The Flowering of our Joy

Posted on | September 1, 2008 | 2 Comments

George Siemens mention of Paulo Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ in his recent paper, and my own first thoughts on the paper, reminded me of a line that I memorized from Friere’s ‘Pedagogy of Freedom’ a few years ago: “…resist together the obstacles that prevent the flowering of our joy.” I found the whole quote on page 69 of the text on Google Books (I’m away from home just now, so do not have the paper copy to hand).

It is worth a careful read-through:

“There is a relationship between the joy essential to teaching activity and hope. Hope is something shared between teachers and students. The hope that we can learn together, teach together, be curiously impatient together, produce something together, and resist together the obstacles that prevent the flowering of our joy. In truth, from the point of view of the human condition, hope is an essential component and not an intruder. It would be a serious contradiction of what we are if, aware of our unfinishedness, we were not disposed to participate in a constant movement of search, which in its very nature is an expression of hope. Hope is natural, possible, and necessary impetus in the context of our unfinishedness. Hope is an indispensable seasoning in our human, historical experience. Without it, instead of history we would have pure determinism. History exists only where time is problematized and not simply a given. A future that is inexorable is a denial of history.”

“…..aware of our unfinishedness…..” – the core impetus of the learner to learn! And in our knowledge of our own unfinishedness, we must “…resist together the obstacles that prevent the flowering of our joy.”

It is writing like this that reminds me why Freire is so important to education’s future.

Technorati Tags: george siemens, paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed, pedagogy of freedom, hope, unfinishedness

Category: education, freedom, learning, pedagogy, philosophy, search

Comments

2 Responses to “The Flowering of our Joy”

jaye richards
September 3rd, 2008 @ 6:17 pm

I was first introduced to this book many years ago by Andrew Johnston at Strathclyde University, and agree that so much of what Freire wrote in the early 70’s is timeless. I particularly like his thoughts on the links between discourse, communication and education (discourse building levels of communication without which there can be no education). When we look at too many of our classrooms where children are hardly ever given the chance to talk to each other and learn from each other I think we can see what Freire meant. I think he would be really into the online communities we have created in this day and age with the ease of communication between so many people. One only has to look at Don Ledingham’s recent posts on his blog about shaping the curricula for all levels in schools in East Lothian to get a real flavour of the type of real education which can be possible through such discourse between folk.
Hilery
September 3rd, 2008 @ 11:13 pm

‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing’. Raymond Williams (no relation!)