Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach

academic scores, teachers maintain an undemocratic level of control when they arrange the
classroom experiences of their students. Both of these issues are addressed by Paulo Freire,
who calls on educators to aggressively challenge both injustice and unequal power arrange-
ments in the classroom and society.

FIG. 1.1 Excerpts from John Dewey’s pedagogic creed.

1. “The only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the
   demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.”


2. “Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life...
   that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of
   the (human) race, and to use his own powers for social ends.”


3. “Education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.”


4. “The social life of the child is the basis of... all his training or growth.”


5. “The true center of correlation on school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor his-
   tory, nor geography, but the child’s own social activities.”


6. “The only way to make the child conscious of his social heritage is to enable him to
   perform those fundamental types of activity which make civilization what it is.”


7. “The active side precedes the passive.”


8. “Education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.”


9. “Education is... the process of coming to share in the social consciousness.”

JOIN THE CONVERSATION—DEWEY’S PEDAGOGIC CREED

Questions to Consider:

1. Rewrite these statements by Dewey in your own words.
   2.Which of these ideas do you agree with? Which ones do you disagree with? Why?

Paulo Freire’s Philosophy of Education

Paulo Freire was born in Recife in northeastern Brazil where his ideas about education de-
veloped in response to military dictatorship, enormous social inequality, and widespread
adult illiteracy. As a result, his primary pedagogical goal is to provide the world’s poor and
oppressed with educational experiences that make it possible for them to take control over
their own lives. Freire shares Dewey’s desire to stimulate students to become “agents of cu-
riosity” in a “quest for... the ‘why’ of things,” and his belief that education provides possi-
bility and hope for the future of society. But he believes that these can only be achieved
when students explicitly critique social injustice and actively organize to challenge oppres-
sion (Freire, 1995, pp. 105, 144; 1970, p. 28).
For Freire, education is a process of continuous group discussion that enables people to
acquire collective knowledge they can use to change society. The role of the teacher in-
cludes asking questions that help students identify problems facing their community, work-
ing with students to discover ideas or create symbols that explain their life experiences, and
encouraging analysis of prior experiences and of society as the basis for new academic un-
derstanding and social action.
In a Deweyan classroom, the teacher is an expert who is responsible for organizing expe-
riences so that students learn content, social and academic skills, and an appreciation for
democratic living. Freire is concerned that this arrangement reproduces the unequal power
relationships that exist in society. In a Freirean classroom, everyone has a recognized area

GOALS 9