![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
banking vs. thinking
Oct. 24th, 2021 12:53 pmI think I need to read some things that aren’t book club reads? All of my reviews are starting off the same.
Anyway, one of my book clubs decided to read Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a classic work on critical pedagogy by the legendary Brazilian educator. I’d read sections of it a couple years ago and was vaguely familiar with some of the topics, such as the “banking” model of education versus the “problem-posing” model but I figured it’d be good to read the whole thing straight through and therefore get more than a bits-and-pieces understanding of it.
Not gonna lie: Between the translation-of-a-translation and the abstract-principles-to-concrete-examples ratio, I was a little disappointed. I have been admittedly In A Mood about activist language lately and therefore had approximately zero patience for self-congratulatory shock value shit like describing forms of bad bourgeois education as “necrophilic.” Like I get what he meant, I just don’t think it was necessary. If I have to hear that Che Guevara quote about being guided by a feeling of great love one more time, as if it’s ever done anything to actually make anyone check themselves and their own behavior instead of checking everybody else’s as pretentiously as possible, I will probably scream.
However, there are still a lot of important ideas in there and if some of them seem obvious it’s probably because critical pedagogy (or at least pseudo-critical pedagogy, in some places) has been pretty influential over the past 50 years. Also in and among all the annoying jargonification of terms like “life” and “death” and “love” there are actually quite a number of bangers, just really good quotes to stick on slides and agendas and flyers and shit, plus some actually fairly useful jargon terms like dialogics and anti-dialogics, limit-situations, and banking vs. problem-posing.
It’ll be interesting to see if actually doing a group discussion on this makes me less cranky about it. It’s definitely something that I just haven’t been quite in the right headspace for. Also it would be really cool to have a more modern English translation that was actually translated out of the Portuguese directly instead of being translated out of the Spanish translation, which is apparently what happened.
Anyway, one of my book clubs decided to read Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a classic work on critical pedagogy by the legendary Brazilian educator. I’d read sections of it a couple years ago and was vaguely familiar with some of the topics, such as the “banking” model of education versus the “problem-posing” model but I figured it’d be good to read the whole thing straight through and therefore get more than a bits-and-pieces understanding of it.
Not gonna lie: Between the translation-of-a-translation and the abstract-principles-to-concrete-examples ratio, I was a little disappointed. I have been admittedly In A Mood about activist language lately and therefore had approximately zero patience for self-congratulatory shock value shit like describing forms of bad bourgeois education as “necrophilic.” Like I get what he meant, I just don’t think it was necessary. If I have to hear that Che Guevara quote about being guided by a feeling of great love one more time, as if it’s ever done anything to actually make anyone check themselves and their own behavior instead of checking everybody else’s as pretentiously as possible, I will probably scream.
However, there are still a lot of important ideas in there and if some of them seem obvious it’s probably because critical pedagogy (or at least pseudo-critical pedagogy, in some places) has been pretty influential over the past 50 years. Also in and among all the annoying jargonification of terms like “life” and “death” and “love” there are actually quite a number of bangers, just really good quotes to stick on slides and agendas and flyers and shit, plus some actually fairly useful jargon terms like dialogics and anti-dialogics, limit-situations, and banking vs. problem-posing.
It’ll be interesting to see if actually doing a group discussion on this makes me less cranky about it. It’s definitely something that I just haven’t been quite in the right headspace for. Also it would be really cool to have a more modern English translation that was actually translated out of the Portuguese directly instead of being translated out of the Spanish translation, which is apparently what happened.