear singing in a bank than serious talk of power in relation to education.”

Power is a reality in nearly all relationships. It determines what we may or may not accomplish as educators.

Education as Cultural Action for Freedom The poor live in a “culture of silence” dominated by the ideas and values of others. Freire saw learning as a process of liberation; for him, education is an act of cultural action for freedom an act of knowing and not memorization. --Paulo Freire

Learning involves dialogue between the teacher and the student. development of critical consciousness on the part of the student. Instead of being simply acted on and reacting to the world in which he or she lives, the student learns to reflect and act on the events of his life.

Education for critical consciousness. “Vocabulary words were of a generative nature, and came from the experience of and reflected the needs of those being taught to read. How and why questions took precedence over questions of who and what. Instead of domestication, education became an act of liberation,… “conscientization” or education for critical consciousness.

The banking model of education Views students as empty containers banking model is “well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well humans fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.”

Educational Colonialism Manifests in three different ways …schools reflect the needs of the colonizers, the aspirations and needs of those being dominated are typically ignored. “The thread that read through all colonial education was the fact that it was offered by the colonizer without the input or the consent of the colonized.” “…neither provided the opportunity for integration into the dominant culture…nor prepared those who were colonized for positions of leadership within their indigenous cultures. In a colonized educational system the individual becomes increasingly alienated from his or her native culture. Colonized people are directed; they do not direct themselves.”

The colonized group eventually comes to identify with the values and beliefs of the colonizer and to assume their superiority.

Education and Hegemony Hegemony refers to the maintenance of domination primarily through consensual social practices, social forms, and social structures produced in specific sites such as the church, the state, the school, the mass media, the political system and the family…. “Hegemony refers to the moral and intellectual leadership of a dominant class over a subordinate class achieved not through willful construction of rules and regulations… but rather through the general winning of consent of the subordinate class to the authority of the dominant class.”

Hegemonic systems try to: define the limits of discourse, set the political agenda, by defining the issues and terms of debate exclude oppositional ideas.

Schools as Social Systems If we try hard enough, we can improve the lives of the children we teach. Noble. Realistic?

Crises arise when “…the structure of a social system allows fewer possibilities for problem solving than are necessary to the continued existence of the system.”