I've only read the first few pages of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It's really good. For anyone who struggles with basic theory, Freire writes with a pretty incredible clarity and succinctness. To me it reads almost like a rehashing of The Communist Manifesto, just without the words "proletariat," "bourgeoisie," "workers," etc.: oppressed people around the world must organize to overthrow their oppressors. All Freire seems to add is that they shouldn't be dickheads when they finally succeed. (He also throws some shade at philanthropy.) In contrast to modern Hegelians like Todd McGowan, Freire believes that contradiction can be overcome, that we can really build a fucking sweet new world free of oppression and dehumanization.
Anyway, this is my question. I've worked for many years as a teacher although I've actually never received any formal training or gone to teacher's college or anything like that. (I worked as an ESL teacher abroad and as a sub in Amerikkka.) I've heard that Pedagogy of the Oppressed is basically required reading if you intend to become a professional teacher in the USA. Yet we all know that nearly all American teachers are either libs or chuds. (I will say however in their defense that the average American teacher is probably way more open to human liberation than the average American.) But still: how the fuck can you read this shit and then basically lick the boots of the pigs on patrol in the hallways of the school you work at? How do you read Pedagogy of the Oppressed and then teach an American history class where you say that the founding fathers were guided by the ideal of liberty rather than their thirst for human blood?i
Edit: lol okay as it turns out I am completely wrong about this book being assigned reading in the USA.
I've got a few friends and family that teach, and none of them had ever heard of it. This includes a relative of mine that got their Ed Masters from a social justice focused Jesuit school a couple years ago.
This seems believable. I googled a summary of the book and what I found said basically that teachers should work together with students to learn shit that benefits both parties. That narrow reading seems to allow normies and the education system generally to escape the deeper implications of Freire’s work.
Definitely wasn't required for me. I'm still working through it myself.
I took like 3 education classes for my masters (didn't do undergrad in education) so Idk if others have to.
But I also live in Iowa and I wouldn't be surprised if they instituted the death penalty for professors who assign it.
I adore Pedagogy of the Oppresed.
But if it’s not the most bland high concept read. I had to go over stuff multiple times AND have an overview to figure it out the last time I read it. And that was my third read through.
Edit: Also going to add that Pedagogy places a huge emphasis on Marxist class analysis and Americans are NOT prepared for that or know how tarp interpret it.
For sure. I read theory aloud to myself in order to focus and keep from breezing through it too quickly.
The jesuit who first introduced me to Freire called his work “the most important text for the downtrodden that no one can understand due to it being far too high concept for the average person to read” which is pretty spot on.
I personally don’t find it too high concept at all. If you want high concept, read Hegel or Lacan.
See I’d argue that Freire wasn’t writing for the same crowd that Hegel and Lacan were. Like Pegasus is for teachers but he also writes sections for students and his other works meant for the common folks in countries are written in the same tone,
The absolute champs of "They're really brilliant, don't read them!" guys.
A teacher friend of mine got her education degree at a regional campus of a state school, and it wasn't required reading at all. I think they read maybe a couple passages. I will say that a couple of her core professors had read it, and were pretty based. She got a copy to read because of that recommendation, so I guess at least at some level, in some places, the teaching faculty have read it. You make a good point though. It probably should be required. Seems like it's a more accessible entry to a socialist politics for at least some of the politically disinterested.
You can't overcome contradiction. If you have two things you have contradiction in some form.
Class contradiction, by eliminating class. The only way to not have class contradiction is to not have class.
Look at the USSR, the proletariat and peasants allied, but being different classes they had differing material interests, which led to contradiction, often with pretty devasting consequences.
I think Mao lays this out best in on contradiction.
The way Mao would describe the peasant/proletariat contradiction is that of a non-antagonistic contradiction. As opposed to the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeois, which is an antagonistic contradiction.
Not all contradiction is created equal, and identifying the character of a contradiction is essential to understanding the best approach for dealing with those contradictions.
Mao touches on these ideas more in "On the correct handling of contradiction among the people."
Yeah, petty and big bourgeoisie, labour aristocracy bourgeoisie. These are non antagonistic contradictions. Still contrdictions though. You can see maga republicans as a reputure between big and petty bourgeoisie leading to increasingly antagonistic contradiction.
I guess dialectically speaking. The contradiction between the individual and the universal leads to the belief in self, which leads to desire and aversion, which leads to constant disequilibrium known as dukha, suffering, unease, discomfort. The only way to end dukha is to cut out the root by understanding non self, i guess you could say belief in self is the principal contradiction.
Not really an expert, but that would be my best Buddhist dialectical understanding of the arising of suffering.
I think this basically stems from a secularized version of christian guilt/ christian conception of free will at least in NA context. I think Beyond Good and Evil kind of discusses this stuff.
That Hegalianism, which you don't have to be a communist to follow and vice versa. Marx was really big on Hegel and dialectics are usually built into Marxist theory. It's less about solving contradictions but seeing them. Like how you can't really describe many things just by its positive attributes, sometimes you need to describe what they aren't. It's a whole fucking thing. I can fuck with dialectics as it applies to Marxism for the most part but Hegel is notoriously hard to understand, good thinker fucking awful writer.
I don't think it's made up, it's an observation about the process of change. It's not more or less made up than any other observation.
It's a philosophical framework. And yeah, pretty much everything does have an inherent contradiction. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction is a law of thermodynamics.
That's covered here:
http://www.marxist.com/what-is-dialectical-materialism.htm#_contents1
I think the problem you're running into is that you're defining contradiction in the colloquial sense, but in this context contradictions generally refers to any things that are in opposition.
I think you are actuay right. You look at Hindu philosophy and you have advaita vendanta, Shiva Shakti dualism, sankhya and all of them are present in the Tantra symbol proposing that you can understand reality as singular, dual, tripartite, and so on ad infinitum and they are all simultaneously correct. At some point it's a matter of perspective.
Yantra* stupid auto correct .
We have two hydrogen atoms. The sun’s gravity fuses them into a helium atom. Has contradiction been overcome?
I don’t know. Another example. In Europe the old feudal contradiction between serf-lord doesn’t really seem to exist anymore. Modern workers and business owners are not quite the same thing as serfs and lords. Serfs weren’t paid wages until the end of feudalism, they didn’t really labor for exchange, and they were bound to perform military service and corvée labor for a certain amount of time every year. (You could argue that wage theft is like corvée labor but the difference is that the former is ostensibly illegal under capitalism while the latter is legal under feudalism.) Like capitalism is definitely the child of feudalism but the two are not the same.
Capitalism grew out of fuedalism and would not have been possible without fuedal contradictions leading to primitive accumulation. Closing of the commons etc.
The study of contradiction is a study of the process of change. That all things exist in dialectical causal relationships and contradiction in those relationships lead to the arising of the process of change.
You can have minimal contradiction leading to relative equlibirum, but change and contradiction are Constants on some level.
This is all pretty theoretical obviously
Got my credential a decade ago in a lib state from a lib school. Heard some of the leftist credential students talk about this book, but don't know anyone who had actually read it besides the exceedingly annoying trust fund theory hipster who got a job working at a charter school
My friend who's becoming a teacher only read passages from it as part of class. I told him to read the whole thing but idk if he has
The book "Lies My Teacher Told Me" touches on this somewhat. (there's an older edition in PDF form in the hexbear Theory archive)
- Not wanting to get into a fight with parents or the school's administration.
- That it would take a huge effort to get kids, already trained to view what is written in a text book as "absolute and correct fact", to critically view the information presented in the text books and then do research to find out how wrong or incomplete the text book was.
