When I interviewed John McGee, the founder of gentle teaching, for Community Living, a few years ago, he referred to Paulo Freire as the "king". McGee had spent some time working with Freire in Brazil. If you are familiar with gentle teaching, Freire's influence, i suggest is obvious, everywhere.
As a young manager in the mid 80's, struggling with the complexity of community care in inner-city London, I turned time and again to Paulo Freire's books for inspiration while travelling to work on the bus, for ideas and inspiration. I embraced gentle teaching so readily because it was the same message.
This radical Brazilian educator, who wrote his first book, Education the Practice of Freedom, while in prison, died aged 75 on 2 May 1997. Freire knew he would be jailed for his revolutionary work. After his first night working adult literacy, he came home and said to his wife : "Elza, I think what I saw today, what i experienced today, in two or three years many people will be asking me 'What is this Paulo ?' But possibly i will be jailed. And i think the possibility of jail is more likely." Unlike John Crawford, who spoke about the importance of Freire's work in the last issue, I never met Paulo Freire. Yet his writings are probably the single biggest influence upon my thinking and subsequent development work through Right Track.
Freire says we must ask ourselves for whom and on whose behalf we are working. The more conscious and committed you are, he says, the more you will understand that, if you are going to work with oppressed people, your role might require you to take risks, including a willingness to risk your your own job.
It has always been my conviction that my work with people who have a learning difficulty is essentially educational. I am engaged with service users in mutual learning process. I am learning a lot about myself - on all sorts of levels - and the person receiving the service is learning to grow in self-awareness, self-esteem and personal power. Together we are engaged in a much wider social, political and economic struggle. It is in the context of the worker as educator, that i find motivation in Paulo Freire.
Freire argues that work with the poor and oppressed groups cannot be a mechanistic affair. He attacks notions of education which see the person as an empty vessel to be filled - he calls this the 'digestive theory of education'. if we consider the person with a learning disabilty to be a sort of 'sick' person, existing on the fringe of society, for whom the Five Accomplishments are the 'cure', enabling him or her to be returned to the 'healthy' society from which she has been seperated, then our efforts wil never be towards freedom because we will never question the system that deprived the person in the first place.
If we follow Freire's argument, then we can say that people with a learning disability are not marginal people, somehow forced to exist on the edges of society. They are not beings outside society but oppressed men and women already within (an oppressive) society . The way forward then, cannot lie in trying to incorporate these men and women into the structures which have oppressed them and caused their depedency.
There is no other road to everyone's humanisation, says freire, but authentic transformation of the dehumanising structures. if people with a learning disability are oppressed, then we are all oppressed and dehumanised.
In his most most famous development, Freire goes on to outline his theory of 'conscientisation'. This is based on a view of man as a reflective being, inrelationship with the world, which acts upon and transforms the world. Freire rejects behaviourism as a defective explanation of the man-world relationship, based as it is on a non-dialectical, mechanistic view of the world.
The process of transformation the world leads, says Freire, to man's humanisation - or dehumanisation . It depends on which path we choose.
This process of liberation can only be accompanied by men and women in dialogue with each other. we cannot liberate someone else, for them, on their behalf. freire writes : "We cannot say that in the process of revolution someone liberates someone else, nor yet that someone liberates himself, but rather that men in communion liberate each other." What could be more important, he asks, than " to live and work, with the oppressed, with the 'rejects of life', with 'wretched of the earth' "?
This mutual process is achieved by people becoming more aware of their own power to change their situation. this comes about through our solidarity with the poor. Readers familiar with gentle teaching will begin to see the parallels.
We show solidarity, says Freire, when we stop making pious, sentimental and individualistic gestures" and risk "an act of love".
He says: "This solidarity is born only when the leaders witness to it by their humble, loving and courageous encounter with the people. Not everyone has sufficient courage for this encounter. he says, but when "men avoid encounter they become inflexible and treat others as mere objects - instead of nurturing life they kill life; instead of searching for life, they kill life, instead of searching for life, they flee from it. And these are oppressor characteristics."
For over 20 years I have been challenged by this man's writings. it has been the most wonderful journey.
Freire writes : "Let us take our alienation into our own hands and ask "Why?" 'Does it have to be this way ?' I do not think so."
Quotes from :
Paulo Freire (1970) Cultural Action for Freedom, Penguin, London
PauloFreire (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Penguin, London
PauloFreire (1985) The Politics of education, Culture, Power and Liberation. Bergin & Garvey, New York.
Greg Crowhurst