Lecture Transcript (Week 1)

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Dear All,

Here is the lecture transcript for Week 1.  As you read this, think thru the questions I inserted here, some that I asked, some that some of you asked during our discussion.  The link to my public blog, which preceded the theme for this lecture, is also below.  Please feel free to post responses here, or on the public blog to that post.  Not required of course, but a way to further the discussion in the short time we have.  Also, fyi, my public blog and this course’s blog have blog links that are meant as resources for all the topics/issues we discuss, or nearly all.  I won’t be posting every lecture up here, because as I perform a different lecture “persona” each week (or nearly each week–), some won’t have transcripts.  Enjoy.

–David

LECTURE Week 1

 

TOPIC: FREIRE, THE LECTURE-AS-EDUCATIONAL MODEL, & TOSCANO’S CPT LETTER

 

PERSONA/LECTURE MODE: STANDARD WESTERN-MODEL (Historical/Thematic lecture of 1 professor standing in front of class, followed by Q&A period, with professor directing/facilitating the discussion)

 

–I will begin by performing the lecture, and want you to make a mouth sound when you sense that I have stopped, and a performance of dialogic education has begun

 

[ Post-lecture: no discernable mouth sounds, tho some students said they made mouth sounds at various points; one said that discussing/talking IS a mouth sound – Okay, yeah yeah ]

 

BACKGROUND: Socrates, Marx, & Freire

 

Freire is often spoken of—or at least POP is—in terms of five main contributions to philosophy and economy of education, beyond the Marxist dichotomy of banking education (dominant) and problem-posing, or dialogic education (sub-dominant, revolutionary).  We’ll get to politics and aesthetics of Freire in a moment, but presently, Freire’s five main contributions are often thought of as liberation or critical education necessarily entailing:

 

1)    dialog

2)    praxis

3)    developing a historical consciousness, one that has the power, or recognizes its power, to change the world

4)    site-specificity: taking the lived experience and the context, even the room one is in, into consideration as teachable aspects, or parts of the educational dialog

5)    transcendence thru dialectic, or in other words, a sort of mysticism based in Marxist Christianity, where terms like “redemption” are put into a dialectical framework: all can be redeemed, says Freire, within the banking model, the ruling classes—all can (and will!) transcend their given roles

 

Not that this is wrong—this seems quite right as a kind of outline of some of the more important aspects of Freire’s work, but I’m more interested in what I think, and what you think—.  So what I, firstly, want to focus on are the first two of these five points, dialog and praxis, but give them some historicity, as well as to ask: what’s Freire’s possible relation to the arts, and what’s contemporary critical education’s more general relation to aesthetics, to, say, radical art, if there is a relationship at all?  Why start here?

 

But still, what are we to make out of this “poetics” element

in “poetics theater” (PT). You might ask, “ok, why can’t the ‘poetics’

element of PT be made by a group of people (more than just RT)?”

And the answer to that is, it can, provided the participants have each

developed a poetics that is recognizable (in its political valence most of

all), so that a conjoining of poetics is a carefully honed negotiation

and not a watering down of each of the other.

–RT, “Strikes & Orgies”

 

 

–Notice the parallel here between Freire’s dialogic model and CPT, where both seem to entail the need for people on equal footing with regard to the practice/subject at hand.

 

–We’ll come back to this quote and look at it a bit closer in relation to the arts and education, but for now:

 

–As I wrote on my public blog a few days ago, here we are at Evergreen where the lecture, in some definable sense, is not the rule, but the exception.  Dialogic education, at least in terms of our stated mission as a school (maybe not in reality but…) is more the norm. 

 

–And I find myself giving lectures and then facilitating dialog when I perform THE STANDARD LECTURE, and it’s the lectures you crave (these, and more so, performative, more unusual lectures, but lectures nonetheless), very much expect and want badly, in addition to all the co-learning—and I did too, and still do!  I sense you’d like to sit back once in a while here and be entertained in a deep sense, in a sense that straddles the line between beauty as entertainment and art as moral lesson in the Aristotlean sense, in the sense that Euripides, wrote Aristotle in The Poetics, could bestow on an audience: art that not only drives the senses, but the intellect, such that a moral feeling might result. 

 

–I sense that some of you would like the lecture to be functional in this way, in the sense that the music for use, the modernist and movement in opera and the theater thought they could have it: to straddle that line between narrative drawing the audience in, into a world of its own, and yet, being obviously art, calling attention to its being artifice as juxtaposed to reality, being different enough from the norm, and critical enough (formally and otherwise) of the everyday, such that the art, or in this case the standard lecture, can teach in a sort of sideways, but not so praxis-driven, way.  It can serve to facilitate some sort of learning that enhances the dialogic process, as it itself is not complete—it’s necessarily fragmented enough for you to have to fill in its blanks.

 

–More so when the lecture is consciously non-normative, where entertainment has a use value beyond simply being novel, interesting:

 

–Were I to move my hand like this, then turn like this.  And linger on this quote, from Artaud’s Theater and Its Double:

 

We must insist upon the idea of culture-in-action, of culture growing within us like a new organ, a sort of second breath: and on civilization as an applied culture controlling even our subtlest actions, a presence of mind 

 

–And then go on with my lecture, leaving the quote dangling like so, I have neither sought to confound you nor have I filled you like an empty vessel.  I’ve neither led you by the hand and pressed a lesson into your mind treating it like Aristotle’s wax seal, nor have I simply obfuscated things in an attempt to impress you with my knowledge and your ignorance.

 

–This quote relates to what we are talking about, but I have not explained it away.

 

–Not if I continue on with the lecture in order that some praxis might appear to be at work here—as, perhaps a lack of fleshing the quote out with regard to how it works with and against Freire models a certain way of essaying, trying out, playing, such that seemingly disparate strands can be connected up by you, perhaps in 25 distinct, yet potentially related ways. 

 

–And this is to treat the non-normative lecture as a flahspoint, or maybe at least a starting point, in a recognition and activation of all subjects in this place as becoming.

 

–Lecture as non-normative part of critical education, and critical education as both revolutionary act and as aesthetic event ?

 

–Why do you crave this mode of interaction?  The performative, non-normative lecture as juxtaposed to the normative, straightforward lecture that I’ve now fallen back into?  And why crave lectures generally, even this one?  The lecture that is self-aware as such, and seeks to aestheticize itself such that dialogic elements pock it throughout, as well as this mode?

 

–Noted poet and essayist, and teacher Stan Apps wrote a response to my blog post regarding this question.  He writes as of yesterday:

 

This is a very interesting set of comments. Regarding Freire and American students, while you’re right that students enjoy the “spectacle” and “value” of the banking model, at the same time they might reject the other model because they don’t want to be liberated or deeply activated by the interaction with a professor. That can be, or seem, invasive to many students, who feel like they are obligated to come and often prefer to learn something specific and be unconfronted (unthreatened) by the professor’s ideology. After all, whether it’s true or not, American students tend to already feel liberated (since the idea of liberation is so basic to our culture), and that will lead them to reject the professor’s implication that they are not in fact liberated, which students might encounter as pessimistic or even disempowering.

 

–This is very much a Freirean response, and Stan meant it to be, as he, like so many of us in the arts and in education is very much dedicated to a Freirean model. 

 

–But I think that our situation—meaning the situation of students in late capitalist America—is sufficiently different enough for this to only ring partly true to me.

 

–I don’t know if it rings true to you

 

[ during Q&A some said it did, others not: one of you remarked that the lecture levels the playing field for further, more dialogic inquiry; another remarked that having a diversity of ways to learn or unlearn is good, so the lecture as merely one component is a positive thing ]

 

–I think it’s right that we often feel quite liberated and that this is a superstructure ideology, our false conscience, at work (Marx).  That sounds right.  I know I feel free to do what I want a lot of times.  But where this feeling comes from, and how free I am, is a deeply unsettling question.  Unsettling enough to not want to pose it to myself if I’m trying to get to sleep.

 

[ later we talked about some of the elements we weren’t aware of – conscious of – in the room, that might contribute to being “unfree” – the hierarchy of the way I stood and talked, controlled discussion, etc ]

 

Post-Lecture considerations/questions:

 

–But how does critical education, Freire being perhaps if not the founder of it, then its most celebrated co-founders, really work?  What are the nuts and bolts of the praxis of education, its dialogic elements? 

 

And how does this dialogic mode potentially square away with this lecture mode?  Or, in other words, how might banking education and dialogic question posing be not as different from one another as we might want? 

 

–One provisional answer is to be found in Socrates, to whom Freire looked to for inspiration, as much if not more than he looked to Marx:

 

 

Socrates: If I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes. 

Glaucon: They undoubtedly say this.

 

Socrates: Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.

 

–Freire writes that the banking model does not, like education should, recognize subjects as in a constant state of becoming, the world not static, but malleable, changeable:

 

If the banking model is cast away…They (learners in dialog) may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation.

–Freire, POP

 

–Freire calls the banking model one that assumes, as axiom, that persons are not copro consciente – conscious beings, but possesors of consciousness (one has it, one is not one and the same as it)

 

–Plato Continues the Dialog:

 

Glaucon: Very true.

 

Socrates: Each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the den, and you will know what the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth. And thus our State which is also yours will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good. Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst….

When a person starts on the discovery of the absolute by the light of reason only, and without any assistance of sense, and perseveres until by pure intelligence he arrives at the perception of the absolute good, he at last finds himself at the end of the intellectual world, as in the case of sight at the end of the visible….

 

Because a freeman ought not be a slave in the acquisition of knowledge of any kind, bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

 

Glaucon: Very true.

 

Socrates: Then, my good friend, do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to find out the natural bent.

(Book 7, Cave Scene, The Republic)

 

 

—

 

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not “marginals,” are not people living “outside” society. They have always been “inside” — inside the structure which made them “beings for others.” The solution is not to “integrate” them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become “beings for themselves.” Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors’ purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientizacao.

—Freire, POP

–Here is where revolutionary education meets revolutionary politics on the tactical level, that is, where Freire is most explicit about his reliance on Marx and Fromm; education’s end is social revolution’s end; unlearning the ideology of the superstructure means tactically to reform “the base economy” – to set up a model in which the base economy, the vast majority of the producers (laborers, middle-class in some cases) has the greatest potential to realize that their values amount to false consciousness, that, for example, the desire for plasma screen televisions and the ability to get one one day through individual responsibility and hard work – this is the superstructure ideology of the ruling class, not the person’s “authentic” values, but the values the ruling class wants people to have.  Here, Fromm’s thesis, that of the necropheliac, or in Marx’s term, the person with false consciousness, is quoted:

“hence a threat to his possession is a threat to himself; if he loses possession he loses contact with the world. … He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life.” 

–An incredibly important, perhaps counterintuitive notion—it speaks to an understanding of community, indeed diversity, that isn’t integrative, and isn’t defined by bringing people into a commonality, but rather heightening difference, turning society less homogenous, less on common footing, and more heteronymous.  A definition of community and of diversity that is quite at odds with how these terms are used, for instance, here.

The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never propose to students that they critically consider reality. It will deal instead with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat, and insist upon the importance of learning that on the contrary, Roger gave green grass to the rabbit. The “humanism” of the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons — the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human.

 

—Freire, POP

 

Post-Lecture Considerations:

 

What sort of “subjects” would there be in Freirean education? 

 

Or, what is put at a premium here? 

 

How, if at all, does wrote memorization and the learning of systems—calculus, say, or chemistry—factor in? 

 

How would these subjects be treated in critical education circles?

 

–Taylor’s criticism: How can we tell the difference between the banking educational system and problem-posing?  I can pose problem after problem to you and all the while be steering you in the direction of capitalist values say, or more generally, my particular thesis on what we’re engaged in.

 

–In fact, the question-posing part of this performance of a standard western-world lecture is, in fact, steering you down one set of paths, asking of you to (even as performance) adopt certain ideological positions that aren’t, perhaps, yours (even as I attempt to simply outline what Freire and his proponents are thinking):

 

 Taylor allows me space to point out two further problems with Freire (potential problems):

 

1) the either/or writing here, i.e., that there is too much generality, such that without examples of how this dialogic process might work, it threatens to be identical to the banking model in outcome, and

 

2) it seems that for true problem-posing, dialogic learning to take place, many parts of the system beyond the classroom power dynamic need to be changed: tuition and teaching for pay would have to radically change or be thrown out; the idea of what a curriculum is would need overhauling—after all, a curriculum is a pre-ordered set of things to attend to, pre-established by an institution or a teacher; the idea of discrete subjects being taught would have to radically change—no more could we simply have a calculus course, for that would require that, even emerging by accident, or throughout the course of time during a dialogic process, an expert in calculus to emerge, a teacher who teaches, by way of imparting very particular knowledge.  A true dialog would thus entail widening “areas of discussion” (eg classes) to be much more general in nature, such that all would have an equal chance for equal contribution, drawing on different levels and sorts of expertise/experience, or all classes would involve co-learners all starting out with the same basic level of expertise in what they are discussing, thereby dissolving the need for a teacher in any normative sense of the word.  Which gets us back to Toscano’s organizational politics in CPT, which is very much influenced by Freire:

 

But still, what are we to make out of this “poetics” element

in “poetics theater” (PT). You might ask, “ok, why can’t the ‘poetics’

element of PT be made by a group of people (more than just RT)?”

And the answer to that is, it can, provided the participants have each

developed a poetics that is recognizable (in its political valence most of

all), so that a conjoining of poetics is a carefully honed negotiation

and not a watering down of each of the other.

–RT, “Strikes & Orgies”

 

Pos-Lecture Considerations:

 

–What other problems can you locate in Freire? (potential criticism, apparent contradiction, or conclusion that leads to further conclusions you find problematic)

 

–DISCUSSION OF QUESTIONS ABOVE AND BELOW–

 

–But then how would anyone become expert in any one, more narrow area of “study” – in order that co-learning/dialogic circles could arise? 

 

–Further observations about classroom-lecture setup that influence the educational process

 

–What counts here, in this space, as part of the “educational process”?

 

Can some of these criticisms be met (?), I think, if one understands Freire to be not as radical as we would like in some ways, yet more radical than given credit in others: to understand Freire to be really pushing for an aesthetics of education, that is, realizing and formulating ideas about education being an art practice. 

 

Plato is a main source of influence here.  The dialogs being not just philosophical inquiries and dialogs, but proto-theater, long polyvocal poems, in which the poet and the reader are on equal footing in the total exploration of a vast world, as well as in the ability to re-make the world, refashion it, change it—but are not on equal footing in all respects.  The artist has more control of the outcome of the dialog in virtue of making the art—calling attention to particular problems, starting the conversation, as it were, along a certain path. 

 

–Through Rancière: if we truly want to understand the aesthetics of pedagogy, we cannot simply see aesthetics as external to teaching and learning. Rather, education as an aesthetic event has to be taken seriously, and aesthetics should regain primacy in discussions of critical pedagogy.

 

–So we arrive at radical art being at the core of critical education. 

 

But how?  And why? 

 

We’ll look at this thru Ranciere, thru specific art-education movements, avant-garde American poetry, and very soon, go back in time bit more and look at Black Mountain School, Dewey, Arendt, and the alternative education movement, of which critical education is one school of thought among several that came up in 40s, 50s, and 60s, and influenced radical experiments that are contemporary, which we will also look at.