Conscientization

What barriers? Who defines success, historical trauma, current trauma, content, relevance, teachers, overt and covert racism, classism,  support academic, cultural and physical, denial by adults, adult interference.

Why do you think they exist? Over heard in a staffroom, with parents present: Principal saying “if you want to learn Maori, you should do it in your own time” also over heard an expression along the lines of “I only do what I have to” (meaning any tikanga or te Reo).

• As long as people don’t realise, or don’t want to see, the change occurring (please) in the world, and as long as people live in their own bubbles these ideas get maintained.
• Fear
• What people hear vs what is actually said (co governance an example)
• that those at the top are not of the general population (eg current PM owning many freehold houses)
• old boys clubs exist
• is of advantage to the state: eg having a dispossed people means a low wage economy can be maintained
• suits the “optics” for the government, fear of crime turning into votes
• is of advantage to big corporations

The cure of the oppression that exists in our education system would take a total change in emphasis of our schools. A change in the role of teachers, even who teachers are… even a change in what people believe education is for. It would require the kind of change that is challenging and requires people to question beliefs, and to question what they value, including capitalism.

according to the internet “Transformative praxis is a product of multidimensional critical consciousness, which is informed by the notion of education as a practice of freedom and praxis, which Freire explained as “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (1970, p. 36).”

I think it translates to: It is the whole system that we need to critically think about (what is education for? etc and how it fits in our lives) to get real change, to not have roles of oppressed/oppressor. eg, free school lunches is currently couched with ideas about getting something for nothing, providing welfare rather than if we give these lunches to all they give freedom from the status of poverty (oh boy does our culture hate poor people) and a freedom from one of the constraints to learning. The idea of the nanny state as being negative as we focus on individualistic “responsibility”. That meritocracy is defined in a particular way by our capitalistic state and yet to be truely free we need a multitude of different kind of successes portrayed so we are free to learn what we want to – education to be educated rather than to fulfill an esteemed job’s brief. (I have written on homeschoolery about what to say to your child when they show an obvious propensity to a low status low paid job – and one that they see their mother do).