Freire and Douglass on the Emancipatory Power of Education
Posted by felixgrobler on January 28, 2008
Felix J Grobler
Ariana Paliobagis
English 121
28th of January 2008
Freire and Douglass on the Emancipatory Power of Education
Freire and Douglass each have interesting views on the liberating power of education. They both have realized, as Douglass wrote, “the emancipatory power of education” (Douglass, p.506). The two authors address the ability of education to free people from oppression. In the case of Douglass it was the black slaves in the southern United States and in the case of Freire it was the poor people of rural Brazil. Both groups of people have never really received any form of education, most of them are illiterate. Due to this fact they are often used and controlled by other factions of people.
Freedom can only be sustained through education, this holds true for the United States as a country as well, without and educated populace a republic can not function as it is intended to. On a more personal level the same idea follows, being educated allows you to understand your surroundings and react to them. For example many of the slaves did not realize entirely how much they were being oppressed, this life was all that they had ever known. Reading in particular made Douglass first realize how much he and his fellow slaves were being oppressed by the slave owners. Without education Douglass would have never realized that the state of slavery he was born into was not a natural one. Only through the books he read did he realize that everybody deserved and should be free, including the slaves.
Freire realized the freeing aspect of education as well. Freire was mainly concerned with the theory of how people should be taught. He believed that is was crucial to even the playing field between the students and the teachers. This way they would be on the same level and able to work together better. Freire favored open discussion over memorization. He wanted to make learning an active experience. Students should not just be copy ideas down, they should think about the subject and come up with ideas of their own. This type of learning process makes students more pro-active and creative. They learn to think for themselves.
Douglass was very pro-active with his own education. He would have never learned to read and write if he had not done so. In this respect he was learning in a similar way as Freire envisions learning. Douglass of course did not have a choice, this was the only way.
