Paulo Freire
Background: I purchased this book during the summer break between years one and two of teaching high school in Mississippi, but never fully read cover-to-cover until the current spring season of 2022. This book embodies a few different areas of interest that have waned or waxed in the last twenty years of my life, but overall offers me very little benefit in my life of today:
1) The work of a Latin American thinker: less interesting to me today than before
2) Societal analysis before, during, and after revolution: much less interesting to me today than before
3) Pedagogy/education: of interest to me now, but shifting more to early childhood education rather than adult education
Impression: Twenty years ago I was very interested in the prospect of educating and empowering people that feel powerless and trapped, and of course, the fulfillment of this would balance out disparities in society still today. However, Freire really only focuses on these powerless classes of people that are actively and directly being kept down. Instead of rote-memorization-based education, he proposes a process to define the exact elements responsible for maintaining people in this subordinated state (through a "problem-posing" education), having dialogue with the people to determine ways to overcome these barriers, and taking action to alleviate the solution. In order to achieve Freire's pedagogical goals, a revolution must occur, and he spends considerable time explaining this. This is fine for a post-colonial, newly independent third world nation in the 1950s or 1960s, but is not applicable to the US in 2022.
Conclusion: This books deals with actual pedagogy very little, despite its title, and instead uses quite difficult language and complicated ideas to attempt to explain and justify a mind-set shift and subsequent action needed by oppressed people to overcome their situation of oppression. The fact that Freire at some point attempted to implement his ideas in Guinea-Bissau and failed miserably, for me, supports the opinion that his ideas are probably too complicated or too impractical to actually be implemented, despite his repeated emphasis that a solution requires both theory and action.
