This blog has looked at the work of Paulo Freire before:
Jay Doubleyou: paulo freire
It has also looked at some of his ideas:
Starting with Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1972, through the late 1990s, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire explored various effects of presumptive teaching on students, schools, and society as a whole.
Jay Doubleyou: the hidden curriculum
Other educationalists have questioned the whole 'behaviourist' approach:
In the first half of this century, a reductionist view of human behavior - behaviorialism - dominated the field. Behaviorialism, a Pavlovian view of human learning developed by Watson, Hull and Thorndike reached its heyday in the 1950's, in B.F. Skinner's work on operant psychology and reinforcement. It was reductionist because it used a "black box" approach based in empiricism, much like the approach a chemist might use. Since one cannot observe what is happening in the brain, we should limit our measurements and theories to merely what is going in - the stimulus - and what is coming out - the response.
However, cognitive and humanistic research pointed more and more towards the importance of experience. For example, we can see the rudiments of the experiential theory in Saljo's 1979 hierarchy of student views of learning. Nonetheless, the theory of experiential learning did not gain prominence until the work of Mezirow, Freire, Kolb and Gregorc in the 1980's.
In the early 1980's, Mezirow, Freire and others stressed that the heart of all learning lies in the way we process experience, in particular, our critical reflection of experience. They spoke of learning as a cycle that begins with experience, continues with reflection and later leads to action, which itself becomes a concrete experience for reflection
Jay Doubleyou: kolb's learning cycle
See also:
Jay Doubleyou: teaching machines: behaviour management apps in the classroom
Jay Doubleyou: behaviourism >>> krashen... pinker... skinner... chomsky
Jay Doubleyou: social engineering
Jay Doubleyou: theories of language learning and teaching: behaviourism vs nativism
Freire was very critical of how education is 'oppressive':
Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Wikipedia
He produced a 'critical pedagogy':
Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy: A Description and American Application | Commonwealth
It's all about experience:
Peace and Conflict Monitor, The ‘Banking’ System of Teaching: Frowns and No Flowers
And not simply 'filling an empty box':
In terms of pedagogy, Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the "banking" concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. He notes that "it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power."[12] The basic critique was not new — Rousseau's conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from tabula rasa (which is basically the same as the "banking concept").[citation needed] In addition, thinkers like John Dewey were strongly critical of the transmission of mere facts as the goal of education. Dewey often described education as a mechanism for social change, explaining that "education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction".[13] Freire's work, however, updated the concept and placed it in context with current theories and practices of education, laying the foundation for what is now called critical pedagogy.
Paulo Freire - New World Encyclopedia
Paulo Freire - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
He was not a fan of the idea of the person as a 'tabula rasa' - or empty vessel:
112. Some Thoughts on John Locke’s Theory of Mind and Education | Philosophical Eggs
Here are some excellent related articles from an interesting website (more of later)
The digital revolution and edtech learning revolution in education - Edtech pedagogy, digital education, a critique
- which challenges the above:
Sugata Mitra TED talk on edtech and empire - a critique
Critical Thinking - a Critique
The child as empty vessel - emptiness and liberation pedagogy
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