The Jossey-Bass Reader on Contemporary Issues in Adult Education

By Sharan B. Merriam

THE JOSSEY-BASS READER ON Contemporary Issues in Adult Education

With contributions from leading experts in the field, The Jossey-Bass Reader on Contemporary Issues in Adult Education collects in one volume the best previously published literature on the issues and trends affecting adult education today. The volume includes influential pieces from foundational authors in the profession such as Eduard C. Lindeman, Alain Locke, and Paulo Freire, as well as current work from authors around the world, including Laura L. Bierema, John M. Dirkx, Cecilia Amaluisa Fiallos, Peter Jarvis, Michael Newman, and Shirley Walters.

In five sections, the book's thirty chapters delve into a wide range of compelling topics including:

• social justice, democracy, and activism
• diversity and marginalization
• human resource development
• lifelong learning
• ethical issues
• the meaning and role of emotions
• globalization and non-Western perspectives
• the role of mass media, popular culture, and "social learning"
• technology
• health, welfare, and environment

Each piece is framed within its larger context by the editors, and each section is accompanied by helpful reflection and discussion questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Feb 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781118094174

Book preview

Part One

Defining a Field of Practice: The Foundations of Adult Education

Giroux (1996) asserts, History is not an artifact (p. 51). From this perspective, the history of adult education is alive, bringing issues of who is represented and who works for change to bear on theorizing, research, and practice. In our field of study and practice, a turn to history enables us to explore people, politics, and ideas that have defined modern practice. It becomes a way to reflect on what has been perceived as a divide exacerbating fragmentation of our field. On one side is adult education's tradition as social education in the spirit of initiatives like the Highlander Folk School and the Antigonish Movement. These social-learning endeavors variously focused on education for citizenship, community building, recovering from economic and other hardships, and fighting oppression in the name of social justice. On the other side is the field's pragmatic tendency to respond to outside pressures to become more instrumental and vocational in nature. However, we view engaging field history as more than investigating this divide: It provides us opportunities to explore the degree to which adult education can be spacious and filled with possibility as we set goals to meet the instrumental, social, and cultural needs of learners. As well, a turn to history also enables us to think about what adult education might look like in the future:

At issue here is a vision of the future in which history is not accepted simply as a set of prescriptions unproblematically inherited from the past. History can be named and remade by those who refuse to stand by passively in the face of human suffering and oppression. (Giroux & McLaren, 1988, p. 176)

This vision, aimed at extending human possibilities, situates foundational studies as dynamic, open, unsettled, subject to revision, and worth struggling over.

Such a view of history is reflected in the selections in this section that includes pieces from the original writings of three field icons: Eduard Lindeman, Alain Locke, and Paulo Freire. In Chapter 1, Lindeman, framing education as life, positions the field as a potentially liberating space for adult learners as he engages what adult education means. He provocatively suggests that adult education begins where vocational education ends. His work will appeal to reflective practitioners concerned with holistic forms of learning and education that address current economic, social, and cultural turmoil. Throughout his influential book The Meaning of Adult Education, Lindeman (-NIL-) cast true adult education as social education that helps learners thrive as citizens living in community with others. From this perspective, Chapter 1 considers motivations, concepts, and methods that shape the learning process as it focuses on situations that require learners to draw on their experiences as they participate in problem solving.

In Chapter 2, Locke, a social and cultural educator who became the first Black president of the American Association for Adult Education from 1945 to 1946 (Stubblefield & Keane, 1994), contests the historical notion of the Black American as a problem and speaks to the transformation of modern Blacks in early 20th century U.S. culture through migration augmenting urbanization and the intensification of race consciousness and solidarity. Locke's work will speak to readers interested in the social history of recovery of Black morale through political participation aimed at attaining civil rights. Importantly for those interested in revising the place of Black citizens in U.S. social history, his work explores the emergence of the Black American amid deterrents to this recovery including racial tensions, injustices, and the rapid spread of policies of segregation.

In another classical contribution to our field of study, Freire in Chapter 3 presents his banking concept of education as a springboard to think about the roles and interactions of educators and learners in adult education, where the key goal of social education is justice for all that starts from building critical consciousness of worldly realities and systems. Freire's anti-oppression work has been a major influence on critical pedagogy and critical adult education in North America. What reflective practitioners can gain from this piece is a set of themes to guide the development of a democratic social practice of adult education. These themes include education as the practice of freedom, education as transformation through praxis, and education as a proactive space for problem solving. These themes are central to Freire's goal for adult education: to help educators and learners build partnerships through critically reflective dialogue and action to create a better world.

In Chapter 4, Grace explores the emergence of U.S. academic adult education during the quarter century following World War II when knowledge production was deeply influenced by an array of economic and cultural transitions. This article is informative to those exploring how adult education has to readjust to cope with the fallout from the ongoing economic crisis that hit with full force in the fall of 2008. While the present is different, the article and the current crisis both raise the same basic question for adult educators: What knowledge has most worth? Grace considers how adult educators answered this question pragmatically after World War II so they might increase the presence and value of adult education in mainstream education and culture. This article, exploring such constructs as liberal adult education, provides food for thought for those concerned with the decline of social education and its emphases on democracy, freedom, and social justice in a more instrumentalized lifelong learning world.

In a social historical analysis in Chapter 5, Glowacki-Dudka and Helvie-Mason locate adult education at the margins of the university and society. Their work speaks to readers concerned with assaults on academic adult education. Glowacki-Dudka and Helvie-Mason reflect on purposes and goals of adult education tied to the dichotomy of adult education as social education and as a professionalized practice. For readers concerned that adult education is a weather vane responding to social, cultural, and economic change forces, their analysis leads to a hopeful conclusion: While adult education is a marginalized enterprise, it can be energized by the field's natural tendencies toward collectivity, flexibility, and diversity.

Johnson-Bailey's Chapter 6 parallels themes in Locke's analysis. She explores the steady and committed participation of African Americans in adult education, surveying available research on the sociopolitical and cultural aspects of this educational movement. In particular, she focuses on African-American involvement in the Harlem Renaissance (1920–1945). Themes emerging from her study include education for assimilation (linked to addressing the Black problem); education for cultural survival (associated with Black efforts to build self-esteem and cultural importance in the context of nation); and education for resistance (focused on minority rights and addressing injustices). For educators and learners who may think adult education is neutral, Johnson-Bailey's article challenges them to interrogate the field's political nature and the ways that modern practice has been exclusionary.

Any reflection on the foundations of adult education ought to include a focus on ethical issues and practices. In Chapter 7, Gordon and Sork consider arguments for and against the development of codes of ethics across professional practices. They compare views of Canadian and U.S. adult educational practitioners regarding the scope and functions of codes of ethics. They survey practitioner encounters with ethical issues and dilemmas, listing frequently cited issues like confidentiality and learner-adult educator relationships. Gordon and Sork's research will have import for reflective practitioners grappling with codes of ethics, attitudes toward them, and their implications for the field of study and practice.

As the selections in this section demonstrate, traditional adult education has been marked by a commitment to education for social purposes. The social history of the field reminds us of a long-standing critical concern with issues of democracy, freedom, social justice, and ethics. Sometimes these issues have been sidelined in instrumental moves to professionalize modern practice. We hope that readers consider the selections in this section to be an appetizer for further engagement with the foundations of adult education.

For Reflection and Discussion

1. Inspired by the theme living and learning for a viable future: the power of adult learning, the UNESCO-sponsored Sixth International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA VI) was held in Bélem do Pará, Brazil, December 1–4, 2009. CONFINTEA VI noted that a significant portion of adult learning and education is deeply rooted in everyday life, local contexts, and grassroots initiatives focused on addressing social, cultural, and environmental challenges (UIL, 2010). Provide some examples of such contemporary adult education from your own knowledge and experience. How does adult education today compare to ways it was constructed in the historical articles in this section?

2. While CONFINTEA VI positioned diversity as a necessity in adult learning and education, does it exacerbate field fragmentation? Are there ways to value diversity and still describe the field as strong, coherent, and organized?

3. How might we address the long-standing divide positioning adult education for social and cultural purposes against adult education as a professionalized practice tied to economic interests? Do social and economic interests have to be in opposition?

4. How might learning from the history of education for Black adults in the United States inform and revitalize more dynamic and inclusive contemporary forms of adult education focused on social justice?

5. How important is it for the field of adult education to have a code of ethics? With the enormous diversity of programs and constituencies that exist, is it even possible or realistic to have a code of ethics?

References

Giroux, H. A. (1996). Is there a place for cultural studies in colleges of education? In H. A. Giroux, C. Lankshear, P. McLaren, & M. Peters (Eds.), Counternarratives: Cultural studies and critical pedagogies in postmodern spaces (pp. 41–58). New York: Routledge.

Giroux, H. A., & McLaren, P. (1988). Teacher education and the politics of democratic reform. In H. A. Giroux (Ed.), Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning (pp. 158–176). New York: Bergin & Garvey.

Lindeman, E. C. (1926/1961). The meaning of adult education. Montreal: Harvest House.

Stubblefield, H. W., & Keane, P. (1994). Adult education in the American experience. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL). (2010). CONFINTEA VI–Sixth international conference on adult education: Final report. Hamburg, Germany: Author.

Chapter 1

For Those Who Need to Be Learners

Eduard C. Lindeman

We need, then, to reintegrate, to synthesize, to bind up together the different forces and influences in our national life. We need a greater courage: seriousness, a greater courage in self-knowledge, a greater unity, and changes in the machinery of our education which leave our religious and political life in their existing incoherence, or even add to it, will not serve our purpose.

—A. E. ZlMMERN

The principle we wish to establish is that the important thing in this connection is an increased demand on the part of all kinds of people for educational facilities, which may roughly be termed non-vocational, since they are concerned really with restoring balance to a man who has, of necessity, developed to a great extent one or other of his characteristics for the purposes of his livelihood or for the satisfaction of his reasonable desires.

—ALBERT MANSBRIDGE

Education conceived as preparation for life locks the learning process within a vicious circle. Youth educated in terms of adult ideas and taught to think of learning as a process which ends when real life begins will make no better use of intelligence than the elders who prescribe the system. Brief and rebellious moments occur when youth sees this fallacy clearly, but alas, the pressure of adult civilization is too great; in the end young people fit into the pattern, succumb to the tradition of their elders—indeed, become elderly-minded before their time. Education within the vicious circle becomes not a joyous enterprise but rather something to be endured because it leads to a satisfying end. But there can be no genuine joy in the end if means are irritating, painful. Generally therefore those who have completed a standardized regimen of education promptly turn their faces in the opposite direction. Humor, but more of pathos lurks in the caricature of the college graduate standing in cap and gown, diploma in hand shouting: Educated, b'gosh! Henceforth, while devoting himself to life he will think of education as a necessary annoyance for succeeding youths. For him, this life for which he has suffered the affliction of learning will come to be a series of dull, uninteresting, degrading capitulations to the stereotyped pattern of his set. Within a single decade he will be out of touch with the world of intelligence, or what is worse, he will still be using the intellectual coins of his college days; he will find difficulty in reading serious books; he will have become inured to the jargon of his particular profession and will affect derision for all highbrows; he will, in short, have become a typical adult who holds the bag of education—the game of learning having long since slipped by him.

Obviously, extension of the quantity of educational facilities cannot break the circle. Once the belief was current that if only education were free to all, intelligence would become the proper tool for managing the affairs of the world. We have gone even further and have made certain levels of education compulsory. But the result has been disappointing; we have succeeded merely in formalizing, mechanizing, educational processes. The spirit and meaning of education cannot be enhanced by addition, by the easy method of giving the same dose to more individuals. If learning is to be revivified, quickened so as to become once more an adventure, we shall have need of new concepts, new motives, new methods; we shall need to experiment with the qualitative aspects of education.

A fresh hope is astir. From many quarters comes the call to a new kind of education with its initial assumption affirming that education is life—not a mere preparation for an unknown kind of future living. Consequently all static concepts of education which relegate the learning process to the period of youth are abandoned. The whole of life is learning, therefore education can have no endings. This new venture is called adult education—not because it is confined to adults but because adulthood, maturity, defines its limits. The concept is inclusive. The fact that manual workers of Great Britain and farmers of Denmark have conducted the initial experiments which now inspire us does not imply that adult education is designed solely for these classes. No one, probably, needs adult education so much as the college graduate for it is he who makes the most doubtful assumptions concerning the function of learning.

Secondly, education conceived as a process coterminous with life revolves about non-vocational ideals. In this world of specialists everyone will of necessity learn to do his work, and if education of any variety can assist in this and in the further end of helping the worker to see the meaning of his labor, it will be education of high order. But adult education more accurately defined begins where vocational education leaves off. Its purpose is to put meaning into the whole of life. Workers, those who perform essential services, will naturally discover more values in continuing education than will those for whom all knowledge is merely decorative or conversational. The possibilities of enriching the activities of labor itself grow less for all workers who manipulate automatic machines. If the good life, the life interfused with meaning and with joy, is to come to these, opportunities for expressing more of the total personality than is called forth by machines will be needed. Their lives will be quickened into creative activities in proportion as they learn to make fruitful use of leisure.

Thirdly, the approach to adult education will be via the route of situations, not subjects. Our academic system has grown in reverse order: subjects and teachers constitute the starting-point; students are secondary. In conventional education the student is required to adjust himself to an established curriculum; in adult education the curriculum is built around the student's needs and interests. Every adult person finds himself in specific situations with respect to his work, his recreation, his family-life, his community-life, et cetera—situations which call for adjustments. Adult education begins at this point. Subject-matter is brought into the situation, is put to work, when needed. Texts and teachers play a new and secondary role in this type of education; they must give way to the primary importance of the learner. (Indeed, as we shall see later, the teacher of adults becomes also a learner.) The situation-approach to education means that the learning process is at the outset given a setting of reality. Intelligence performs its function in relation to actualities, not abstractions.

In the fourth place, the resource of highest value in adult education is the learner's experience. If education is life, then life is also education. Too much of learning consists of vicarious substitution of someone else's experience and knowledge. Psychology is teaching us, however, that we learn what we do, and that therefore all genuine education will keep doing and thinking together. Life becomes rational, meaningful, as we learn to be intelligent about the things we do and the things that happen to us. If we lived sensibly, we should all discover that the attractions of experience increase as we grow older. Correspondingly, we should find cumulative joys in searching out the reasonable meaning of the events in which we play parts. In teaching children it may be necessary to anticipate objective experience by uses of imagination but adult experience is already there waiting to be appropriated. Experience is the adult learner's living textbook.

Authoritative teaching, examinations which preclude original thinking, rigid pedagogical formula—all of these have no place in adult education. Friends educating each other, says Yeaxlee, and perhaps Walt Whitman saw accurately with his fervent democratic vision what the new educational experiment implied when he wrote: Learn from the simple—teach the wise. Small groups of aspiring adults who desire to keep their minds fresh and vigorous; who begin to learn by confronting pertinent situations; who dig down into the reservoirs of their experience before resorting to texts and secondary facts; who are led in the discussion by teachers who are also searchers after wisdom and not oracles: this constitutes the setting for adult education, the modern quest for life's meaning.

But where does one search for life's meaning? If adult education is not to fall into the pitfalls which have vulgarized public education, caution must be exercised in striving for answers to this query. For example, once the assumption is made that human nature is uniform, common and static—that all human beings will find meaning in identical goals, ends or aims—the standardizing process begins: teachers are trained according to orthodox and regulated methods; they teach prescribed subjects to large classes of children who must all pass the same examination; in short, if we accept the standard of uniformity, it follows that we expect, e.g., mathematics, to mean as much to one student as to another. Teaching methods which proceed from this assumption must necessarily become autocratic; if we assume that all values and meanings apply equally to all persons, we may then justify ourselves in using a forcing-method of teaching. On the other hand, if we take for granted that human nature is varied, changing and fluid, we will know that life's meanings are conditioned by the individual. We will then entertain a new respect for personality.

Since the individual personality is not before us we are driven to generalization. In what areas do most people appear to find life's meaning? We have only one pragmatic guide: meaning must reside in the things for which people strive, the goals which they set for themselves, their wants, needs, desires and wishes. Even here our criterion is applicable only to those whose lives are already dedicated to aspirations and ambitions which belong to the higher levels of human achievement. The adult able to break the habits of slovenly mentality and willing to devote himself seriously to study when study no longer holds forth the lure of pecuniary gain is, one must admit, a personality in whom many negative aims and desires have already been eliminated. Under examination, and viewed from the standpoint of adult education, such personalities seem to want among other things, intelligence, power, self-expression, freedom, creativity, appreciation, enjoyment, fellowship. Or, stated in terms of the Greek ideal, they are searchers after the good life. They want to count for something; they want their experiences to be vivid and meaningful; they want their talents to be utilized; they want to know beauty and joy; and they want all of these realizations of their total personalities to be shared in communities of fellowship. Briefly they want to improve themselves; this is their realistic and primary aim. But they want also to change the social order so that vital personalities will be creating a new environment in which their aspirations may be properly expressed.

Chapter 2

The Negro in America

Alain Locke

Introduction

One-tenth of the population of these United States is black, brown or yellow, of Negro descent and remotely of African derivation, and, according to the relative rates of population growth, this racial ratio promises to remain nearly constant indefinitely. To visualize this ratio, it has been aptly suggested that we think of the Negro as America's tenth man. But the Negro's true significance only becomes evident when to this numerical importance we add that which he has always had as a national issue and which he still has as a present-day minority problem. As the bone of contention in the slavery controversy, the ward of democracy throughout the Reconstruction, and the problem of interracial adjustment in the contemporary social order, the Negro has been by some irony of fate throughout American history the human crux of our practical problems of political and social democracy.

The importance of being a problem, however, is a handicapping, not a stimulating, importance, and the black minority would gladly be relieved of it. Yet not until social justice and consistent democracy are worked out in America will the Negro as America's most chronic social problem cease to have an unnatural and disproportionate prominence. This summary and outline reading course are designed to help the reader interested in the problem of the Negro minority achieve historical perspective, social insight and progressive understanding with respect to it, and, equally important, to lead him to some acquaintance with the human elements and achievements of the people behind the problem.

If ever the story of the American Negro can be divorced from the controversial plane of the race problem—and some day it will—the story will then be told and appreciated as one of the impressive epics of human history. For, in the final analysis, it is a great folk-epic. In order that the reader may have panoramic perspective, let us review the main stages of this racial epic in its tragic, but momentous and inspiring three-hundred-year course through the decades of American history. We review it not solely to gratify historical curiosity or to evoke sentimental interest, but because the one safe intellectual approach to a social problem is through a sound historical perspective. Since this, too, is a most effective cure for prejudice and social misunderstanding, the wide-scale cultivation of such an approach seems obviously one of the outstanding practical hopes of the Negro and one of the great progressive needs of democracy.

To comprehend the Negro in America one must trace his path for seven or eight human generations through a long inferno of slavery and a yet unfinished social purgatory of testing struggle and development. The black man's Odyssey began with the terrific toll of a wholesale transplanting from Africa, rapidly succeeded by burdensome, yet transforming, tasks. The Negro endured titanic toil, the complete transformation of his ways of life, and the stress of an unplanned, begrudged, but quite redeeming, assimilation of the white man's civilization and religion. Patience, adaptability, loyalty and smiling humility gave him the subtle victory of survival against great odds; and the first act of slavery climaxed with the welding of patriarchal ties between master and slave.

But the tragic second act was already pushing the first off the historical scene. Slavery deepens and spreads; the black victim must descend to its abysses in the Lower South, nurturing almost hopelessly, but for religion, the underground hope of freedom. And then, as the vexing question of human property begins to divide the political and legal councils of the nation, the fugitive slave sets fire to the tinder of abolitionism and moral reaction, and suddenly out of the first great crisis comes the Civil War and slave emancipation.

But after the first blind leap of the black masses into the hopeful chaos and opportunities of freedom, Negro life was destined to drag through the Reconstruction and its heavy series of ordeals. First there was the difficult lesson of self-maintenance, clumsily but ploddingly learned; then the still heavier task of education, feverishly and unevenly achieved; then confusion and setback, patiently endured, under the storm of Reconstruction reaction and mob violence; then a slow, dogged retreat from serfdom and partial defeat on the tenant farms to the labor marts of the towns and cities; more patient endurance of the loss of the newly won franchise and the civil rights of full citizenship; and eventually a new mass concentration and survival in the city's black ghettos, under steady odds of economic discrimination and segregation.

Finally, with another war, another crisis and its new opportunities came. This time it was the surge forward into the World War's rapid expansion of life and labor, and a consequent enlargement of life, economic and cultural, in the new centers. But the anticipated rewards of the Negro's patriotic response to the idealism of the War to Save Democracy were not measurably realized and, spurred by the bitter disillusionments of post-war indifference, there came that desperate intensification of the Negro's race consciousness and attempt at the recovery of group morale through a racialist program of self-help and self-determination which has been the outstanding development in Negro life during this generation. With this phase came the beginnings of independent economic enterprise, a growing disposition for political action and the recovery of civil rights and political participation; and finally on the horizon a mounting wave of new social and economic realism. It is with this new temper and attitude that the Negro confronts the present crisis, with its crossroads dilemma of either slow progress by patient advance and interracial cooperation or of problematic but tempting quick progress through joining issues with the forces of radical proletarian reform. This is the point at which we contemporary spectators stand, survey and wonder. Certainly the past of the Negro in America has been an epical adventure, pursued against great odds and opposition, but favored, almost providentially at critical times, by saving alliances with the forces of moral and social liberalism, all combining to achieve a gradually ascending scale of achievement and progress.

On the other side, the story is equally dramatic if read in forward-looking perspective. It is the long Odyssey of the white mind, wandering through the mazes of self-made dilemmas, in search of a way out into the consistent practice of democracy.

Out of the Civil War, inevitable consequence of the deepening hold of slavery, emancipation came as a strategic blow at the seceded South; half a national economy had to be overturned and the freed Negro masses became the helpless, burdensome wards of the Federal government. Meshed in with the aftermath of war and slavery came then a conflicting flow and ebb of forces, now favorable, now unfavorable, to the interests of the Negro.

In 1895, however, a leader in black reconstruction caught the approval of the South and the favor of Northern captains of industry by an appeal for advancing the South through improving the industrial and economic condition of the Negro. There followed a great revival of philanthropic interest and aid in the education of the Negro; but along with it a very prevalent and possibly dangerous acceptance of Booker Washington's strategic compromise of bi-racialism: In all things vital and economic, we can be one as the hand, while in things social we can be separate as the fingers. There followed a decade and more of common, constructive, enthusiastic effort to truss up the sagging economy of the rural Southern Negro, but the odds of a bad system of land tenant farming, an unscientific type of agriculture, continued exploitation and the inroads of the growing industrialization of the South all combined to cause a steady trek of the Negro population from the land toward the cities. This caused or coincided with another reaction of Southern opinion and a flare of race riots and increased racial tension, bridged only at a desperate moment in 1919 by the adoption of the new machinery of local interracial commissions to allay popular antagonism and bring the better elements of both races together in common counsel and constructive community effort.

To this movement we owe the emergence of the new liberal South. But the large-scale migration of Negroes from the South to Northern centers shortly afterward led to increased friction in these communities, and merely shifted the areas and issues of racial tension. In fact, a problem conventionally regarded as sectional suddenly and unmistakably became national, and a new phase of the race problem began. We still confront a seriously divided white mind, no longer split sectionally, but divided now into nation-wide liberal and reactionary camps. A liberal element in the South, small but influential, has recanted the traditional antagonisms and code of the old régime, and in liberal circles, North and South, an enlightened minority is showing an increased willingness to welcome Negro advance, to join cooperatively with Negro leadership in programs of racial and community improvement, and to extend recognition and reciprocity to the advance-guard elements of Negro life. Over against this, however, is a white mass mind still reactionary and strongly racial; this time largely over labor rivalry and for economic reasons. In fact, segregation policies and labor discrimination have now become the crucial practical issues in the contemporary racial situation. And although this reactionary body of opinion is not as militant as the older traditional opposition, its wide distribution, North and South, is a threatening aspect in the present and near future.

These are but highlights in the history of the shifting attitudes of the white majority mind, as it has grappled and fumbled, relaxed and grown tense again, in reaction to the steadily changing situations of the steadily advancing black minority.

Students of the question are generally agreed that the effect of the Negro's presence in this country has been about as marked as the admittedly great and transforming influence of America upon the Negro. There is this double strand running through the whole scheme of the American race problem, and the student should bear constantly in mind the parallelism by which every white move has its black counterpart, every black stitch, its white counter-stitch. Whenever we think of the situation as a minority problem, we must instantly think of it also in its other aspect as a majority problem. This is factual warrant for preferring to regard the dilemmas and difficulties of this minority-majority interaction as the American race problem rather than as the Negro problem. In every historical crisis its consequences have turned out to be just as national as they have been racial; and it should be obvious that from no one side of the equation alone can its progressive solution be carried forward.

The Present-Day Problem (circa 1933)

The transformation of the Negro during the last two decades is founded on two motives, one physical, the other, spiritual. Migration has been the physical mainspring of the change, and a new spirit of race consciousness and solidarity has been the regenerating spiritual force. Out of the combination has come both a New Negro, and a new frontage of the Negro on American life.

All through his history since emancipation, the Negro has been responding to unfavorable conditions by migration, but this last series of mass movements has been upon an unprecedented scale. It had begun before the outbreak of the World War, but was heavily increased by the demands of industry during the war for the replacement of the European immigrant labor supply. This has been estimated as a movement northward of over a million and a half of the Negro population. But to this must be added that phase of the Negro migration which is not inter-sectional between North and South, but from the rural to the urban centers within comparatively short range. Two results are outstanding, the rapid urbanization of the Negro, a serious shift in the areas feeling the stresses of race contacts and their difficulties, a decided extension of new phases of the race situation to cities of the North and Mid-West, and a closer alignment of the race issue with the problems of labor competition and economic adjustment.

It has already been pointed out that a decided increase in race tension and a rapid spread of policies of segregation have accompanied this mass movement. But the movement has had its positive gains; large masses of the Negro population have been subjected to the galvanizing shocks of change and have thus been stimulated to rapid progress. Because of the new concentrations in city areas, there has been a marked heightening of the sense of group solidarity and common interests. This will prove to be the most potential and powerful factor in the whole situation, if ever the exigencies of Negro life should demand large-scale mass action. And if the present heavy social and economic pressure on the Negro should increase or even be maintained, such demands will undoubtedly arise. There have also been great drawbacks in this urban movement, chiefly the unfavorable conditions in the almost ghetto-like city centers where so many of the migrant masses have been forced to congregate, and the precarious marginal position of the Negro on the fringe of the labor market, faced at present, as he is, by comparative indifference or hostility from the ranks of organized white labor.

Though fraught with danger, this is an entirely new alignment, likely within half a generation to change the whole basic aspect of the race question. There is a school of younger Negro thought which, viewing the increasing emphasis of the situation upon the economic condition of the Negro masses, regards the race question as likely to resolve itself into the issues of the economic class struggle and proletarian radicalism. There is a main obstacle, however, for the present, in the conservative temper of social thinking now prevalent among Negroes, although in very recent years there are increasing signs of a slow drift toward the spirit and doctrines of social radicalism. Certainly the only likely factors in a possible shift of any large section of the Negro masses in the direction of radical social action would be those of extreme pressure from intolerable mass conditions in the city areas or desperate reaction in the face of continued exclusion from the ranks and opportunities of progressive and organized white labor.

A feature of great importance, however, is the swing of the race situation in the South toward this same condition of increasing economic discrimination and labor antagonism. This is a direct result of the recent industrialization of the South and the simultaneous shift of the Negro population to city and town centers. At first the northward migration of the Negro had a favorable influence on the Southern situation. There was a greater appreciation of the Negro as an economic asset and as a potential labor supply. Considerable improvement followed in the policy of Southern communities, resulting in the improvement of school and civic facilities for Negroes in the South. But in spite of heavy increases in state expenditure for public school facilities for Negroes in the South, still more equitable division of the public school funds is obviously necessary, since with all this rapid improvement only 69 per cent of the Negro children of school age are enrolled and the general per capita expenditure averages for the whole South only one-third of the average expenditure for white children, with of course many communities falling considerably below this general average.

When all favorable progress has been taken into account, therefore, there is still much injustice to be remedied: the persistence of lynching and mob-terrorism, the increasing tension and competition of white and Negro unskilled and semi-skilled labor, the crowding of the Negro out of the higher ranks of labor, some of which he occupied earlier in the century, the continuation of the traditional policies of segregation in public, civic and educational activities, the inequitable distribution of the Negro share in public tax funds for schools and civic improvements, and continued lack of respect for the advancing class of Negroes, except from the few enlightened liberal elements in the Southern communities.

Summarizing the whole situation, we may see that although the Negro has made amazingly rapid gains in the last few years, the race situation in both the North and the South is intensified, indeed partly because of these gains. For mass opinion among whites still interprets this rapid advance as social and economic encroachment, and seldom looks at it in its deeper constructive aspect of common advance and the lifting of the level of civilization. So, unless liberal white opinion in both sections, in cooperation with intelligent Negro leadership, can rapidly widen opportunities and lessen artificial handicaps, the mass momentum of Negro advance must produce serious race conflict. Short of the bitter extremities of ruthless economic conflict or resolution of the mass feud between black and white through the discovery of common proletarian interests, there lies one intermediate way of realistic hope, since, after all, America has kept herself an institutional democracy in spite of her treatment of the Negro. The Negro, though still heavily disfranchised, is potentially a citizen with the corrective power of the ballot. Two things encourage this hope: the revival of the Negro's interest in reclaiming the ballot along with political independence in its use, and the fact that by his recent migrations to border states, he has acquired unexpectedly considerable re-enfranchisement and latent political power. This, intelligently used, might remove enough of the restrictions to his progress to forestall serious race conflict, and might lead to the steady progressive adjustment so desirable and so desired by all but the extreme social reactionaries and the extreme social radicals.

The Negro's Americanism

A solution of the race problem within the institutional framework and the traditional ideals of American democracy would be most congenial and welcome to the Negro, for on the whole his Americanism is unquestioned and unquestioning. Both by temperament and group policy, the Negro has been conformist throughout his history in this country. His values, his ideals, his objectives, have been peculiarly and unreservedly American. Racialism has rarely, if ever, been a direct mood for the Negro, but only an enforced counter-attitude in the face of proscription and discrimination. And, even then, this racialism has never set up separate or different values or loyalties, but has only been a practical social device to secure on a separate basis and by another route the common values and ends which prejudice more directly denied or curtailed. Except for superficial physical dissimilarities, by and large, the Negro would be indistinguishably American, and it is unlikely that a foreign observer would believe himself in the presence of a different race. What overtones of emotional difference there are, in fair comparison with the mass similarities, would seem negligible, making the prevalent social sense of difference all the more contrary to reason and ironical. On historical, psychological and cultural grounds, the Negro minority is entitled to the fullest share in American civilization, and has less real impediments and separatist tendencies than any other of the many component minority elements in America.

Chapter 3

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Chapter 2

Paulo Freire

A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.

The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to fill the students with the contents of his narration—contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.

The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Pará is Belém. The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of capital in the affirmation the capital of Pará is Belém, that is, what Belém means for Pará and what Pará means for Brazil.

Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated account. Worse yet, it turns them into containers, into receptacles to be filled by the teachers. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the banking concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher's existence—but unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.

The raison d'être of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:

a. the teacher teaches and the students are taught;

b. the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;

c. the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;

d. the teacher talks and the students listen—meekly;

e. the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;

f. the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;

g. the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;

h. the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;

i. the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;

j. the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the student's creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their humanitarianism to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.

Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them, (de Beauvoir, 1963, p. 34) for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this the oppressors use the banking concept of education in conjunction with a paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of welfare recipients. They are treated as individual cases, as marginal persons who deviate from the general configuration of a good, organized and just society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society which must therefore adjust these incompetent and lazy folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be integrated, incorporated into the healthy society that they have forsaken.

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not marginals, are not living outside society. They have always been 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 conscientização.

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.

Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly (for there are innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are serving only to dehumanize), fail to perceive that the deposits themselves contain contradictions about reality. But sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate reality. They may discover through existential experience that their present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human. They may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation. If men and women are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation.

But the humanist revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibility to materialize. From the outset, her efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in people and their creative power. To achieve this, they must be partners of the students in their relations with them.

The banking concept does not admit to such partnership—and necessarily so. To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to exchange the role of depositor, prescriber, domesticator, for the role of student among students would be to undermine the power of oppression and serve the cause of liberation.

Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator. In this view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty mind passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside. For example, my desk, my books, my coffee cup, all the objects before me—as bits of the world which surround me—would be inside me, exactly as I am inside my study right now. This view makes no distinction between being accessible to consciousness and entering consciousness. The distinction, however, is essential: the objects which surround me are simply accessible to my consciousness, not located within it. I am aware of them, but they are not inside me.

It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educator's role is to regulate the way the world enters into the students. The teacher's task is to organize a process which already occurs spontaneously, to fill the students by making deposits of information which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge.¹ And since people receive the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better fit for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited for the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created and how little they question it.

The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant majority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their own purposes), the more easily the minority can continue to prescribe. The theory and practice of banking education serve this end quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements,² the methods for evaluating knowledge, the distance between the teacher and the taught, the criteria for promotion: everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate thinking.

The bank-clerk educator does not realize that there is no true security in his hypertrophied role, that one must seek to live with others in solidarity. One cannot impose oneself, nor even merely co-exist with one's students. Solidarity requires true communication, and the concept by which such an educator is guided fears and proscribes communication.

Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher's thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students' thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.

Because banking education begins with a false understanding of men and women as objects, it cannot promote the development of what Fromm calls biophily, but instead produces its opposite: necrophily.

While life is characterized by growth in a structured functional manner, the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things…. Memory, rather than experience; having, rather than being, is what counts. The necrophilous person can relate to an object—a flower or a person—only if he possesses it; 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. (Fromm, 1966, p. 41)

Oppression—overwhelming control—is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.

When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find themselves unable to use their faculties, people suffer. This suffering due to impotence is rooted in the very fact that the human has been disturbed (Fromm, 1966, p. 31). But the inability to act which causes people's anguish also causes them to reject their impotence, by attempting

….to restore [their] capacity to act. But can [they], and how? One way is to submit to and identify with a person or group having power. By this symbolic participation in another person's life, (men have] the illusion of acting, when in reality [they] only submit to and become a part of those who act. (Fromm, 1966, p. 31)

Populist manifestations perhaps best exemplify this type of behavior by the oppressed, who, by identifying with charismatic leaders, come to feel that they themselves are active and effective. The rebellion they express as they emerge in the historical process is motivated by that desire to act effectively. The dominant elites consider the remedy to be more domination and repression, carried out in the name of freedom, order, and social peace (that is, the peace of the elites). Thus they can condemn—logically, from their point of view—the violence of a strike by workers and [can] call upon the state in the same breath to use violence in putting down the strike (Niebuhr, 1960, p. 130).

Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. This accusation is not made in the naïve hope that the dominant elites will thereby simply abandon the practice. Its