We invite you all to take part in the Study Room 2 Forum. After you have read the text from Unesco from SR1 and watched Paulo Freire´s interview, share with the group the parts that were most meaningful to you and why. Make sure you also comment on other participant's comments.
Our selections:
From the text:
Freire assumes that the learners must understand their own reality as part of their learning activity. (UNESCO, p. 1)
[…] working with children meant taking into consideration their social and family environment as well. Problems, such as malnutrition and child labour, could only be solved with the involvement of the parents. (UNESCO, p. 2)
He opposed the concepts of extension of culture and the concept of communication about culture. For him the first one is ‘invading’ while the second promotes awareness. […] One cannot learn if the new knowledge contradicts one’s context […]The incidental intention was to emphasize the principles and fundamentals of an education promoting the practice of liberty. This practice should not to be reduced to simple technical support but include man’s effort to decipher himself and others. (UNESCO, p. 7)
From the interview:On Tolerance
“The virtue of tolerance is an ethical, political and historical duty.”
On Critical Thinking
"There is a need for a proposition of a critical way of thinking, teaching and knowing to the teachers in order for them to work differenty with students."
On Language and Power
"Who says a certain way of speaking is the cultivated one? If there is a cultivated pattern, it is because there is one that is not!"
On Changing
“I was a curious boy and I am a curious old man.”
On his philosophical conviction
"We did not come to keep the world as it is. We came to the world in order to remake the world, we have to change reality!"