A Comparative Analysis of Educational Philosophies: Freire, Makarenko, and McLuhan

Posted on Jul 16, 2024 in Social sciences

FREIRE

True or False

1. True: Freire designed a pedagogy of liberation, closely related to the vision of developing countries and the oppressed classes, with the aim of achieving their awareness. For Freire, there is no neutral education; all education is, in itself, policy, i.e., to transform reality.
2. True: For Freire, it is necessary to develop a pedagogy of the question. In traditional schools, the “banking” model of education always develops a pedagogy of the answer. Teachers answer questions that students have not raised. The school focuses on the teacher and not the interests of students. Banking education is education for the subjugation and oppression of the poorest.
3. True: Paul Freire tells us that culture is not an exclusive attribute of the bourgeoisie. The so-called ignorant men and women are treated as objects rather than people. The so-called ignorant are denied the right to express themselves and are therefore subject to living in a culture of silence, misery, and oppression. To escape this situation, Freire proposes a revolutionary process as a cultural action against monologue.
4. True: For Freire’s liberatory pedagogy, educational practice should not be limited to only reading the word and reading text but should include reading the context, reading the world, and reading social reality. The study should not be measured by the number of pages read in one night, nor the number of books read in a semester. Education should not be an act of consumption of ideas but of creation and recreation, that is, to cultivate. To be literate should not be to learn to repeat words but to say one’s own word: the truth is the path to freedom.
5. True: For Paul Freire, teaching demands respect for the knowledge of trainees, requires the materialization of words by example, demands respect for the autonomy of the learner, requires security, skills, and generosity, requires listening and not only knowledge transfer, and needs to challenge the dominant culture of power.
6. True: In problem-posing education, the liberating education of Paulo Freire, the educational process is not understood as a mere repository of knowledge but is an act of knowing and serving, breaking and releasing the contradiction between teacher and learner. While banking education ignores the possibility of dialogue, problem-posing education proposes a dialogic situation for a clear educator.
7. True: For Freire’s liberating educational model, the educator cannot appropriate knowledge, but it is only that about which the teacher and learner reflect. Education, as a practice of freedom, implies the negation of man isolated in the world, promoting integration, solidarity, and cooperation. The construction of knowledge will be based on reflection, which should not be a mere abstraction. Man should always be understood in relation to his link with the world, with his contextual reality.

MAKARENKO AND MARXISM

True or False

1. True: To Makarenko, the most important aspect of Marxism is to achieve a new man ready to live in the new classless communist society. The mass or collective will be all; hence, the group will become the centerpiece of his educational proposals. Work will be synonymous with education.
2. True: Facing the challenge of harmonizing the social interests of individual learners, Makarenko answers by involving them in the search for solutions to everyday problems, making them partners in the organization of school and productive life, generating partnerships, solidarity, respect, shared authority, and discipline. The achievement was obtained with this personally productive work with his people and the new company. What mattered, rather than being people of integrity, was that dedicated workers were formed, true Communists convinced of the virtues of the new regime.
3. True: To Makarenko, the true Communist must learn to obey and command. Subordination and command capabilities are clearly Communist qualities. Every young person should know they are conditionally subordinate but understand that subordination must be to the comrade, not the master or the rich, and that both should know when sending a comrade, they are authorizing him to do so.
4. True: The school, for Makarenko, like the Cologne itself, is a well-organized system, a social microcommunity characterized by social needs that are established between pupils and teachers, which ultimately leads to the development of conscious discipline.
5. True: To Makarenko, family becomes a key to achieving the great Communist goals. Although he also considered that the earlier a child is incorporated into the system, i.e., Communist kindergartens, the better. In this way, the parents could work and collaborate in building the new Communist regime.
6. True: The student’s individuality and individual differences must be rejected. According to Makarenko, the child must be absorbed into the school community. Man is the product of experience, and expertise can never emerge from the interests or individual needs: social needs are the only ones.
7. True: According to Makarenko, as in the Gorki Colony, work should be presented as a value in the individual; therefore, education is a process in which any person comes to value both teaching and work. Work, more particularly manual work, should be positively accepted and implemented by all, without any differentiation. Work is not an option but a necessity; it is what makes us anthropologically human. Man never fails himself if not through working for the collective production—work.
8. True: For Makarenko, and Marxism in general, education does not serve the individual but the community, designed for the person to serve the common good defined democratically by every single citizen.

McLUHAN AND THE DESCHOOLERS

True or False

1. True: To McLuhan, film is a cold medium or of low resolution because it provides a limited amount of information, requiring the viewer, by a high turnout, to supplement and complement it.
2. True: Following McLuhan’s defined criteria for distinguishing between cold and hot media, in general terms, we could say that the internet is cold, as the impressive interactivity and participation of its users is one of the main distinctions of the medium. The internet has become an extraordinary educational tool.
3. True: According to McLuhan, electricity and electronics tend to abolish the time and space of human consciousness. There is no delay between the effect of an event and the next. The extension cords of our nervous system create a field of organically disconnected and isolated structures.
4. False: When McLuhan tells us that “the medium is the message,” he is telling us that the individual and social consequences of any medium result from the new scale introduced into our affairs by any new technology. In other words, the important thing is not the content of the news but the medium that transmits it; any means mediates the transmitted information.
5. False: The effects of the environment on individuals and society depend on the change of scale produced by a new technology. New media, new electronic technologies, open us to the era of simultaneity, and with it, beyond cultural fragmentation, announce a new society: a democratic and alternative planet empowering the global village of the left hemisphere of rationality and the sequencing of ideas and concepts.
6. True: McLuhan argues that each culture develops a certain sensory configuration prevailing the role of media in it. Thus, in an oral culture, the human sensory structure is dominated by the sense of hearing. In the same way, sight takes a central role in typographic cultures. Printed culture is an enrichment, slow but progressive, of oral culture.
7. True: For McLuhan, when a technology is pushed to the limit, when the media are overheated, they generate a function opposite to the alleged one. Every form, pushed to the limits of its potential, reverses its characteristics. On television, for example, junk programs have flooded all channels: television fails to communicate, instead isolating, becoming an opiate numbing human consciousness.