Assignment 1B- Human 7

Paulo Freire had many important contributions to education and the world. One of the most important things that people should know about him is that he was born to a middle class family September 19, 1921. He lived through the great depression and this is where he began to develop his theories on poverty and education. One of his major theories is critical pedagogy which is the theory that teaches students to question and challenge domination. For example, many of the oppressed people were oppressed because the education system either did not exist for them or did not allow them to think for themselves. In today’s public schools children are treated like containers that are to be filled with information that the government wants them to learn. This is also called the banking theory that Paulo Freire believed was the wrong way to teach a student. His theory was to allow the learner to think about the information and have the student create their own thoughts and feelings on the information, rather than the teacher telling them what to think or how it should be. Both the teacher and the student learn from each other as they see the world differently and can draw upon their own theories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_pedagogy
Paulo Freire believed that learning comes from dialogue. What I think he meant by this is that people learn about the world through talking with each other and listening to what the other person has to say and then this back and forth is how man has interpreted the world and begins the process of naming it. In other words, through dialogue we learn about the world around us and through dialogue we can see how others perceive the world around us. This is how the world was first interpreted and how knowledge was created.
http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-dialog.htm
Paulo Freire believed that the poor would help bring themselves out of poverty through education. Paulo believed that through dialogue that the oppressed would see that their opinions do count and through literacy they could change their future. When the oppressed were literate and they were learning through dialogue they learned that they had a choice about how their lives would turn out. They did not have to live in poverty and neither did their children. They could change their own futures and make their government work for them by being involved and voting for representatives that cared about the poor people not just the wealthy people. They could use their knowledge to change their government by coming together and demanding change. It is not enough to tell someone that they can be anything they must see and believe it for themselves. This I believe was what Paulo Freire theory about educating the oppressed was all about.
http://www.answers.com/topic/paulo-freire

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRmQjVSsRyQ&feature=related
Maria