Why are we Oppressing the Oppressed?

            Something about reading Freire always fires me up. His use of language seems to speak directly to me, as he eloquently and deliberately addresses many of the issues that are circling around in my mind. Although I could literately pull quotations from almost every page in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” to talk about, I want to focus on two related quotations that address the issue of student agency and victim status. The first quotation reads:

            Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a burning building; it is to lead them into the populist pitfall and transform them into masses which can be manipulated.

I strongly agree with this statement and I fear that our public education system is aligned deliberately towards this damaging “savior” mentality that Freire speaks against. We do not actively promote student agency or participation on a wide scale basis and thus position our broader student population as passive victims in need of saving. This becomes even more visible in our interaction with minority and low SES students, as we remove their “reflective participation” on a cyclical basis. In this sense, there is an entire population of students that are labeled “at-risk” essentially from birth, and because of this our public school teachers are urged to “save” these children from the “burning building” that we perceive their lives to be. This begs the question–how can we ever possibly respect or value a student’s home culture if we view his or her inherited environment as the primary predictor for looming failure?

           

            Unfortunately for the equity of our society, there is little room for authentic “liberation” present in our current system, as a student must instead “play the system” to succeed; as opposed to viewing the system itself as the oppressive force. Freire addresses this in the second quotation I hoped to speak on, writing:

            “One does not liberate people by alienating them. Authentic liberation– the process of humanization–is not another deposit to be made in men. Liberation is praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.”

If we adopt Freire’s position that liberation (and humanization in general) is accomplished FOR and BY the individual people being oppressed, then there is no room for a savior mentality within our classrooms. Instead, teachers must use the classroom as a  space–not a mechanism–for social change. The ultimate change, in this sense, comes from the students NOT the teacher.