Essay:"On Dialogue"

Paulo Freire, the essay's main subject and author of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed

On Dialogue

Certain so-called Marxists hold that communication or even interaction with the masses is unimportant. These left communists are incorrect, and promote the worst kind of revisionism.

Education and the Cultural Revolution

On April 24, 1945, Mao delivered his report “On Coalition Government”, in which he so-rightfully declared that, “the people, and the people alone, are the motive force in history.” His analysis manifested in Spring, 1966, when he called upon the Chinese people to rebel against the bourgeois ideals that permeated into Chinese society. Chairman Mao pushed for the people to exculpate and remove the capitalist roaders in high government and in the old education system. For example, on May 26, 1966, Comrade Nieh Yuan-tzu led Peking – now called Beijing – University professors in their struggle against the traditional bourgeois education through the first big character poster. With organized resistance, the professors garnered the attention of the Central Committee and the People’s Radio, and removed the university administrator from power. Their efforts – and the efforts of the Chinese masses – aided the educational reform campaign throughout the country.

Introduction

Dialogue is the basis to effectively educate from and to the masses and the party. The party cannot fall into the armchair’s traps and forget the people; at the same time, however, the party must educate the people in order to bring about revolution. What is the method of such an education? How do we, as people and socialists, ensure that we do not replicate the bourgeois method? Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist educator and philosopher, explained in his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He posited that the old order of bourgeois education can not be the principle of a new party, and that, instead, a true, revolutionary party emphasizes the oppressed as human. Such an argument is, undoubtedly, correct. Only through mass work can organization, agitation, and education become not only possible but a movement.

Analysis

Freire posited that the common pedagogy is the banking method. As the name suggests, it dehumanizes the oppressed – in his case, the masses or the students – and treats them as boxes with information to be deposited in. We come to understand topics in their death, not in their life. Students, for example, do not learn in bourgeois society. Students merely memorize, rather than adopt, information, instead. Think of the liberal scholars who attend most prestigious universities: correct ideas can form, but genuine praxis – no dice! While intellectuals publish papers on exploitation and discrimination to their private and paid for university library, the people of the world press on – despite the weight of capital’s iron chains, despite the scars which form on their wrists from their handcuffs. Hence, no information is adopted under the confines of both this bourgeois method and institution. The banking method reinforces false-learning through memorization, and allows only the elitism of the educator, in comparison to an effective relationship with the educated.

Therefore, we, as people who seek to change the world and not but comment on it, seek true education. We do not seek the imperialist pedagogy, the education mode that suggests the world must bend to its will and its unreliable logic. Nor do we seek its capitalist counterpart. Rather, we seek liberation. Gil-Scott Heron, an African-American jazz poet and musician, wrote the poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” In an interview, he clarified that, “the first change that has to take place is in your mind.” This is undeniably true. A successful revolutionary movement, yet again, requires that the people and the party maintain interdependence through reaffirming theory and practice.

Paulo Freire resolved the contradiction between theory and practice, party and people, through problem-posing education. Rather than bourgeois banking education, problem-posing education understands students as subjects – rather than objects – and teachers, as well, as subjects. These social groups both engage in dialogue between one another and consistently offer the other new information. Students are not boxes to be filled, but are humans and require interaction. That same doctrine is true of the teacher, who the students may educate on his, her, or their pedagogy. In our case, students are understood as the oppressed – the people, our comrades – and the teacher is understood as the party – the people’s leader. Hence, although some may claim otherwise, the contradiction between leadership and led may be resolved under problem-posing education.

Conclusion

Overall, the matter of how the party interprets and interacts among the people is a matter of serious dialogue. We must acknowledge humans in human terms and methods of not only the communication of ideas but also the education on and adoption of them. Propaganda, namely, may be effective, but it can not replace how one understands and imposes theory and practice. Our solution on education, the problem-posing solution, is historically vindicated. Just as Lenin composed his “Questionnaire” to learn and interact with the factory workers, just as the masses led the Cultural Revolution and the socialist line, or just as Peruvian rebels educated one another in the Canto Grande prison, this fact remains.