The Analysis of Pedagogy of the Oppressed

这篇essay讲诉了被压迫者，弗莱雷，一个巴西的教育家和哲学家中最有影响力的工作，教育学，一直被认为是批判教育学的基本文本之一。在这本书的第二章，教育的概念银行业，弗莱雷由教师提出了银行的主意，因为压迫的工具，并提出教育问题的冒充概念作为一种手段解放。

Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the most influential work of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher, has long been regarded as one of the foundational texts of critical pedagogy. In the second chapter of this book, The Banking Concept of Education, Freire raised the idea of banking by teachers as an instrument of oppression, and proposed the problem-posing concept of education as an instrument for liberation.

The detailed analysis starts with a critique of the traditional teacher-student relationship at any level. According to Freire, in this fundamentally narrative relationship, the teacher is regarded as the authority of knowledge, which is lifeless, petrified, detached from reality, and disconnected from the totality (Freire, 57). Outstandingly characterized by the sonority of the words uttered by the teacher, this kind of narrative education requires the students only to mechanically depositing all the contents into their memory without the need to critical thinking, reflecting, and even categorizing. This is the banking concept of education, a clear dichotomy between the teacher as the Subject and the depositor who disciplines and the students as the mere Objects and the depositories who are disciplined.

Under the firm control of banking education, the students' creative power and independent consciousness are oppressed to an extreme degree. To be liberated from the total control of the oppressors and to fully gain their critical consciousness, the students must struggle and fight against for their mind independence. And that is when the problem-posing education is need. During this process of emancipation, the students need to be aware of their own disadvantaged situations and take actions. However, for educators, they cannot wait aside to look on things going without any interference, since "the presence of the oppressed in the struggle for liberation... not pseudo-participation, but committed involvement" (Freire, 56). This requires those truly committed to liberation to abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of men in their relations with the world (Freire, 66).

This process of emancipation and liberation is especially painful for the oppressors, since it required a consciousness in depth of their situations, to admit that their authority over the students are not to be mistaken as the authority of knowledge, to be willing to accept the equal teacher-and-student relationship, and to be prepared for challenge from independent-thinking students in a dialogue. This is the process toward what Freire called humanization, an effort not only from the oppressed but also from the oppressors. This idealized concept really sets us into thinking of who, Rodriguez or Pratt, does a better job of addressing Freire's vision and offering a clearer path for the students to fight for their emancipation from the banking education. I would like to propose that from Pratt's Arts of the Contact Zone, I have seen a brighter future for "humanization".

Indeed, the vivid description in The Achievement of Desire provided by Rodriguez does give us a deeper understanding of Freire's banking education in the real situations. The enthusiastic girl in Rodriguez's class, and more significantly, the young Rodriguez himself, best illustrate how obsessed and frantic the students may be after been transformed by the narrative and authoritative education. As the author admits in his adult years in this passage, "books were crucial for my academic success, though I couldn't have said exactly how and why". When reading, the mere bookish little boy only hungrily noted down or bored in mind the major idea and theme it contained, regarding it as the only educational value of the books without comprehensive and independent appreciation of the books' beauty and intrinsic value on his own, ignorant of what those famous critic says.

In Rodriguez's case, he is far from being a negative oppressed student, but an active and willingly victim, readily giving up his own consciousness and being subject to the white peoples' education system's control. What's worse, this long-term unconscious oppression even cultivated his desire of severing from his own culture identity. At first, he may only be proud of being devoid of any accent in spoken English, but gradually, "the guilty for the shame" of his father's misbehavior in front of his teacher, the furious anger towards his mother of being ignorant of his book, and the desire to run away from his noisy families successfully alienates him from the identity he born with. This grieve loss was not been discovered until the oppression of education make the author "felt drawn by professionalism to the edge of sterility, capable of no more than pedantic, lifeless, unassailable prose" and the nostalgia took hold of his mind.

This is a moving and profound illustration of the detrimental effect of banking education to its extreme. But beside the emotional story of the author's own experiences, we find little seasonal analysis of the mechanisms of this tragedy or any suggested methods to overthrow or overcome the authoritarian white people's banking education system. And in face of the alienating intellectualism, the author seems hopeless and weak, wholly at the disposal of nostalgia and running away from his intrinsic cultural identity.

From Pratt's paradigm, however, we are gladly to find some hope for solutions and even some measures already taken. According to Pratt, autoethonographic text refers to "a text which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them" (Pratt, 519). Characterized by a mixture of Quechua, the native language of Andean indigenous of Latin America, and ungrammatical but expressive Spanish in written text, Guaman Poma's letter is intended to present to King Philip III of Spain. The intended audience of such texts includes both the "metropolitan audiences and the speaker's own community" (Pratt, 520).

This is an effort striving for equal communication, which reasonably demands our appreciation. In face of the politically, economically superior Spanish king, Guama Poma refused to be controlled and oppressed. Instead, he engaged an equal dialogue for both parties, holding firm his own standpoint and explicitly expressing his own opinions. Of course, the things were not go as he designed, the letter had never reached to the Spanish king's hands and the "sociocultural complexities and disparities produced by conquest and empire"(Pratt, 519) can never be easily be solved by a mere letter. At least, we have seen Guaman Poma's using the European narrative techniques to his passionate expression and the Spanish governor's better understanding of his intense proud of his Andean cultural heritage and honored tradition, which by no means can be found in the opposed in the communication.

Then, we are glad to find Pratt offering some tangible efforts and "transforming action" towards the equality in communication and the cultivation of self-consciousness. First of all, she provides some theoretical and mechanism-related concepts. At the center of overcoming the authoritarianism and constructing shared understanding is the notion of "safe house", a term defined by Pratt as "social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves a horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, temporary protection from legacies of oppression" (Pratt, 529) This is the ideal space which can hardly be achieved, but at the same time, its importance reminds us to stick to one's own cultural identity and to keep away from the eroding effect of alienating intellectualism, since no one should be separated from his or her own cultural and the source of independent consciousness and self-identity.

Then, guided by this notion of "safe house" and equal communication, she conducted a revolutionary and even progressive, to some people's opinion, educational reform in search of educational democracy. In this course, knowledge is no longer "a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing" (Freire, 58), but something that whatever one said, regardless of the content and the people no raised it. And this knowledge is not passively accepted without objection, but need to be worked on and to be "systematically received in radically heterogeneous way that we (teachers) were neither able nor entitled to prescribe" (Pratt, 528). This means that the educators no longer have the authority of knowledge, which previous entitled to them in the banking education. Instead, teachers and students alike equal in front of the knowledge and actively engaging into the discussion and formation of the knowledge.

This is a great effort towards humanization envisioned by Freire, for in this case, it is the educators, the previous oppressors that actively take measures to promote and facilitate the materialization of students' liberation and emancipation. Teachers in Pratt's case are willingly step down and work with the students to form their own knowledge in an equal fashion. This can also be seen as problem-posing education to some extent, since the class as a whole need to create their own knowledge jointly, at the same time to be prepared by the influences and cultural shocks brought by "rage, incomprehension, pain" as well as "exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation, mutual understanding, and new wisdom" (Pratt, 529). It is the joys of the contact zone, but it can also be understood as the joy of emancipation and recovering self-consciousness.

In conclusion, Pratt went further than Rodriguez in addressing Freire's idea. Going beyond the mere description of what a student may be oppressed by the banking education, Pratt actively takes measures in order to solve this problem like Guaman Poma did hundreds of years ago. Maybe the experimental class described by Pratt cannot be put in practice in a nationwide or even worldwide scale, but it at least explicitly displays what a Freire-style education can be in the future.

Bibliography

Freire, Paulo. "Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans." Myra Bergman Ramos. New York:

Continuum (1970).

51Due网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文著作权归51Due所有；未经51Due官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯著作权现象，51Due保留一切法律追诉权。