At 9:50 AM -0500 2002/02/04, Gail Stewart
wrote:
(I therefore don't agree that the decision to choose what a word will mean is confined to the rich and powerful. Brian has written to Harry: "Alice is perfect because as you recall the rich and powerful get to decide what language means and they get to change that meaning when it serves their purposes!! Now that is infinitely better than privilege." I think we all have that privilege although the rich and powerful may have better access to leverage in making their definitions known, but even they cannot force acceptance of their decisions.)
Hi Gail,
It is good to have you contributing to this list
again. As to the section of your posting that is copied above, I
agree with you with one major qualifier. Let me start with an example:
the word 'terrorism'. When the rich and powerful(George W and friends)
define this concept to suit their purposes it has huge very pragmatic
consequences. Enough said?
Having said that; I work very hard to help my
beginning teachers of English wrestle with what you believe. Paulo
Freire has written extensively on this topic. His "Pedagogy of
the Oppressed" and his "Pedagogy of Liberation" are
good starting points.
Below you will find a passage from his
book: "The politics of Education":
I can offer no specific advice, but here are a few brotherly suggestions. First, start rereading this book (The Politics of Education). Your second reading should be far more critical than the first. I suggest this not only for this book but for all your reading.
Whether it be a raindrop (a raindrop that was about to fall but froze, giving birth to a beautiful icicle), be it a bird that sings, a bus that runs, a violent person on the street, be it a sentence in the newspaper, a political speech, a lover's rejection, be it anything, we must adopt a critical view, that of the person who questions, who doubts, who investigates, and who wants to illuminate the very life we live.
My suggestion is that we capture our daily alienation, the alienation of our routine, of repeating things bureaucratically, or doing the same thing every day at ten o'clock, for example, because "it has to be done" and we never question why. We should take our lives into our own hands and begin to exercise control. We should try to stand up to, and get out from under time.
In these complex societies we sometimes find ourselves living very much submerged in time, without critical and dynamic appreciation of history, as if history were flying over us, commanding and relentlessly regulating our lives. This is a fatalism that immobilizes, suffocates, and eventually kills us. History is nothing like this. History has no power. As Marx has said, history does not command us, history is made by us. History makes us while we make it. Again, my suggestion is that we attempt to emerge from this alienating daily routine that repeats itself. Let's try to understand life, not necessarily as the daily repetition of things, but as an effort to create and re-create, and as an effort to rebel, as well. Let's take our alienation into our own hands and ask, "Why?" "Does it have to be this way?" I do not think so. We need to be subjects of history, even if we cannot totally stop becoming objects of history. And to be subjects, we need unquestionably to claim history critically. As active participants and real subjects, we can make history only when we are continually critical of our very lives.
Excerpted from The Politics of Education, by Paulo Freire. Copyright 1985 by Paulo Freire. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Bergin and Garvey.
And thus become newer everyday!
Take care,
Brian
