The beautiful, the decent and the serious

Posted on | March 21, 2008 | 1 Comment

While doing some reading for last week’s Tech Chat on Second Life, I went back to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Freedom. I came across this:

“When we live our lives with the authenticity demanded by the practice of teaching that is also learning and learning that is also teaching, we are participating in a total experience that is simultaneously directive, political, ideological, gnostic, pedagogical, aesthetic, and ethical. In this experience the beautiful, the decent, and the serious form a circle with hands joined.

Teaching always has been and always will be a profoundly political act.

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Category: education, enlightenment, ethics, freedom, knowledge, learning, passion, pedagogy, philosophy, politics, power, principle, schooling, society, teaching

Comments

One Response to “The beautiful, the decent and the serious”

Martin Stewart-Weeks
March 24th, 2008 @ 1:44 pm

Couldn’t disagree about teaching being political, but is there a concern about how the students, especially younger students, are protected in a political act in which they are not ready or capable of participating? It’s fine, and perhaps very satisfying, for a teacher to relish the politicalness of their work, but is there a risk that this is played out at the expense of the kind of disinterested and inclusive learning they are meant to be offering their students?

I’m witnessing at the moment some truly rotten ‘political’ teaching at one of Australia’s finest universities at which a bunch of very ordinary academics are indulging thier instincts for a political experience at the expense of their students (one of whom in my daughter, who is very evidently not capable of fighting back…and when she tried, with a bit of help from me, she was immediately and very deliberately slapped down).

i appreciate you are using the word ‘political’ here in a very specific and vital sense. But for too many teachers, I suspect, the temptation to be ideological is too easily dressed up as the right to be political.