Need help with my Social Science question – I’m studying for my class.

1.) How does the process of dialogue lead to more effective
teaching for teachers and learning for students?
2.) What is the teacher’s role in transformative education through
praxis?
PAULO FREIRE
PEDAGOGY
of the
OPPRESSED
;
• 30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION •
Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos
With an Introduction by Donaldo Macedo
A continuum
•
I f N E W
YORK
•
LONDON
2005
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
15 East 26,h Street, New York, NY 10010
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
Copyright © 1970, 1993 by Paulo Freire
Introduction © 2000 by Donaldo Macedo
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the written permission of
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Freire, Paulo, 1921[Pedagogia del oprimido. English]
Pedagogy of the oppressed / Paulo Freire ; translated by Myra
Bergman Ramos ; introduction by Donaldo Macedo.—30th anniversary ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8264-1276-9 (alk. paper)
1. Freire, Paulo, 1921- 2. Education—Philosophy. 3. Popular
education—Philosophy. 4. Critical pedagogy. I. Title.
LB880.F73 P4313 2000
370.11*5—dc21
00-030304
To the oppressed,
and to those who suffer with them
and fight at their side
Contents
Publisher’s Foreword
9
Introduction to the Anniversary Edition
b y DONALDO MACEDO
11
Foreword by RICHARD SHAULL
29
Preface
35
Chapter 1
^
43
The justification for a pedagogy of the oppressed; the contradiction
between the oppressors and the oppressed, and how it is overcome;
oppression and the oppressors; oppression and the oppressed;
liberation: not a gift, not a self-achievement, but a mutual process.
Chapter 2
71
The “banking” concept of education as an instrument of oppression—
its presuppositions—a critique; the problem-posing concept of
education as an instrument for liberation—-its presuppositions; the
“banking” concept and the teacher-student contradiction; the
problem-posing concept and the supersedence of the teacherstudent contradiction; education: a mutual process, world-mediated;
people as uncompleted beings, conscious of their incompletion, and
their attempt to be more fully human.
8•CONTENTS
Chapter 3
87
Dialogics—the essence of education as the practice of freedom;
dialogics and dialogue; dialogue and the search for program
content; the human-world relationship, “generative themes,” and
the program content of education as the practice of freedom; the
investigation of “generative themes” and its methodology; the
awakening of critical consciousness through the investigation of
“generative themes”; the various stages of the investigation.
Chapter 4
125
Antidialogics and dialogics as matrices of opposing theories of
cultural action: the former as an instrument of oppression and the
latter as an instrument of liberation; the theory of antidialogical
action and its characteristics: conquest, divide and rule,
manipulation, and cultural invasion; the theory of dialogical
action and its characteristics: cooperation, unity, organization, and
cultural synthesis.
Publisher’s Foreword
This is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication in the United States
of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Since the original publication, this revolutionary work has gone into more than a score of printings and sold
over 750,000 copies worldwide.
In his foreword to the first edition, which is included in this one,
Richard Shaull wrote:
In this country, we are gradually becoming aware of the work of
Paulo Freire, but thus^far we have thought of it primarily in terms
of its contribution to the education of illiterate adults in the Third
World. If, however, we take a close look, we may discover that
his methodology as well as his educational philosophy are as important for us as for the dispossessed in Latin America…. For
this reason, I consider the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in an English edition to be something of an event.
These words have proved prophetic. Freire’s books have since taken
on a considerable relevance for educators in our own technologically
advanced society, which to our detriment acts to program the individual—especially the disadvantaged—to a rigid conformity. A new
underclass has been created, and it is everyone’s responsibility to react
thoughtfully and positively to the situation. This is the underlying
message of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
As times change so do attitudes and beliefs. The translation has
been modified—and the volume has been newly typeset—to reflect
the connection between liberation and inclusive language. An important introduction by Donaldo Macedo has been added.
This revised thirtieth-anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed thus represents a fresh expression of a work that will continue to
stimulate and shape the thought of educators and citizens everywhere.
Introduction
Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined when I first read
Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1971 that, a decade later, I would be
engaged in a very close collaboration with its author, Paulo Freire—
a collaboration that lasted sixteen years until his untimely death on
May 2, 1997. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that,
today, I would have the honor to write an introduction to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, a book that according to Stanley Aronowitz, “meets the
single criterion of a ‘classic’ ” in that “it has outlived its own time and
its authors.”
I remember vividly my first encounter with Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as a colonized young man from Cape Verde who had been
struggling with significant questions of cultural identity, yearning to
break away from the yoke of Portuguese colonialism. Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed gave me a language to critically understand the
tensions, contradictions, fears, doubts, hopes, and “deferred” dreams
that are part and parcel of living a borrowed and colonized cultural
existence. Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed also gave me the inner
strength to begin the arduous process of transcending a colonial existence that is almost culturally schizophrenic: being present and yet
not visible, being visible and yet not present. It is a condition that I
painfully experienced in the United States, constantly juggling the
power asymmetry of the two worlds, two cultures, and two languages.
Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed gave me the critical tools to reflect on, and understand, the process through which we come to know
what it means to be at the periphery of the intimate yet fragile relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.
12 • INTRODUCTION
Paulo Freire’s invigorating critique of the dominant banking model
of education leads to his democratic proposals of problem-posing education where “men and women develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they
find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality but
as a reality in the process of transformation.” This offered to me—
and all of those who experience subordination through an imposed
assimilation policy—a path through which we come to understand
what it means to come to cultural voice. It is a process that always
involves pain and hope; a process through which, as forced cultural
jugglers, we can come to subjectivity, transcending our object position
in a society that hosts us yet is alien.
It is not surprising that my friends back in Cape Verde—and, for
that matter in most totalitarian states—risked cruel punishment, including imprisonment, if they were caught reading Pedagogy of the
Oppressed. I remember meeting a South African student in Boston
who told me that students would photocopy chapters of Pedagogy of
the Oppressed and share them with their classmates and peers. Sometimes, given the long list of students waiting to read Freire, they
would have to wait for weeks before they were able to get their hands
on a photocopied chapter. These students, and students like them in
Central America, South America, Tanzania, Chile, Guinea-Bissau and
other nations struggling to overthrow totalitarianism and oppression,
passionately embraced Freire and his proposals for liberation. It is no
wonder that his success in teaching Brazilian peasants how to read
landed him in prison and led to a subsequent long and painful exile.
Oppressed people all over the world identified with Paulo Freire’s
denunciation of the oppressive conditions that were choking millions
of poor people, including a large number of middle-class families that
had bitterly begun to experience the inhumanity of hunger in a potentially very rich and fertile country.
Freire’s denunciation of oppression was not merely the intellectual
exercise that we often find among many facile liberals and pseudocritical educators. His intellectual brilliance and courage in denouncing the structures of oppression were rooted in a very real and
material experience, as he recounts in Letters to Cristina:
INTRODUCTION • 13
It was a real and concrete hunger that had no specific date of
departure. Even though it never reached the rigor of the hunger
experienced by some people I know, it was not the hunger experienced by those who undergo a tonsil operation or are dieting.
On the contrary, our hunger was of the type that arrives unannounced and unauthorized, making itself at home without an end
in sight. A hunger that, if it was not softened as ours was, would
take over our bodies, molding them into angular shapes. Legs,
arms, and fingers become skinny. Eye sockets become deeper,
making the eyes almost disappear. Many of our classmates experienced this hunger and today it continues to afflict millions of
Brazilians who die of its violence every year.1
Thus, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has its roots in Paulo Freire’s lived
experiences.
The experience of hunger as a child of a middle-class family that
had lost its economic base enabled Freire to, on the one hand, identify
and develop “solidarity with the children from the poor outskirts of
town”2 and, on the other hand, to realize that “in spite of the hunger
that gave us solidarity… in spite of the bond that united us in our
search for ways to survive—our playtime, as far as the poor children
were concerned, ranked us as people from another world who happened to fall accidentally into their world.”3 It is the realization of
such class borders that led, invariably, to Freire’s radical rejection of
a class-based society.
Although some strands of postmodernism would dismiss Freire’s
detailed class analysis in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it is an enormous
mistake, if not academic dishonesty, to pretend that we now live in a
classless world. Although Freire understood very well that “material
oppression and the affective investments that tie oppressed groups to
the logic of domination cannot be grasped in all of their complexity
within a singular logic of class struggle/’4 he consistently argued that
a thorough understanding of oppression must always take a detour
through some form of class analysis.
Until his death, he courageously denounced the neoliberal position
that promotes the false notion of the end of history and the end of
class. Freire always viewed history as possibility, “recognizing that
History is time filled with possibility and not inexorably determined—
14 • INTRODUCTION
that the future is problematic and not already decided, fatalistically,”5
In like manner, Freire continued to reject any false claim to the end
of class struggle. Whereas he continually revised his earlier class analyses, he never abandoned or devalued class as an important theoretical category in our search for a better comprehension of conditions
of oppression. In a long dialogue we had during his last visit to New
York—in fact, the last time we worked together—he again said that
although one cannot reduce everything to class, class remains an important factor in our understanding of multiple forms of oppression.
While poststructuralists may want to proclaim the end of class analysis, they still have to account for the horrendous human conditions
that led, as Freire recounted, a family in Northeast Brazil to scavenge
a landfill and take “pieces of an amputated human breast with which
they prepared their Sunday lunch/’ 6
Freire also never accepted the ‘ poststructuralism tendency to translate diverse forms of class, race, and gender based oppression to the
discursive space of subject positions/’7 He always appreciated the theoretical complexity of multifactor analyses while never underestimating the role of class. For example, he resisted the essentialist approach
of reducing all analysis to one monolithic entity of race. For instance,
African functionaries who assimilate to colonial cultural values constitute a distinct class with very different ideological cultural values
and aspirations than the bulk of the population. Likewise, it would be
a mistake to view all African Americans as one monolithic cultural
group without marked differences: United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is black, after all (and conservative). Somewhat
similar gulfs exist between the vast mass of African Americans who
remain subordinated and reduced to ghettoes and middle-class African Americans who, in some sense, have also partly abandoned the
subordinated mass of African Americans. I am reminded of a discussion I had with a personal friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who
had joined him in the important struggle to end segregation and oppression during the 1960s. During our discussion, King’s friend remarked, “Donaldo, you are right. We are using euphemisms such as
Economically marginal’ and avoid more pointed terms like ‘oppres-
I N T R O D U C T I O N • 15
sion/ I confess that I often feel uneasy when I am invited to discuss
at institutions issues pertaining to the community. In reality, I haven’t
been there in over twenty years.” Having achieved great personal
success and having moved to a middle-class reality, this African American gentleman began to experience a distance from other African
Americans who remain abandoned in ghettoes.
In a recent discussion with a group of students, a young African
American man who attends an Ivy League university told me that his
parents usually vote with the white middle class, even if, in the long
run, their vote is ^detrimental to the reality of most black people. Thus,
we see again that race, itself, is not necessarily a unifying force.
Freire never abandoned his position with respect to class analysis
as theorized in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. However, as he continually
did, he reconstituted his earlier position throughout the years, particularly in our co-authored book Ideology Matters. In it Freire argues
that whereas, for example, “one cannot reduce the analysis of racism
to social class, one cannot understand racism fully without a class
analysis, for to do one at the expense of the other is to fall prey into
a sectarianist position, which is as despicable as the racism that we
need to reject.”8 In essence, Freire’s later works make it clear that
what is important is to approach the analysis of oppression through a
convergent theoretical framework where the object of oppression is
cut across by such factors as race, class, gender, culture, language,
and ethnicity. Thus, he would reject any theoretical analysis that
would collapse the multiplicity of factors into a monolithic entity, including class.
Although Freire was readily embraced in societies struggling
against colonialism and other forms of totalitarianism, his acceptance
in the so-called open and democratic societies, such as the United
States and the nations of Western Europe, has been more problematic. Even though he has an international reputation and following, his work is, sadly, not central to the curricula of most schools of
education whose major responsibility is to prepare the next generation of teachers. This relative marginality of Freire’s work in the
school-of-education curricula is partly due to the fact that most of
16 • I N T R O D U C T I O N
these schools are informed by the positivistic and management models
that characterize the very culture of ideologies and practices to which
Freire was in opposition all his life. For example, the Harvard Graduate School of Education sanctions a graduate course called “Literacy
Politics and Policies” without requiring students to read, critique, and
analyze the work of Freire. In fact, one can get a doctoral degree
from this school, or from others, without ever learning about, much
less reading, Paulo Freire. This is tantamount to getting a doctoral
degree in Linguistics without ever reading Noam Chomsky, The following illustrates my point. In a lecture at Harvard that analyzed
Paulo Freire’s theories, given by Professor Ramon Flecha from the
University of Barcelona, a doctoral student approached me and asked
the following: “I don’t want to sound naive, but who is this Paulo
Freire that Professor Flecha is citing so much?” I wonder, how can
one expect this doctoral student to know the work of “perhaps the
most significant educator in the world during the last half of the century” in the words of Herbert Kohl,9 when his graduate school pretends that Paulo Freire never existed?
Whereas students in the Third World and other nations struggling
with totalitarian regimes would risk their freedom, if not their lives,
to read Paulo Freire, in our so-called open societies his work suffers
from a more sophisticated form of censorship: omission. This “academic selective selection” of bodies of knowledge, which borders on
censorship of critical educators, is partly to blame for the lack of
knowledge of Paulo Freire’s significant contributions to the field of
education. Even many liberals who have embraced his ideas and educational practices often reduce his theoretical work and leading philosophical ideas to a mechanical methodology. I am reminded of a
panel that was convened to celebrate Freire’s life and work at Harvard
after his death. In a large conference room filled to capacity and with
people standing in hallways, a panelist who had obviously reduced
Freire’s leading ideas to a mechanized dialogical practice passed a
note to the moderator of the panel suggesting that she give everyone
in the room twenty seconds to say something in keeping with the
spirit of Freire. This was the way not to engage Freire’s belief in
INTRODUCTION • 17
emancipation—unless one believes that his complex theory of oppression can be reduced to a twenty-second sound bite. Part of the
problem with this mechanization of Freire’s leading philosophical and
political ideas is that many psudocritical educators, in the name of
liberation pedagogy, often sloganize Freire by straitjacketing his revolutionary politics to an empty cliche of the dialogical method.
Pseudo-Freirean educators not only strip him of the essence of his
radical pedagogical proposals that go beyond the classroom boundaries and effect significant changes in the society as well: these educators also fail to understand the epistemological relationship of
dialogue. According to Freire,
In order to understand the meaning of dialogical practice, we
have to put aside the simplistic understanding of dialogue as a
mere technique. Dialogue does not represent a somewhat false
path that I attempt to elaborate on and realize in the sense of
involving the ingenuity of the other. On the contrary, dialogue
characterizes an epistemological relationship. Thus, in this sense,
dialogue is a way of knowing and should never be viewed as a
mere tactic to involve students in a particular task. We have to
make this point very clear. I engage in dialogue not necessarily
because I like the other person. I engage in dialogue because I
recognize the social and not merely the individualistic character
of the process of knowing. In this sense, dialogue presents itself
as an indispensable component of the process of both learning
and knowing.10
Unfortunately, in the United States, many educators who claim to
be Freirean in their pedagogical orientation mistakenly transform Freire’s notion of dialogue into a method, thus losing sight of the fact
that the fundamental goal of dialogical teaching is to create a process
of learning and knowing that invariably involves theorizing about the
experiences shared in the dialogue process. Some strands of critical
pedagogy engage in an overdose of experiential celebration that offers
a reductionistic view of identity^ leading Henry Giroux to point out
that such pedagogy leaves identity and experience removed from the
problematics of power, agency, and history. By overindulging in the
18 • INTRODUCTION
legacy and importance of their respective voices and experiences,
these educators often fail to move beyond a notion of difference structured in polarizing binarisms and uncritical appeals to the discourse
of experience. I believe that it is for this reason that some of these
educators invoke a romantic pedagogical mode that “exoticizes” discussing lived experiences as a process of coming to voice. At the same
time, educators who misinterpret Freire’s notion of dialogical teaching
also refuse to link experiences to the politics of culture and critical
democracy, thus reducing their pedagogy to a form of middle-class
narcissism. This creates, on the one hand, the transformation of dialogical teaching into a method invoking conversation that provides
participants with a group-therapy space for stating their grievances.
On the other hand, it offers the teacher as facilitator a safe pedagogical zone to deal with his or her class guilt. It is a process that bell
hooks characterizes as nauseating in that it brooks no dissent. Simply
put, as Freire reminded us, “what these educators are calling dialogical is a process that hides the true nature of dialogue as a process of
learning and knowing. . . .Understanding dialogue as a process of
learning and knowing establishes a previous requirement that always
involves an epistemological curiosity about the very elements of the
dialogue.”11 That is to say, dialogue must require an ever-present curiosity about the object of knowledge. Thus, dialogue is never an end
in itself but a means to develop a better comprehension about the
object of knowledge. Otherwise, one could end up with dialogue as
conversation where individual lived experiences are given primacy. I
have been in many contexts where the over-celebration of one’s own
location and history often eclipses the possibility of engaging the object of knowledge by refusing to struggle directly, for instance, with
readings involving an object of knowledge, particularly if these readings involve theory.
As Freire himself decidedly argued,
Curiosity about the object of knowledge and the willingness and
openness to engage theoretical readings and discussions is fundamental. However, I am not suggesting an over-celebration of
I N T R O D U C T I O N • 19
theory. We must not negate practice for the sake of theory. To
do so would reduce theory to a pure verbalism or intellectualism. By the same token, to negate theory for the sake of practice, as in the use of dialogue as conversation, is to run the risk
of losing oneself in the disconnectedness of practice. It is for
this reason that I never advocate either a theoretic elitism or a
practice ungrounded in theory, but the unity between theory
and practice. In order to achieve this unity, one must have an
epistemological curiosity—a curiosity that is often missing in dialogue as conversation.12
That is, when students lack both the necessary epistemological curiosity and a certain conviviality with the object of knowledge under
study, it is difficult to create conditions that increase their epistemological curiosity in order to develop the necessary intellectual tools
that will enable him or her to apprehend and comprehend the object
of knowledge. If students are not able to transform their lived experiences into knowledge and to use the already acquired knowledge as
a process to unveil new knowledge, they will never be able to participate rigorously in a dialogue as a process of learning and knowing.
In truth, how can one dialogue without any prior apprenticeship with
the object of knowledge and without any epistemological curiosity?
For example, how can anyone dialogue about linguistics if the teacher
refuses to create the pedagogical conditions that will apprentice students into the new body of knowledge? By this I do not mean that
the apprenticeship process should be reduced to the authoritarian
tradition of lecturing without student input and discussion. What becomes very clear is that the bureaucratization of the dialogical process
represents yet another mechanism used by even some progressive
educators to diminish Freire’s radical revolutionary and transformative
proposals through a process that gives rise to politics without content.
Thus, it is not surprising that some liberals join conservative educators
to critique Freire for what they characterize as “radical ties.” For
example, Gregory Jay and Gerald Graff have argued that Freire’s proposal in Pedagogy of the Oppressed to move students toward “a critical perception of the world”—which “implies a correct method of
approaching reality” so that they can get “a comprehension of total
20 • INTRODUCTION
reality”—assumes that Freire already knows the identity of the oppressed. As Jay and Graff point out, “Freire assumes that we know
from the outset the identity of the Oppressed’ ahd their ‘oppressors/
Who the oppressors and the oppressed are is conceived not as an
open question that teachers and students might disagree about, but
as a given of Freirean pedagogy.”13 This form of critique presupposes
that education should be nondirective and neutral, a posture that
Freire always opposed: “I must intervene in teaching the peasants
that their hunger is socially constructed and work with them to help
identify those responsible for this social construction, which is, in my
view, a crime against humanity.”14 Therefore, we need to intervene
not only pedagogically but also ethically. Before any intervention,
however, an educator must have political clarity—posture that makes
many liberals like Graff very uncomfortable to the degree that he
considers “Radical educational theorists such as Freire, Henry Giroux,
and Stanley Aronowitz . . . [as having a] tunnel-vision style of. . . writing . . . which speaks of but never to those who oppose its premises.”15
The assumption that Freire, Giroux, and Aronowitz engage in a
“tunnel-vision style of. . . writing” is not only false: it also points to a
distorted notion that there is an a priori agreed-upon style of writing
that is monolithic, available to all, and “free of jargon.” This blind
and facile call for writing clarity represents a pernicious mechanism
used by academic liberals who suffocate discourses different from
their own. Such a call often ignores how language is being used to
make social inequality invisible. It also assumes that the only way to
deconstruct ideologies of oppression is through a discourse that involves what these academics characterize as a language of clarity.
When I was working with Freire on the book Literacy: Reading
the Word and the World, I asked a colleague whom I considered to
be politically aggressive and to have a keen understanding of Freire’s
work to read the manuscript. Yet, during a discussion we had about
this, she asked me, a bit irritably, “Why do you and Paulo insist on
using Marxist jargon? Many readers who may enjoy reading Paulo may
be put off by the jargon.” I was at first taken aback, but proceeded
to explain calmly to her that the equation of Marxism with jargon did
INTRODUCTION ‘ 2 1
not fully capture the richness of Freire’s analysis. In fact, I reminded
her that Freire’s language was the only means through which he could
have done justice to the complexity of the various concepts dealing
with oppression. For one thing, I reminded her, “Imagine that instead
of writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire had written “Pedagogy
of the Disenfranchised.77 The first title utilizes a discourse that names
the oppressor, whereas the second fails to do so. If you have an “oppressed,” you must have an “oppressor/’ What would be the counterpart of disenfranchised? “Pedagogy of the Disenfranchised77
dislodges the agent of the action while leaving in doubt who bears
the responsibility for such action. This leaves the ground wide open
for blaming the victim of disenfranchisement for his or her own disenfranchisement. This example is a clear case in which the object of
oppression can also be understood as the subject of oppression. Language like this distorts reality.
And yet, mainstream academics like Graff seldom object to these
linguistic distortions that disfigure reality. I seldom hear academics
on a crusade for “language clarity” equate mainstream terms such as
“disenfranchised” or “ethnic cleansing,” for example, to jargon status.
On the one hand, they readily accept “ethnic cleansing,” a euphemism
for genocide, while, on the other hand, they will, with certain automatism, point to the jargon quality of terms such as “oppression/’ “subordination,” and “praxis.” If we were to deconstruct the term “ethnic
cleansing” we would see that it prevents us from becoming horrified
by Serbian brutality and horrendous crimes against Bosnian Muslims.
The mass killing of women, children, and the elderly and the rape of
women and girls as young as five years old take on the positive attribute of “cleansing,” which leads us to conjure a reality of “purification” of the ethnic “filth” ascribed to Bosnian Muslims, in
particular, and to Muslims the world over, in general.
I also seldom heard any real protest from the same academics who
want “language clarity” when, during the Gulf War, the horrific blood
bath of the battlefield became a “theater of operation,” and the violent
killing of over one hundred thousand Iraqis, including innocent
women, children, and the elderly by our “smart bombs,” was sanitized
22 • INTRODUCTION
into a technical term: “collateral damage.” I can go on with examples
to point out how academics who argue for clarity of language not only
seldom object to language that obfuscates reality, but often use the
same language as part of the general acceptance that the “standard”
discourse is given and should remain unproblematic. Although these
academics accept the dominant standard discourse, they aggressively
object to any discourse that both fractures the dominant language
and bares the veiled reality in order to name it. Thus, a discourse
that names it becomes, in their view, imprecise and unclear, and
wholesale euphemisms such as “disadvantaged,” “disenfranchised,”
“educational mortality,” “theater of operation,” “collateral damage,”
and “ethnic cleansing” remain unchallenged since they are part of
the dominant social construction of images that are treated as unproblematic and clear.
I am often amazed to hear academics complain about the complexity of a particular discourse because of its alleged lack of clarity.
It is as if they have assumed that there is a mono-discourse that is
characterized by its clarity and is also equally available to all. If
one begins to probe the issue of clarity, we soon realize that it is
class specific, thus favoring those of that class in the meaningmaking process.
The following two examples will bring the point home: Henry Giroux and I gave a speech at Massasoit Community College in Massachusetts to approximately three hundred unwed mothers who were
part of a GED (graduate-equivalency diploma) program. The director
of the program later informed us that most of the students were considered functionally illiterate. After Giroux’s speech, during the question-and-answer period, a woman got up and eloquently said,
“Professor Giroux, all my life I felt the things you talked about. I just
didn’t have a language to express what I have felt. Today I have come
to realize that I do have a language. Thank you.” And Paulo Freire
told me the story of what happened to him at the time he was preparing the English translation of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He gave
an African American student at Harvard a chapter of the book to read
to see how she would receive it. A few days later when he ask