A Pedagogy For Liberbation

Shor, Ira & Freire, Paulo. (1987). New York: Bergin & Garvey.

In their dialogue about liberating educators, Freire says, "To the extent I could prove to them that they could learn, when I challenged them, they felt more free" (p. 27). This means liberating educators are more demanding. This statement resonates with his perspective about learning: "Knowing demands discipline! Knowing which demands many things from you, which makes you tired in spite of being happy. It is not something which just happens" (p. 80). He demands intellectual responsibility from truly liberating teachers.

To Freire, liberating education requires transformation. He says, "[E]ducation per sé is not the lever of revolutionary transformation. The school system was created by political forces whose center of power is at a istance from the classroom. If education is not the lever of transformation, how can we understand liberating education? ... Liberatory education is fundamentally a situation where the teacher and the students both have to be learners, both have to be cognitive subjects, in spite of being different. This for me is the first test of liberating education, for teachers and students both to be critical agents in the act of learning" (p. 33).

Freire states that dialogical/democratic relationship between the educator and students do not make them equal. There is and should be difference. The central question for him is that whether the difference become 'antagonistic', which entails an authoritarian educator. At the same time, he stresses that students need to know their freedom that goes beyond the limits of democratic authority must be punished and the punishment has to be made by authority (p. 92-93). To him, democracy, freedom and authority are one entity.

Shor regards the 'culture of silence' as passive tolerance of domination, which has a aggressive dimension. He argues that aggression is inevitable because passivity is not a natural condition of childhood or adulthood and it is a response to symbolic violence imposed by the school through curriculum, punishments, manipulation, subordination, etc. He contends that this symbolic violence causes the culture of sabotage, which he calls 'performance strike', as a negative resistance, or falling into deeper silences. Aggressive students create disorder and alienate themselves from the school environment. Thus Shor calls for a counter-alienation pedagogy on the side of student subjectivity (pp. 123-125).