About Education these days

In my time as a sociology student, i met a lot of education investigations and studies and i do a few ones on my one. That's because i'm interested in the sociology of education. I think education and educational system and models are a big problem in Chile nowadays, we can see this in the media but is in the street where we can see the problem in the most clear way, the student movement is going on demonstraitions every year since at least the year 2006, the one of the penguin revolution, and its demands aren't satisfied yet.

In these studies, is very common to see comparisons of levels of education achieved by the population in differents historical times or in differents countries. I think this is wrong. That's because education is not a thing that is reductible to a degree or a level, is a social and historical contextualiced process. The purpose of education is make the human being capable of live freely in society and capable of doing productive and creative work, i mean, being capable of transform their social and material environment. So, if by getting a secondary degree in the past, a person was able to work, kept studying or was politically active in their social reality, that's not what a person gets today if he gets a secondary degree. Here in Chile, a secondary degree, for most of the people, is obligatory and leads to a precarious job, does not mean great and useful knowledges and does not allow to understand how the society and the country work (not even an university degree can do this, because is way more complex than what a formal education degree can assure). If we compare the past levels of education with the ones we have now, yes, we can be more or less satisfied, but we would be hiding that degrees, because of the nowadays inequality, are much less significant that they were before, when they were exclusive to certain class of the society.

If we really hear the student movement and their demands, and we really analice how is the education in Chile, above reductionist numbers, we surely think that is nothing to be proud of. In fact, there is a lot of things to be angry.

Paulo Freire and Education as Practice of Freedom

Now i'm going to write about a matter that is in the very base of my formation. Is my approach to the Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the conception of education of Paulo Freire.

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and intellectual. Him, in the 60's develop a theory and, the most important, a practice of an emancipatory pedagogy. Freire's thought is rooted in his context, Latin America, his theory is and original creation of the social context and the material conditions of our region. In consecuence, the problems that he see and that his theory tries to solve are the problems of the latin americans, one of the main issues are the historical oppression and exploitation of our people from not just the local oppressors, the first world nations are a fundamental part of it.

Freire is an intellectual, but not like normal intellectuals like those ones who make their theories just by reading books and writing in libraries and their studies. He is an intellectual that develops his thought in the practice, in dialogue with the reality and the people. That's because he was an educator and work with the parents and comunities in the State of Pernambuco in Brazil, working as a funtionary of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service of that state. Also, i think, the reality that motivates him the most to create his theories was the big illiteracy that he see in his context and his work to develop a way to the people want to learn how to read and write by his own desire. In illiteracy and the reject he found to the traditional ways of teaching how to read and write, Freire, found not just ignorance, but a political issue. He found that the conditions of life of the pupils as a totality were the main explainaition of his willing or not to learn. In particulary, in Latin America, was the oppression that produces not a pupil in abstract, but an oppressed, so, the education and the teaching of reading and writing has to be a step to freedom, a practice of freedom itself to realize the human condition of the pupils. So in summary, he created his theories "in" and to solve the social problems that he see in the place he lived, and with a very strong compromise with the emancipation and the social change. We can say then, Paulo Freire is a practical Latin American intelectual.

In further entries i'll talk more about him and his thought. But for now, i want to say that is a disgrace that Paulo Freire's educational theories aren't t part of any subject in my career, but worst than that, is that none of our teachers here at university seems to have read him or applied his methods. All theachers do a schooling and traditional teaching.