Just some boring thoughts.

I am taking an education class intitled "Contemporary Issues in American Education." For Wednesday, the assigned reading was "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Paulo Freire. He is writing about how to educate the oppressed in Brazil and interact with them so they can become liberated, but the applications to American Education are startling.

He writes "Thus, the dialogical character of education as the practice of freedom does not begin when the teacher-student meets with the students-teachers in a pedagogical fashion, but rather when the former first asks herself of himself what she or he will dialogue with the latter about." (Friere, Paulo "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." Continuum International Publishing Group: New York, NY, 2006. 93.)

I feel that so many teachers, and myself included, don't think about what they are teaching. Yes, there are tests, there are curricula, but really, how am I approaching the material? And in the future, why will I be teaching this? What is important? I think that the most important is to think.

A couple pages later, Freire writes "If children reared in an atmosphere of lovelessness and oppression...do not manage during their youth to take the path of authentic rebellion, they will either drift into total indifference, alienated from reality by the authorities and the myths the latter have used to "shape" them or they may engage in forms of destructive action." (ibid, 155)

Ok, so maybe that wasn't a couple pages later, but still. Kozol writes about deprivation and lack of resources in schools in East St. Louis and post industrial areas of Chicago. These schools lack hope, and I think that there is a great similarity between the lack of hope and "lovelessness and oppression." If these students do not rise against there unfair circumstances, and teachers and administrators do not let them, then they have no path anywhere. It would take great courage from people in power to say, yes, these students have a point, let them rebel, let them take action, since we have let them down.

Freire writes about the interaction a "organizer" of a rebellion should have with the oppressed (the people he thinks should be freed). He stresses the importance of a "communion" and a "dialogue." I hesitate to say that he supports a grass roots movement, he seems to say that they must be lead to rebellion, but only up to the point where they can take over the rebellion themselves. What does this say about American Education? To what point I as a teacher should lead my students to rise against the structures of which I am a part?