Content is king?

As I set up my blog, I started out with the question below (1/8/08), on the one hand to become familiar with the posting-bit, on the other, I picked up on Julie’s statement from class: “Content is king!” - “Content is king!” - as she instructed us in how to set up and manage a blog. I think there was a sarcastic touch to her voice as she made the statement. Sarcasm is good because you simultaneously embrace and distance yourself from your statement, so I look forward to have my understanding of the nature and pedagogical relevance of ‘content’ clarified.

Before commenting on Freire’s text I salute and take comfort in our instructions: write a ‘personal, informal narrative of 500 words’ on his text/own classroom experience/best teacher you ever had. The great thing about ‘personal narratives’ is that you just can’t go wrong no matter how wrong you go. Should be the case, at least, inasmuch as ‘personal’ places more demand upon the reader’s ability to keep her idiosyncrasies in check. So, I’ll enjoy (at least in this writing) informally to jab a little right and left according to my personal humor, and thus leave whatever opinions I might have irreverently shrouded.

I’ll get straight to the point with Freire in a couple of related questions:

(1) Isn’t there something fundamentally awkward and false about pretending that there isn’t, or shouldn’t be, distance between teacher and student?
(2) How does his pedestrian, elementary-political, repetitive-redundant diatribe on oppression and liberation based in his false dichotomy of “banking education” vs. “problem-posing education” translate into teaching 1st graders the alphabet, 3rd graders geography, 6th graders German, and English graduate students literary theory?

If it indeed is true (which I subscribe to) that “the unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity” (65) must we not rather celebrate the fact that we are 'distant' than goofily suggest that difference is bad? Genghis Khan and I both had our first organized, educational experiences before the invention of the laptop and the cell phone – does that not make us fundamentally different from those generations who received these items in the crib? You ask your undergrads if they’ve seen Terminator 2 or Jaws and you’re lucky if one or two nod. Throw in a handful of foreign languages and cultures and you seem to miss out on something important if you systematically ignore multifaceted difference. In this sense his text is the educational equivalent of a Jehovah’s Witnesses-brochure depicting lambs gently and lovingly embraced by lions in their religious-utopian la-la land: both have little clue about reality. But he likes to pretend he does: “Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world.” (62) What brilliant statement of the obvious! This can only be a revelation to gullible educators thirsting for theory to lean on. Do we breathe as well? That might constitute the next pseudo-theoretical project for Freire. In this sense his approach constitutes the pedagogical equivalent of confirming that Nazi-Germany was bad. “The banking-concept of education” (e.g. 52-53) = ‘regurgitation’/’rote memorization’ vs. collaborative, participatory learning is something we – at least in some parts of the world – have been familiar with since the 19th century and certainly was turned into effective social practice since World War II.

Finally, did French existentialism not arrive upon the Copacabana until very recently? What’s the deal with Sartre and de Beauvoir? Surely, if you want to go philosophical on educational practice, things have happened since then? Another good trick in scaring your audience into submission is to nonchalantly, without further ado, drop the names of scary philosophers: Hegel (53), Jasper (60), and Husserl (64). Scary shit unless you are already well-versed, especially if you don’t offer any further explanation of their relevance.

So, I look forward to Julie telling us about content being king. Somewhere in the above lies ‘my own’ ‘classroom experience’; but I have run out of words, so I may elaborate later. ‘The best teacher I have ever had’ – I’ll go with Noam Chomsky giving a talk at WSU a couple of years ago: a splendid orator whose economy of diction and pedagogical approach in explaining his position and guiding his listener exemplifies a learning strategy which Freire – had he any wit – would give his right arm to be able to emulate, both in terms of theoretical lucidity and message. And Chomsky did leave time for critical questions.