Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Doubt regarding the possible effects of conscientização implies a premise which the doubter does not always make explicit: It is better for the victims of injustice not to recognize themselves as such. ... by making it possible for people to enter the historical process as responsible Subjects, conscientização enrolls them in the search for self-affirmation and thus avoids fanaticism.”

“the revolution is made neither by the leaders for the people, nor by the people for the leaders, but by both acting together in unshakable solidarity. This solidarity is born only when the leaders witness to it by their humble, loving, and courageous encounter with the people. Not all [people] have sufficient courage for this encounter—but when they avoid encounter they become inflexible and treat others as objects”

“denial of communion in the revolutionary process, avoidance of dialogue with people under the pretext of organizing them, of strengthening revolutionary power, or ensuring a united front, is really a fear of freedom. It is fear of lack of faith in the people...”

“Communion with the oppressed means one's willingness to commit class and race suicide which represents much more than "the mere crossing from one space to another... crossing from oppressor to oppressed.... Class suicide is a form of Easter; it involves problematizing a passage through a cultural and ideological context. It is the commitment to meaningful and lasting solidarity with the oppressed that counts."”

“Freire always emphasized that the raison d'etre of struggles for liberation is the reclamation of these rights, which can never be achieved without autonomy. In turn, autonomy cannot be achieved without a true communion with the people with whom we are engaged in a struggle for liberation.”

“the false benevolence of "giving voice" and being institutionally forced into voicelessness. Thus, the pseudo-critical educators who proclaim the need to "give" people of color or women a voice, fail to realize that voice is not a gift. It is a democratic right. It is a human right.”

“The more completely they accept the passive role... the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them." The dire result is that occupiers of the most privileged class, with the greatest wealth and opportunity, thus renounce their ontological vocation as agents of history who might not only transform their world but also reflect on that transformation.”

“this "banking" model of education produces a fragmentation of knowledge that invariably diminishes the students' critical awareness in favor of accepting reality as a given, and as a consequence undermines the "critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world.”

“The students... measured by high-stakes tests that reflect... militaristic, controlled transaction of the teacher's narration and students memorization... Hence, the dominant effects of this mechanistic "banking" education... create...structures that favor rote learning and necessarily reduce the priorities of education to the pragmatic requirements of capital, anesthetizing students' critical abilities...”

“despite their apparent differences, the two approaches share one common feature: they both prevent the development of critical thinking that enables one to "read the world" critically and to understand the reasons and linkages behind mere facts... This "banking" and instrumental approach to education sets the stage for the anesthetization of the mind”

“The "banking" model of education is largely at work in instrumental literacy programs for the poor, in the form of a competency-based, skills-banking approach to schooling, and even through higher education (the highest form of instrumental literacy for the rich), acquired in the form of professional specialization.”

“Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filling, and storing the deposits.”

“The inability to resolve the contradictions between the oppressor and the oppressed...is directly related to what Freire identified...as the failings of a prevalent "banking" model of education — a process through which education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”

“Hence "if the goal of the oppressed is to become fully human, they do not achieve their goal by merely reversing the terms of the contradiction, by changing poles." By the same token, the oppressor cannot expect to liberate the oppressed by reversing the poles so as to experience directly the violence of oppression. This is the continuation of the oppressor's need to appropriate even the oppressed's suffering...”

“the oppressors' humanitarian interventions packaged as charitable gifts which, in turn, encapsulate the self-centered benevolence of the First World order. ... First World humanitarians fail to understand that liberation comes only through a process of resolution of tensions and contradictions in the relation between the oppressor and the oppressed.”

“Humanitarianism as the embodiment of dehumanization is best exemplified by the Red Cross, a charitable organization which collected over $400 million to alleviate the suffering... of Haitians displaced...by the earthquake and... building of a luxury hotel costing millions of dollars while ... Haitians remain homeless... stress relief for the army of NGOs and other humanitarian help as they celebrate "happy hour"”

“Engaging Freire's conscientization process could help reveal the West's penchant for engaging in the construction of invisibility to keep the submerged cultures invisible and also to hide the West's own extremism, which is no less terroristic than Muslim extremism.”

“institutional mechanisms in the West and in much of the world function, by and large, to contain and maintain these so-called primitive Third World cultures that are often silenced by the incessant speech of the dominant culture so as to make these "silent sections of cultures" invisible or, at least, outside the parameters of public discussion or debate.”

“This false dichotomy between the so-called First World and Third World represents yet another sequestration of language designed to lead to a form of mystification — a distraction that functions as a reproductive mechanism designed to create a center or a core of romanticized Eurocentric values while relegating other cultural expressions to the margins.”

“all of us are involved in a permanent process of conscientization, as thinking beings in a dialectical relation with an objective reality upon which we act. What varies in time and space are the contents, methods, and objectives of conscientization... [when human beings became aware] and made themselves capable of revealing their active reality, knowing it and understanding what they know.”

“"the here and now, ... the situation within which [the oppressed] are submerged, from which they emerge, and [in] which they intervene to denounce and confront their oppressors in their "pursuit of full humanity." This sequestration of language denies people the possibility to understand the dialectical relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. If you have an oppressed, you must have an oppressor.”

“...opening up the possibility of a better future when "recognizing that History is time filled with possibility and not inexorably determined-that the future is problematic and not already decided, fatalistically." In like manner, Freire continued to reject any false claim to the end of class struggle.”

“Until his death, Freire courageously denounced the neoliberal position that promotes the false notion of the end of history and the end of class. In contrast to the idea that society has reached the end point of its evolution, thus emptying history of its meaning, Freire always viewed historical awareness as an ongoing condition for human betterment...”

“For Freire literacy was not a means to prepare students for the world of subordinated labor or "careers," but a preparation for a self-managed life.”

“"no one liberates [themselve] by [their] own efforts alone, neither [are they] liberated by others. Liberation, a human phenomenon, cannot be achieved by semihumans. Any attempts to treat people as semihumans [e.g. White supremacy and patriarchy] only dehumanizes them." A semihuman whose only concern is things and not people can never... offer a form of literacy that leads to liberation and emancipation.”

“The danger lies...in the disarticulation of writing about hunger within the... safety of the academy and actual...hunger, or in making the sloganized proclamation "I am a Maoisť" while refusing to de-Guccify and allowing oneself to remain shackled to bourgeois values that undergird... the neoliberal project and which deem the appropriation and accumulation of things as more important than the expansion of humanity.”

“store window displays of fashion and the latest technological gadgets — a hallmark of an obsessively consumerist society — a society where "money is the measure of all things, and profit the primarily goal. For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more-always more-even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have..." ”

“The expectation that women perform deference and pliancy in relation to others is an invisible precondition for masculine subjectivity. As they have been able to access more power in capitalist societies, some women have been able to lay claim to this type of sovereignty, even if this claim is necessarily partial and unstable.”

“Agency and sovereignty are associated with masculine forms of subjectivity. In this context, sovereignty means the capacity to act as the ruler and owner of oneself, and to not be influenced by others or by 'irrational' emotion. This form of subjectivity can be understood as produced by the work of feminised subjects, who are lessening their own agency through the production of masculine sovereignty.”

“Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon suggest that in the nineteenth century, wage labour, previously seen as a form of dependence on an employer, was culturally re-coded as a sign of independence. White working-class men therefore came to appear as independent at the cost of other people — those who could not sell their labour power.”