Finally got ’round to reading this ‘required’ text for those interested in confronting the imperialist colonizer chokehold that capitalism has on most of the world. Freire’s insistence that those most oppressed – those who enjoy pretty much none of the comforts that are used by the ownership class to mollify the mushy middle in most societies – must be the people who lead us to a better way of doing things has a definite ring of truth to it. However, in order for these people to rise to being able to change things rather than to simply attempt to reform systems so that those on the top don’t have to face any consequence like, oh … elimination/extinction, we all must first clearly identify who the oppressors are and then decide one and for all which side we are on and commit to it.

Having faced the reality of what is being done to each of us, we must then look at the tools used to keep people from realizing that things could be better … and here we see that our educational systems are – when they are even accessible to people – little more than propaganda-dispensing programs that force feed ideas into minds that are not asked to engage beyond simply showing up and submitting to the indoctrination. Freire rightly believes that education should be a dialogue that allows for exchanges that would create knowledge that is more meaningful to both the educator and the student and that ends the authoritarian mindset that current educational systems promote.

Freire is very big on dialogue and I can’t disagree that it is our growing inability to talk/communicate amongst ourselves that lets the oppressive classes run the show to suit themselves. They manipulate things to keep themselves in power and we react, but since they are protected from our reactions by layers of armed police & other class traitors, we wind up acting out on each other rather than listening to each others truths. Talking and listening would encourage an understanding that a small number of greedy people are doing harmful things that affect all of us, but that those harms are not experienced equally and that we would probably do better by addressing the physically real harms together, in good faith, sooner than later.