Subjects in Expectancy
Subject expectancy effect occurs when the unconscious mind affects the outcome of a given phenomenon. The most influential philosopher of education of the twentieth century was Paulo Freire. His practice of critical pedagogy and his philosophy played a significant role in uplifting the living conditions of oppressed people. The eradication of illiteracy among persons across the world and especially those countries that had been colonized was Frere’s key objective. The political realities and social life of the offspring and grandchildren rooted Freire’s insights. His life and ideas were dedicated to improving the living standards of these children and grandchildren. This study’s main objectives are to examine and expand Freire’s ideology on “subjects in expectancy” in regards to oppression and political science. In this thesis, “Subjects in expectancy,” Freire pointed out that; when the relationship of the oppressor and the oppressed is characterized by oppressive dynamics, both parties are diminished in their humanity, to become more human is every person’s ontological vocation. Additionally, he pointed out that both the oppressed and the oppressed can eventually discover their own power in the process of conscentizacao. Finally, he stated that the oppressed could ultimately change their conditions only if their actions and intentions marry their goals.
For us to expand Paulo Freire’s ideas on oppression and political science, we must consider the background from which this gentleman developed his philosophy. Paulo lived in the Northern Eastern region of Brazil in the 1930s all the way to the 1960s. Brazil was colonized by the Portuguese in the year 1500 to 1822. The indigenous population of Brazil died because of the harsh, forced labor environment and because they lacked immunity to European diseases. Those that survived the harsh conditions were enslaved in sugar mills. However, most natives perished, and the owners of the sugar mills were involved in the practice of slavery (they bought Africans) to boost the labor force working in the production of sugar. Indigenous and Africans dominated the Brazilian population during the years of Portuguese colonization. Few Portuguese moved into Brazil as most of them saw Brazil as a commercial enterprise. Brazil was not allowed to publish her newspaper until 1808. Illiteracy dominated vast regions of Brazil.
Friere’s ideas on oppression and political science are rooted in the four hundred years of slavery and colonization in the American continent. Slavery in Brazil was not abolished since independence until 1888 when she experienced economic growth. Nevertheless, the living conditions of most Brazilians continued to deteriorate even through the mid-20th century. As a result of poverty, most farmers sold themselves or their family members to slavery to avoid starvation. Freire was born during a time when political instability and economic hardships were at the peak. He lost his father during the economic depression of the 1930s, and Friere was forced to taste the dehumanizing effects and crippling impacts of hunger. The conditions were so harsh that he had to steal food to feed his family. The conditions never became better for young Friere that he dropped out of elementary school to support his family financially. The harsh conditions he went through made Friere develop an unfailing connection with the poor. The conditions made him make a conscious commitment to working to improve the standards of the marginalized.
Despite the harsh conditions, Friere finished elementary school and later secondary school (Oswaldo) in Recife. The principal of the secondary school (Oswaldo Cruz), allowed Freire to school at reduced tuition as his family could not raise the full tuition. In 1942, Friere returned the favor by teaching Portuguese classes in Oswaldo Cruz. From 1943 to 1947, he joined law school at Recife’s School of Law. His ideas and works were greatly influenced by his own experiences and the history of Brazil. Other factors that influenced his works were his parents, principal, preschool teacher, and other philosophical works such as Marxism, humanism, Christianity, existentialism, and phenomenology. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed presents an opportunity for the young people to assert and acquire a sense of their responsibilities and rights, especially in the current democratic world that shuns and fights the corporate good and embraces the common good. Paulo Freire initiates an education movement guided by love, passion, and principle to uplift consciousness of freedom in students, forms a connection knowledge between agency and power, for the love of democracy and justice he learns both the world and the word and recognizes the authoritarian tendencies.
When we deeply look into the current state of education in different countries, what is visible is that tertiary institutions, colleges, and universities are now dominated by conservative and instrumentalist theories, based on methods, selfish accountability measures and ran by administrators who don’t have the bigger vision of education as the pillar of expanding democratic public life and civic imagination. What they are doing is uprooting excellence in matters of equity. Higher education has been reduced to a private entity, a source of wealth, which was once conceptualized as a fundamental public entity. Most universities are increasingly being tailored to meet corporate demands to impact knowledge, provide skills and build workforce credentials that will help the country of concern compete against blockbuster growth in other countries but still maintain its role as the major military power and major global growth. no one or rather very few people have an interest in understanding the pedagogical foundation of the university as a pillar of civic and political milestone that provides conditions that empower an individual’s autonomy and the heartbeat of freedom practice and the foundation of liberation as a collective goal.
Freire saw education, critically, as a political institution that exposes students to conditions of self-reflection, critical agency, and a self-managed life. Freire connects learning to social change; education is a project that provokes and challenges learners to engage with the world to impact it critically. Contrary to this, countries have ‘banked education’ and stripped it of all critical fundamentals of learning and teaching. Paulo’s pedagogy enabled students to realize the forces that governed their lives and, more importantly, shaped their consciousness (Stanley Aronowitz). Freire insisted that pedagogy at its best is not about political indoctrination or coercion, neither is it about teaching skills and methods. Education at its best is not just a mere technique or method imposed on learners but a moral and political practice that imparts knowledge, social relations, and skills that will enable learners to decide themselves the possibilities of the responsibilities of citizens while deepening and expanding their interactions in the quest of a substantive democracy. Critical pedagogy allows students to read, write, and learn from an agency position that is developing a culture of asking questions whose demands are beyond the competency in learning and applying the acquired skills.
According to Freire, the pedagogy to be transformative and critical has to be meaningful. This means that past events and personal experience play a major role in shaping and giving leaners a chance to associate with their narratives, social relations, and histories of what they are learning. The pedagogy also forms a resource that helps students root themselves in the fundamental conditions of their day-to-day activities while boosting their understanding of the boundaries caused by those conditions. In such conditions, a starting point is a personal experience, a resource used in broadening modes of understanding and knowledge, an object that can be critically interrogated and a subject of inquiry that can be affirmed. For Freire, critical pedagogy is the imagination of literacy as not virtually cramming of certain skills, but as well as an intervention, that is to say, reading the word and learning about in order to intervene in the world. Critical thinking is far beyond an object lesson in a classroom to be tested. It is beyond memorizing the ‘so-called facts’ and decontextualized. Critical thinking is about thinking beyond the visible naturalness or present uncontrollable state of things, questioning assumptions acceptable to common sense, moving beyond the limits of one’s experiences, starting a conversation with history, and visualizing different future fruits of today.
Freire pedagogy staged the interplay of print texts, visuals, and audio as a form of examining history as a place of struggle, one that can shed some light on the student’s personal experiences in the present moment. A history class, for example, may engage in watching and reading films about the desegregation of schools in the 1950s as part of pedagogical interaction with the civil rights movement and the massive demonstrations and protests due to student rights and educational access to literacy. This would open up opportunities to deliberate why these struggles are still prevalent to many people youths in the world today, especially poor brown and black youths, whose equality of opportunity has been infringed by virtue of market-based rather than segregation. Learners can be asked to write a paper that speculates the power and meaning of literacy, and why the civil rights movement took it so seriously. Every learner should read and elaborate his or her position and offer commentary to permit critical discussion of the racial exclusions, reflecting on how its formations and ideologies are affecting the world despite the victorious dawn of the Obama post-racial alleged era. This context helps the learner expand his or her sense of agency and, at the same time, realizing that to be voiceless is to be powerless. Teachers should emphasize this pedagogy to the learners and make clear relationships among power, knowledge, and authority.
When learners are given the opportunity to pose problems and engage in a questioning culture, the critical issue of who is in charge of the conditions of learning, types of knowledge, authority and identities will be constructed within the classroom relations. In such a way, students don’t just receive knowledge but transformed actively. Ready to be related to self and challenged as an important step towards the agency, learn to govern rather than be governed, and learn to self-represent. Friere was deeply concerned about social transformation for liberating the oppressed. In the 1960s, a group of educated elite across the world recognized devastating wrongs in social, political, and environmental landscapes. Some of the growing social wrongs include failure of the progress promised for the post World War II era and wars such as the one imposed on Vietnam. The need for change was inevitable. Some people marginalized themselves to escape from the established world and its set of rules and institutions. However, they realized this path was an illusion and a bad dream. Later they sought accommodation to the same world they were escaping from and devised ways to survive in it. Others decided to change their behaviors in order to live in their own way after discovering the prevalent social constraints. Others decided to change the world, and this is our man Freire.
The unsatisfactory conditions of the world, such as underdevelopment, poverty, and social injustices, however, were rooted during colonization and capitalist exploitation that has continued raping the world. Instead of creating an organization or developing a conscience necessary for leading the people, governments are creating a guerilla,” a fish that swims in the sea of the people.” In developing countries, most citizens live below the poverty rate. Most are homeless. Others are dying of hunger and poverty. Millions cannot afford or rather access quality healthcare, while others cannot afford quality education. Instead of the government providing basic human needs and bringing them the right and suitable kind of development, the politicians are busy stealing from the poor, grabbing their lands, and innocently fattening their bellies using the tax-payers money. They simply don’t offer the promise of emancipation. Friere, in his sentiment, insisted that the “Third World” was not a geographical definition but an ideological definition. He continued to preach denunciation of oppression to all societies in the world. Friere did not define his “oppressed” with any precision, but it’s clear he associated oppression with capitalism. He strongly believed that by liberating himself, the oppressed would also liberate their oppressors. He denounced the use of violence to seize political power in the name of liberation and revolution.
The change was supposed to start with the oppressed themselves, with their awareness and their conscientization. He believed oppression was dehumanizing both the oppressed and the oppressors. The oppressors who exploit, rape, and exploit through power are not in a position to liberate either themselves or the oppressed. Friere progressed on this sentiment by stating that the oppressed cannot liberate themselves too. The key factor of liberation lies only in the power that emanates from the weakness of the oppressed. They are many untold stories of racism in our world today. It was just the other day America reported the death of George Floyd, African-American after he was brutally killed by a white policeman just because of his color. The oppressed are buried within oppression, in the paradise of the oppressor; they are inauthentic beings, dehumanized, and divided. According to Freire, an outside critical intervention was urgently needed. However, the oppressors could not develop such a pedagogy. It would contradict the oppressor’s terms.
Additionally, systematic education could not implement this pedagogy as the system could be changed by political power. On the other hand, the oppressed cannot access such power; neither can they have it. Thus a group of self-liberated and fully conscienticized themselves in the pedagogy of the oppressed was needed.
The elite (liberated) were supposed to learn educational projects, which would later be implemented with the oppressed in the process of grouping them. Eventually, the pedagogy would become a pedagogy of everybody and a permanent liberation of humankind. Freedom cannot be gifted to a person from another person, but a person must fight (claim) their own freedom. In many African countries, elected officials have a tendency to alter the constitution so that they remain in power. A good example is a late president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, who had clenched to power for over 20 years. Nevertheless, the oppressors seek to stop being exploiters by the oppressed. Mugabe got tired at some point and stepped down. The oppressors, however, tend to carry their prejudices because of their origin. They rarely trust the people’s ability to change their own conditions and believe they ought to be in control of the change taking place. They claim false respect to the people and tend to believe to know better than the people.
People ought to tolerate one another in order to learn from each other. It is essential everybody develop a sense of tolerance for others. However, a person should not cease his or her behavior or ways of thinking as one is tolerating others. Dialogue springs from a place of humility, trust, respect, honesty, and curiosity, and it calls for flexibility to change, tensions, and other fundamental developments that may occur. Social workers and people in the education sector must learn to listen to those they offer help. Professionals in most internalized sectors and most of whom they came from tend to believe that holding a powerful position or having some form of authority enables them to help the less privileged with top-down means and strategies. According to Friere, these “helpers” believe in having the right type of answers, knowledge, and expertise to the needs of the people they are “helping.” So they base their “help” on who knows those who can and who do not know. This primary approach problem is that people good in qualifications and intentions, do not always trust the ones with the best knowledge of the problem. Therefore the solutions needed are the “oppressed” people seeking help.
It is evident people pretending to offer humanitarian aid are robbing the people behind the scene. Relief food meant for the starving ends up in galloons of those offering the help. The needy are robbed of their agency of improving their condition. There are numerous ways of promoting the autonomy of those in need and several different ways of helping that depict our help on those who ask for our assistance. Friere differentiates humanism and humanitarianism. In humanism, the person offering the help understands, respects the needy person and offers assistance in such a manner that he or she enables the person to help themselves. On the other hand, humanitarianism does not allow itself to communicate with the person in need because the person offering the help pretends to know the needs of the person in need and implements the help.