Education is continuously evolving, always trying to improve to help provide the best education possible. When in high school, students often despise attending school and barely make it to graduation. Paolo Freire saw great fault in our education system and believed that teachers should not only be imparting knowledge to their students about a specific subject but helping to create socially aware individuals. Professor Priya Parmar, in her book Knowledge Reigns Supreme: The Critical Pedagogy of Hip-Hop Artist Krs-One, discusses Freire’s view of the importance of implementing critical literacy in the classroom.
“Freire advocated for liberatory or revolutionary education, one that was transformative and empowering, redressing social and education injustices” (Parmar 8). According to Freire, an education based on critical literacy questions is meant to empower students and to redefine what it means to be an educator. He wanted schools to make students think about who is being oppressed in society and why they are being oppressed. To him, the purpose of critical literacy is to create socially conscious members of society with the drive to question and effect change. Parmar writes how Freire believed that “the determining factor that leads to student or teacher agency is the development of a critical consciousness” (8). The purpose of critical literacy questions is to make students aware of their actions, of their personalities, of their beliefs, and of their society.
Freire’s believed in education as a way to help create active and socially aware members of society. As such, Marie Kennedy based her views on his. Tom Angotti, in “From Protest to Planning Stories” discusses the idea of Transformative community planning. It takes movements beyond advocacy and protest and into political empowerment. Just as Freire believed that education was meant to empower students, this form of community planning is meant to power the members of a community to take action. Angotti writes, “This meant building the capacity of communities to control their own destinies” (17). Communities should no longer be at the disposal of a few members in charge but they should have the ability to be in charge of their own lives and destinies. He quotes Marie Kennedy as stating, “This requires building within the community critical thinking and planning abilities so that development projects and planning processes can be replicated by community members in the future” (Angotti 17). This method of planning requires that the community needs to be taught how to critically think and needs tools to be able to replicate planning and development projects in a way that they control what happens where they live. Angotti further adds that this form of transformative planning explains the way in which new generations of community planners can come about as they learn from others and interact with others who are able to help them, through dialogue, to solve their community’s problems.
This method of effecting change can be very successful if a community can learn how to properly engage with each other in effective dialogue. As a future educator, I do believe that this can start in the education system. As Freire developed his ideas of critical literacy to be used in a classroom, he believed that the future lies in the hands of the younger generations. These high school students will grow up to either lift their communities or tear them down. Teachers need to help make students aware of what it means to critically think and help empower them to know that they can make a difference. If they are taught in high school how to think and act critically, they will be able to grow into active members of society that can help transform the planning that takes place in their neighborhoods and help to make things better for those who live around them.
- Is it practical for educators to be able to teach critical literacy in subjects like math and science?
- We have seen that community activism is not always successful, is this idea of Transformative Community Planning helping to add anything to help the community be successful in their efforts?
- Besides for educating the youth, is there a way that we can educate the older generation in critical thinking and in their move away from an older way of thinking in a narrow and close-minded manner?
