[Nettime-bold] Fwd: G2000Conf2000 Freire died in 1997, didn't know that

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Subject: G2000Conf2000 Freire died in 1997, didn't know that
From: "Nicholas Hermann" <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 14:12:55 -0500
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http://www.paulofreire.org/

Conclusions

Literacy work is generally recognized as most effective when undertaken by or in the context of community-based organizations--and
least effective when directly managed by large, bureaucratic systems of schooling (Mezirow, Darkenwald, and Knox, 1975; Hunter and
Harmon, 1979). Literacy and other basic skills can be acquired with astonishing speed when the development of those skills is linked
with other activities, the intended outcome of which is change in conditions of oppression (Adams, 1975; Freire, 1970; Shor, 1987).

Freirean, community-based adult education continues to provide a working model for resolving the problem of illiteracy in the United
States, not because it incorporates more effective methods of instruction, not even because its connections with "grass roots"
organizations enhances recruitment efforts and grounds learning in the day-to-day experience of the people. Liberatory education
provides a working model because it links the problem of illiteracy with broader social and political ills and because it does not propose
merely educational solutions to these problems. Its hope and its promise lies in social action for change as an intended consequence of
critical understanding.

Embedded within many community-based programs is a depoliticized vision, a by-product of cooperative arrangements with other,
mainstream institutions. These programs, although no longer based on principles put forward by Freire in the previous decade,
nonetheless are frequently more effective in reaching and retaining hard-core illiterate adults simply because they are closer to the
problems of the neighborhood, they less resemble the more formal schools with which previous "failure" has been identified, and they
evidence care and respect for their neighbors which leads to mutual trust and perseverance.

Most Freirean programs, on the other hand, have been condemned to a marginal existence. There is little which school-based educators
can emulate in the practice of their "liberatory" counterparts. Participatory and democratic pedagogical practices might be adapted to
American schools, but the critique of social and economic oppression linked with collective action for social change creates dissonance,
destroying the neutrality of the schools and unmasking their complicity in maintaining the economic and political imbalance of the social
order. Historically, liberatory programs for literacy have been sustained by government only during the brief time following a revolution,
as in Nicaragua (Miller, 1985) or Guinea Bisseau (Freire, 1978)--a time when the possibilities for change are real and the political
apparatus for accomplishing those changes is at hand. The pedagogy of Paulo Freire has limited potential outside such chaotic and
transitional periods in a nation's history.

The survivors--those liberatory programs in the United States which have maintained their vision--await the revolution and attempt to
prepare learners for political options not yet available.

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