📑 Paulo Freire’s questions for educators

What seems to me to be unconscionable, however, today as yesterday, would be to conceive—or even worse, to practice—a popular education in which a constant, serious approach were not maintained, antecedently and concomitantly, to problems like: what content to teach, in behalf of what this content is to be taught, in behalf of whom, against what, and against whom.

• Who selects the content, and how is it taught?
• What is teaching?
• What is learning?
• What manner of relationship obtains between teaching and learning?
• What is popular knowledge, or knowledge gotten from living experience?
• Can we discard it as imprecise and confused?
• How may it be gotten beyond, transcended?
• What is a teacher?
• What is the role of a teacher?
• And what is a student?
• What is a student’s role?
• If being a teacher means being superior to the student in some way, does this mean that the teacher must be authoritarian?
• Is it possible to be democratic and dialogical without ceasing to be a teacher, which is different from being a student?
• Does dialogue mean irrelevant chitchat whose ideal atmosphere would be to “leave it as it is to see if it’ll work”?
• Can there be a serious attempt at the reading and writing of the word without a reading of the world?
• Does the inescapable criticism of a “banking” education mean the educator has nothing to teach and ought not to teach?
• Is a teacher who does not teach a self-contradiction?
• What is codification, and what is its role in the framework of a theory of knowledge?
• How is the “relation between practice and theory” to be understood—and especially, experienced—without the expression becoming trite, empty wordage?
• How is the “basistic,” voluntaristic temptation to be resisted—and how is the intellectualistic, verbalistic temptation to engage in sheer empty chatter to be overcome?
• How is one to “work on” the relationship between language and citizenship?