Free Learning and Directive Pedagogy

Posted on | January 12, 2010 | 2 Comments

Doug Noon recently wrote a post entitled Critical Readings in which he looked at the work of The Public School in Los Angeles. The school describes itself thus:

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL is a school with no curriculum. At the moment, it operates as follows: first, classes are proposed by the public (I want to learn this or I want to teach this); then, people have the opportunity to sign up for the classes (I also want to learn that); finally, when enough people have expressed interest, the school finds a teacher and offers the class to those who signed up.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL is not accredited, it does not give out degrees, and it has no affiliation with the public school system. It is a framework that supports autodidactic activities, operating under the assumption that everything is in everything.

Doug also pointed towards a partner site which serves as a library for The Public School: AAAARG.ORG. This is a truly wonderful resource that should be on every educator’s RSS reader – you can register for access here.

Amongst the cornucopia of riches to be found there, Doug came across a short piece by Paulo Friere called The Act of Study which he describes thus:

The Act of Study is really a primer on how to read critically. Freire made his case against what he called “banking education,” the view of teaching and learning as a function of depositing information into the minds of students, which they are then expected to store for later retrieval or personal enrichment. Freire maintained that this form of learning kills our creativity and our curiosity, since the point is memorization, as opposed to comprehension.

Rather than seeing ourselves as “vessels to be filled” Freire recommended that we become “subjects of the act” and attempt to recreate the text for ourselves. He saw critical reading as the expression of an attitude toward the world, and not just a relationship to a book or an article. “To study,” he said, “is not to consume ideas, but to create and to re-create them.”

Anyone who reads my blog will know that I have a strong admiration for the work of Freire. It is an admiration borne as much from his political activity as from his educational legacy – although the two were, of course, indivisible in his life. And just as Freire’s politics and teaching were indivisible, so Freire himself is indivisible from the particular environment in which he grew up, taught and developed his own radicalism and hatred of oppression. So, while Friere offers so much that is universally applicable, his location in a particular time and place and set of circumstances, I believe, means that not all of his thinking and ideas can or should be accepted unquestioningly (something that Freire, I am sure, would never have wished for or expected anyway).

So, for example, I would accept Freire’s fundamental notion that learning to read and write (to quote Colin Lankshear in an article in Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter by Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard):

….establishes literacy as a medium for expressing one’s own intentions, creative potency and (emerging) critical perspective, rather than serving as a vehicle for absorbing directives and myths imposed from without.

On the other hand, I find myself less willing to agree with him wholeheartedly on the tension between ‘directive’ and ‘non-directive’ teaching. To quote Freire himself (from The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation)

The educator who says that he or she is equal to his or her learners is either a demagogue, lies or is incompetent. Education is always directive, and this is already said in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

I am just not sure that the second assertion follows logically from the first, or even that the first is always true in every case. I do not believe that education ‘is always directive’, and I certainly do not believe that teachers who feel themselves equal to their learners are necessarily, or even probably, demagogues, liars or bad teachers. That simple word ‘equal’ has far too many connotations to permit such a forceful declaration to pass unquestioned.

Technorati Tags: doug noon, the public school of los angeles, aaaarg.org, paulo freire, pedagogy, teaching, education

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