Tag: literacy

We don’t trust the poor (and they don’t trust themselves): Further reflections on Freire

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I was happy to see the lively discussion in the comments section after my last blog about literacy, subversion, and Paulo Freire, but realized from several people’s responses that some of what I am trying to communicate has been misunderstood. Some people seemed to think that I am throwing out everything I have previously talked about on this blog (especially Jesus) in order to focus exclusively on education as the answer for all problems faced by humankind. I want to clarify that this is not the case.

I am not saying that learning to read is an end in itself, or the key to human liberation. What I am saying is that learning to read is a means of nurturing critical thought, which is the starting place for human liberation. Many of us in the West have had minimal, if any, contact with illiterate people. Now that I live in a community where the vast majority of people cannot read, I recognize how much I have taken for granted the basic problem-solving and critical thinking skills that my education cultivated in me. Being able to read and write was the beginning of being able to learn about my world, to encounter new ideas, and to develop my sense of self as I expressed and explored my own thoughts, experiences, and opinions. So much of my faith has been mediated to me through the written word. Nearly all of my ideas about the things in the world that I have not seen for myself—economies, food systems, histories of entire societies, foreign countries and the ways that other cultures have interacted with my own—have come from books. It was through the written word that I learned about my body, how to care for it, how to understand what was happening when I got sick or caught an infection, and how to prevent or treat those problems when they occurred. It was through the written word that I learned about nutrition, about child psychology, about democracy. It was through the written word that I became employable. It was largely through the written word that I learned about Jesus.

Now imagine for a moment that you are not able to read your own scriptures. You are not able to read a newspaper. You are not able to look up information on WebMD, or to even read the prescription that a doctor gives you. You are not able to open bank account, to enroll your child in school, or to even write down the address of a friend or an office you want to visit. You rely completely on the local mullah or the rumors going around your neighborhood or the folklore of your grandparents to mediate the world to you.

Imagine how small that world will be; how your ignorance will prevent you from encountering any new ideas, from questioning anything you are told, or from seeking to change any of the destructive or unjust circumstances you find yourself in. Without a means of acquiring any information for yourself, and without the critical thinking skills to investigate the world and to form your own opinions about it, how will you ever know that there is a different way to live than the way that you and all the people you know are living right now? How will you begin to hope for anything?

That is the narrow, constricted world of many of my neighbors. That is why I think it is important for them to learn how to read: not so that I can simply deposit my worldview into their minds like empty containers, but so that I can empower them to think for themselves and have a chance of discovering for themselves the possibility of wholeness in their lives. If they are empowered to think critically and to consider new ideas, then we can dialogue together, learn from each other, and be a community that fosters spiritual, intellectual, and emotional growth. Dialogue will be something we engage in together, imagining new possibilities and shaping one another as equals.

It will take time, and I don’t know where that path of dialogue in community will lead, because I will not be the one controlling it. But I know that the path from ignorance to knowledge, from worthlessness to dignity, from blindness to sight—that path is the path to freedom. And it is only from a place of freedom that human beings are able to love. I believe God wants humans to be free agents capable of choosing love, rather than mindless followers who are motivated by ignorance or fear.

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A few nights ago we attended a meeting centered around promoting literacy in India. An expert in the field was gave a lecture about the dismal failure of the education system to teach students how to read simple sentences or to recognize numbers 10-99 after several years of schooling, and then outlined the literacy curriculum she has designed to take Hindi-speaking children and adults from illiteracy to being able to read a newspaper in the space of approximately a month (A. and I have been trialing this curriculum in our slum with encouraging results). As soon as the lecture was over, a microphone was passed around the room and one dignified personage after another began pontificating about the reasons why the poor don’t want to learn, or aren’t learning. Each person was well-dressed and most of them were addressing the group in English, a conspicuous marker of education and status. Most of them were speaking authoritatively about the poor based on limited experience interacting with the people who worked in their homes as servants. We were sitting in an air-conditioned, wood-paneled room drinking chilled water from plastic bottles. Meanwhile, back in our slum (and perhaps the slums in which their servants live) the power was out and everyone was giving up on the idea of being able to sleep in the stuffy darkness with no air movement and temperatures still hovering above 90 degrees.

As is often the case with such meetings, well-intentioned wealthy people had congregated to applaud each others commitment to social causes and to take shots in the dark about to help the poor without consulting any actual poor people at all. Here we were debating the causes of illiteracy and the way forward, but there was not a single illiterate person in our midst, much less someone who could speak from experience about how they personally had managed to become literate in spite of poverty and the barriers it created. To me, this demonstrates a lack of trust in the poor; an assumption that they would have nothing of value to contribute to our discussion.

Of course, we were at this fancy reception, too, enjoying the air-conditioning and lavish food: wealthy foreigners among the wealthy. Yes, A. and I would go home to the sweaty power outage in the slum at the end of the night, and step over the kids from downstairs who fell asleep in front of our doorway trying to take advantage of any chance breeze that might sweep across the roof. We would breathe a sigh of relief in the unscripted familiarity of “home” after so much awkward social mixing. But the point is that we were invited to this elite gathering that our neighbors would have never been included in. We still move easily between the worlds of the downtrodden and the powerful because although we may have committed ourselves to the cause of the oppressed, we are not the oppressed. And like the elite philanthropists at the literacy meeting, I also struggle with a lack of trust of the poor—even though I have committed myself to my neighbors in many other ways. It would be bad form, bad development, to voice it, but sometimes we agree with our neighbors’ assessment of themselves: “You’re right—you may not be able to do this. It would be a lot easier if I just did it for you. Listen to my advice. Adopt my opinion. Listen to my idea. Become more like me.” We talk about empowerment, but deep down we’re afraid that our neighbors are just going to screw it all up. Their thinking is so narrow, their self-esteem is so low, their dreams are so small.

The poor carry with them the “deformities” of having been oppressed. Often their bodies have not fully developed because of malnutrition. Their minds have not fully developed because in addition to lacking food they have lacked opportunities for learning as well. Their sense of self has not fully developed because they have always been told that they are small, unimportant, and incapable. “Just let us do it for you, you can’t do anything to help yourself,” so many people have communicated to them when they’ve come in to “help.” “No need to think about creative solutions, we have the answer for you, because we are the ones who know,” others have insinuated when they come in with their ready-made programs, assuming complete ignorance and passivity on the part of the poor and never stopping to ask for input or participation. Because of all these factors working against them, poor people often do lack the confidence and the skills to help themselves, and they adopt the passive, dependent role assigned to them. Others’ lack of confidence in them inspires a lack of trust in themselves. The poor have been robbed of the very tools they would need to break free of this cycle: critical thinking to re-imagine themselves and their world, and to realization that their unjust situation “is not a closed world from which there is no exit,” but rather “a limiting situation which they can transform.” This can sometimes make our interactions with poor people extremely frustrating.

We who have enjoyed life’s advantages, on the other hand, are able to problem solve and plan ahead and think critically. We’re well-spoken and capable. But we carry with us the “deformities” of our background, too. One of these is our misconception that we are the ones who know… meaning that they are the ones who don’t know; they are lesser and can’t be entrusted with such an important and difficult task as transforming their lives! We need to be disabused of the idea of our superiority and independence so that we can become more fully human ourselves, by acknowledging our interdependence with others and allowing ourselves to be humbled and changed by our fellow human beings in community. If we want to acknowledge our neighbors’ full humanity and their innate human vocation alongside us as “co-creators” in the world, then we must be willing to work patiently alongside each other.

 

Source: New feed

Conscientização 

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n. Critical consciousness. Portuguese origin.
Recently, a friend of ours who was passing through introduced us to the writings of Paulo Freire. Freire is a Brazilian academic who is well-renowned for his alternative education methods, but he’s not your typical university professor—Freire’s adult literacy campaigns in Brazil landed him in jail for over two months and then political exile for several years after that. Since we just began teaching literacy to adults and children in our slum three weeks ago, we probably couldn’t have begun reading his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed at a more appropriate time. His theories concern a lot more than how to teach peasants how to read. They have to do with empowering the oppressed in society to retake their rightful place as full human beings—a task which involves no small amount of social upheaval. Freire says that the true purpose of education should be the process of making the oppressed conscious of their own identity as human beings, conscious of the unjust situation they are in, and conscious of their power to change it. He writes about education as a process of human liberation; a “subversive force” which helps individuals to reclaim their humanity after they have lost it by either dehumanizing others or by being objectified and controlled by others. The bottom line is the pursuit of wholeness for everybody, oppressed and oppressors alike.

In our slum, we see this need for wholeness, and we see the link between illiteracy and oppression. Not being able to fill out a form, to read a prescription, or even to recognize your own name makes you vulnerable to extortion and deceit. It makes it impossible for you to claim your rights (if you can figure out what they are in the first place). It means that you’ll live in unquestioning fear of the police, and bribe them to do what they’re already paid to do, or to refrain from doing what is illegal for them to do. It also means that you’ll have to pay thousands or rupees in “baksheesh” to doctors, nurses, and even cleaning people in order to get a “free” surgery at a government hospital, without ever raising your voice in protest, lest the powerful people get angry and refuse to treat you at all.

This same sense of powerlessness, engendered by lack of education, is a big reason why so many of the skinny, malnourished children we know work long hours at tedious manual jobs polishing furniture in factories owned by fat, wealthy owners who enjoy big profit margins from exporting the finished product. These owners call the expendable, underpaid laborers who create their wealth “dirty” and “cheap”, looking down on them for their ignorance and low station in society.

Meanwhile, the illiterate widows we know travel on foot from their bamboo and plastic shacks to the flashy apartments of the wealthy to wash dishes and clean floors for a few cents a day, knowing that they can’t afford to ask for a fair wage because so many other, more desperate women from the villages are willing to take their places at even lower pay. Their employers give them bonuses, food, or hand-me-down clothes at holidays and imagine themselves to be generous benefactors; the domestic helpers gratefully accept this false charity because they consider themselves helpless and unimportant, and they count themselves fortunate to have attached themselves to such important people who sometimes, on a whim, toss them a bone. In all of these situations, the rich consider themselves divinely ordained to privilege and power over others while the poor consider themselves powerless dependents. Everyone involved ends up with a distorted view of themselves, and no one’s humanity is left in tact.

Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I love the connections between Freire’s concept of education as human liberation and Jesus’ teachings about the role of the oppressed in the Kingdom of God. The book sheds light on what Jesus the servant-King meant when he declared that it is the poor to whom the kingdom belongs: it belongs to the poor because they are the only ones capable of ushering it in through the love and radical forgiveness of their oppressors. Freire writes that “the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity… become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.” The special mission of the oppressed throughout history is to “liberate themselves and their oppressors as well” because those “who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.” The power that springs from weakness is love, and it is exemplified by Jesus in his reliance on forgiveness rather than vengeance to overcome the world.

So the point of marginalized people learning to read isn’t just to open up job opportunities, although literacy does do that. The point is to change the way that the poor perceive themselves. Education should be a process through which “each man wins back his right to say his own word, to name the world.” It should be a process through which the poor begin to think critically about reality instead of just accepting whatever interpretation of reality has been handed on to them from someone else; a growing realization that they, too, are “creators of culture, and that all their work can be creative. ‘I work, and working I transform the world.’” The point of teaching literacy is to help the oppressed recognize the transformative power within themselves.

*All quotes are taken from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire, 1970

The wind is blowing

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The hot season has begun–which means mangos, afternoon naps, kulfi (a kind of traditional Indian ice cream), and of course, sweltering heat. But we were surprised to learn a few days ago that the hot season in this part of India also involves occasional dust storms. I was home alone when the last one began: the relief of temporary cloud cover and the welcome, unexpected, light rain quickly turned more sinister as the wind picked up speed, thrashing trees around and beginning to lift old tires and plastic tarps off of our neighbors’ roofs. I stood in our doorway and watched as the whole landscape suddenly went red, as though we were on Mars. I shut the door against the sideways stream of rain and grit, but a few minutes later the mud-spitting wind actually lifted off a piece of our roof and carried it away! As soon as I saw daylight expanding overhead, I ran downstairs to take cover in our landlord’s room, thinking that the whole roof might be peeling back. When my husband and my presence of mind returned a couple of minutes later, we went back upstairs to salvage books, guitar, and clothes from getting soaked. I was offended after the storm when we started the work of trying to clean up the mess and a neighbor who came up to survey the damage started laughing–offended, that is, until I looked next door and realized that her roof had been split open, too! Everyone just took the storm in stride, and within a few hours most people had already climbed onto the roofs of their homes and repaired the damage. A couple of the bamboo and plastic shacks in the community would have to be rebuild from the ground up, but even this seemed to be casually accepted. The missing piece of our roof, it turned out, had flown into our neighbors’ courtyard behind us and cracked one of the boards of their wooden bed, and a couple of people had been struck by falling bricks from other houses, but fortunately no one had been killed. People here have learned to live with what they can’t control; they have a no-nonsense way of recovering from almost anything and getting on with life. When the temperature began its rapid ascent, we responded first by buying a matka, a traditional clay water pot which is just porous enough to allow water to slowly leak through and evaporate, keeping the water inside cool. For the first few days, we were dipping refreshingly cold water out of the matka and joking to our neighbors that it was a like a cheap fridge that didn’t even need electricity. Then the weather got a bit hotter and the water in the matka went warm. This week, temperatures have climbed high enough that by midday, our ceiling fan is churning down hot wind from our thin roof, and even with the windows and door open, we can sit in the shade and sweat through our clothes in a matter of minutes. Since temperatures reached 107 degrees fahrenheit a few days ago, we decided to opt for a “desert cooler” and spent yesterday afternoon rearranging our room to accommodate the new appliance: a big, aluminum box with a fan inside and a water pump to wet down panels of dried grass from which water will evaporate and be sucked into the blades to pump out a stream of cool air in whichever direction the cooler is facing. A.’s self-taught electrician skills came in handy for rigging up a way to wire the cooler into our existing electrical board and run wires across the ceiling so that the stream of slightly-damp, cool air blows directly across our bed at night. That gives me hope that I’ll be able to do more over the next couple of months than just laying around in a sweaty daze.

In spite of the mounting heat, there have been a couple of exciting things going on around here lately. The first sign of hope is that our widowed neighbor, whose husband died suddenly a couple of months back, has finally found a job! We had been helping her in a lengthy job search which had been fruitless and discouraging up until now, especially since she and her three young daughters had been struggling to eat even once a day throughout those long weeks. We were encouraged to see other poor neighbors generously sharing food with them even though there was very little to go around, but we also struggled to know our own role in helping without either creating unhealthy dependence or discouraging the rest of the community from being involved. The entire process was a cruel reminder: the poverty of the poor is often what keeps them poor; cyclical, exponential disadvantages piling on top of one another. It was hard to get our neighbor a job because she looked so poor. She looked so poor because she didn’t have a job. Wealthy prospective employers would look at her and say, “She looks too weak to do the work.” But she does harder work than cleaning floors when she’s wandering around the city on foot looking for work! I wanted to say. Or they would say, “You need to dress nicely if you’re going to work here. We like cleanliness.” But the reason that even her best suit is old and has holes in it is because she has been unemployed for two months, and she was living hand-to-mouth before that!

You aren’t very employable when you’re illiterate, slightly disabled, stand less than five-feet tall, and look obviously, desperately poor. But you also aren’t going to get any less malnourished and desperate-looking until you land a job. When I would talk and pray with her about the situation, she would tell me despairingly, “If only I had a job, then I wouldn’t be distressed anymore! Everything would be fine! God could give me a job. God just isn’t listening.”

Finally, one of the myriad connections we had tried to make for her finally came through, and she is now employed at the home of a compassionate middle-class woman who lives just a short distance away from our community and who has even bought a month’s supply of food to last the family until the first pay day.

The second recent development is so new and fragile that I hesitate to even mention it yet. We’ve met a woman who began a couple of weeks ago to create an interactive, and student-led curriculum for teaching literacy to adults and children who are fluent in Hindi but who can’t read–either due to their having never been afforded the opportunity to go to school, or due to their having been subjected to the experience of spending a few years in an Indian government school where teachers were absent more often than students, or where the teachers’ presence facilitated rote memorization and useless examinations without any learning whatsoever. I don’t have time to fully explain the blatant inadequacies of the Indian education system, and the corruption that prevents so many kids from being able to access what exists on paper as their basic right. But against that backdrop, this literacy curriculum is shockingly simple: it teaches the Hindi script phonetically rather than having students begin by memorize the names of each letter of the alphabet, it relies on simple pictures to connect letters with sounds, and it helps learners to immediately begin piecing sounds into words and words into sentences, so that instant gratification gives them confidence and propels them to continue learning. It’s also student-led, which means you barely need a teacher at all. A. and I, along with a couple of other friends, are helping out with the pilot project by trying the curriculum with some of our neighbors, and it’s been exciting to see the enthusiasm of kids and adults alike as they begin timidly and then experience unexpected success in starting to achieve something that has seemed unattainable for them for so long.

The woman behind this program is passionate and ambitious about ridding India of illiteracy, and has plans of using the curriculum on a large-scale. It remains to be seen how all of this will pan out, but for now we’re excited by the possibility of sitting down with even a few individuals in our community to guide them through the process, and then give them the chance to pass on their new-found skill to their kids, friends, relatives, and neighbors in the slum.