Pedagogy review

What I enjoyed most throughout the book is the theme of dehumanization. Being oppressed has its own caveats, respectively, and the book does wonders explaining how this works and how to fix it, yet this comes from the point of view of how to forge the two together pedagogically and dialectically. I also felt that, since I am a big proponent of everything that he says in here, this book is not intended for me. It was almost like as it was “preaching to the choir.” This book should be read by those who are unaware of how they observe their lives, or how they oppressively “manipulate” their lives to create this false pretense. Sure, this might be taken from a teacher’s perspective, and how we need to “humanize this pedagogy” but for those who live these unexamined lives, blind to what they are exuding, this book will help them tremendously - to “liberate them from their oppressing.”
We are all enlivened by this “Democratic Spirit” Freire evokes. DFW speaks of this:
“This kind of stuff is advanced U.S. citizenship. A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities people spend their whole lives working on.”
This idea that we can all “work together for the common good” emboldens our desire to work harder. But does what does that entail? Does a teacher believe that they are evoking this spirit by giving students more tests, challenging them, burying them with homework? This “narration sickness” has envenomed the American Educational system for decades. It worked in the 40’s and 50’s because our country was distracted by the blind patriotism of wars, wars in which we were successful (or at least partially successful.) We could afford to dictate information because that was our only agent of dissemination.
Believe it or not, children read and write more than any time in our nation’s history. Blogs, social networks, and schools rife with applications to get into top colleges, garnering attention to the importance of education should be top priority. We must rekindle the importance of knowledge to our children. Freire says: “Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” This book cut a swath with the old ways of teaching, and it is up to us to see that the new way is upon us. With this in mind, we can augment how our children understand knowledge, and how vital it is to their own lives, as well as those around them, familiar or strange. When we can discern that learning is transcendental and that sharing knowledge is transformative, only then will Education in America make a difference.
So, should you read this book? Well, if you are a conscious educator, like me, then yes, absolutely. But I highly recommend it to those unfamiliar with what they do in the classroom. For those that “deposit” information into students’ heads, and hopefully retaining it for test time is their only goal. For those that wonder why they hate teaching, or are sad because their two weeks of vacation time are up during the winter break. These people need this book.