Power and liberation

Power.  Even the word can bring about a visceral response in people.  We lust for it and we become intoxicated by it.  We also wield it and dominate with it. We can resist it and even struggle against it.  But can we deny it? Can it be ignored?

This week, in the two courses that I am currently taking, we have been learning about and discussing in some depth the relationship between power and adult education.  On a micro-level, we’ve looked at power and its influence on the teacher-learner relationship. And, on a more macro-level, we’ve looked at power and the role it plays society, how it influences development and participation in development.  Further, we’ve looked at the role of adult education in either contributing to inequality, both in the classroom and in society, or contributing to change and social justice. 

In one online discussion, there was a notion that power had no place in the classroom; societal constructs of 'class' shouldn’t be allowed admittance into the classroom.  Learning should be unencumbered by such assumptions.  I don’t think that it is ever possible to push power and it's constructs out of the classroom.  Nor do I think that we should want to.  Power should be welcomed, exposed, picked apart, disected, analyzed and named.  To do so brings the freedom of learning from the micro to the macro level.  It fulfills a higher purpose than just expanding one's mind.  Rather, it connects our personal emancipation to others.  I think that Paulo Freire would agree with me. 

For those of you from the adult ed world, you already know Mr. Freire.  For those of you who don’t, I’ll defer to bell hooks for an introduction:

Paulo was one of the thinkers whose work gave me a language.  He made me think deeply about the construction of an identity in resistance.  There was this one sentence of Freire’s that became a revolutionary mantra for me:  “We cannot enter the struggle as objects in order later to become subjects.”  Really it is difficult to find words adequate to explain how this statement was like a locked door – and I struggled within myself to find the key – and that struggle engaged me in a process of critical thought that was transformative.  This experience positioned Freire in my mind and heart as a challenging teacher whose work furthered my own struggle against the colonizing process – the colonizing mindset.” (hooks, 1994, p. 47)

Freire is the father of liberation pedagogy: the idea that education was about transformation from a state of voiceless “magical consciousness”, though a recognition of oppression, to finally landing in a state of critical consciousness.  Education was about leaving a state of despair and stagnation for a state of hope and action.  To him education without liberation was not and should not be possible.  I couldn’t agree more.