Transformative Education: Freire and Barbian Pedagogies
Barbian Principles:
Barbian’s educational approach is based on three essential principles:
- Everyone has the right to knowledge, and schools must provide it.
- Participation is key to building a more just society.
- Collectivity fosters student learning.
A key element in implementing Barbian’s ideas is fostering a spirit of collectivity in schools. Currently, individualism often prevails. Promoting the common good encourages student learning by developing a sense of belonging to a group working together. Introducing collectivity and cooperation encourages critical thinking. Students learn the importance of considering others’ opinions, and teachers must listen to their proposals and ideas. We can implement a caring school model where gifted students help those who are less gifted, eliminating the competitive dynamic prevalent in many classrooms.
Freire’s Pedagogy:
Freire’s work, focused on Latin America, addresses contexts with significant social inequalities, high birth rates, large youth populations, and high illiteracy rates. He argues that underdevelopment cannot be corrected by simply applying economic models from developed countries. A ruling class often oppresses the population, and education can become an instrument of oppression. Freire’s educational praxis is rooted in the experiences of marginalized Latin American populations. His pedagogy is built on the dialogue between the oppressed and the non-oppressed. Education based on dialogue is a key element of Freire’s concept, becoming an instrument of awareness in a society divided into oppressors and oppressed.
Illiteracy and Literacy:
Illiteracy is widespread among the poorest in Latin American societies. It is often seen as a sign of disability or low intelligence. However, Freire argues that illiteracy is an obstacle imposed by the dominant class, characterized by a lack of interest in the elementary education of adults. The task of literacy is not simply teaching isolated words and letters, as words are not independent of human experience. Literacy is about gaining awareness of and overcoming imposed cultural oppression. For Freire, literacy places the learner in the world, enabling them to read and change it, focusing action toward democracy and social justice.
Freire’s Literacy Process:
- Dialogue and Problem Identification: Informal conversations with local residents to understand their needs and concerns. Discussions between teachers and students about community problems. Constructing the literacy program content collaboratively, without a textbook.
- Consolidation: Symbolizing reality through representations of specific, recognizable situations. This involves dialogue representing problems experienced by the group.
- Decoding: Discovering the meaning of the existential situations represented in the previous phase. This involves moving from the symbolized situation to abstract connections between the situation and the subject’s reality, leading to reflection on how to overcome difficulties.
The development of educational action requires an awareness of the relationship between individuals and the world, and between individuals themselves. Freire’s method was highly successful and adaptable, spreading globally.
Banking Education vs. Liberating Education:
Freire criticized traditional pedagogy, which he called “banking education.” In this model, the educator deposits knowledge into the student, who is treated as a passive recipient. This “narrative-discursive” approach, where the teacher talks and students listen, prevents the kind of critical awareness Freire advocated. Banking education reinforces domestication, adapting learners to the existing reality without allowing for transformative possibilities. It may change the mentality of the oppressed but not the oppressive situation.
Freire proposed a liberating education that overcomes the contradiction between educators and students. Both become learners and educators, eliminating the negative consequences of banking education. Learning occurs through dialogue, not just through the teacher’s exclusive instruction. For Freire, education is a communal act; no one educates alone, but people educate each other in communion.
Conclusion:
Liberating education encourages dialogue, the emergence of critical consciousness, and the capacity for decision-making, social responsibility, and political participation. Freire offers a liberating theory and practice applicable to situations of oppression, prevalent in both poor and wealthy societies. His work has a universal character, opening a path for the transformation of an unjust world.