This revision attaches a rather large amount of "Freire in his context" to a good deal less of you in yours. It does not accept the invitation to get more specific about the pedagogical situation in which you find yourself, except insofar as it embodies self-criticism that I think overly harsh and unfair. No doubt there are ways in which you could have engaged the process of learning more immediately with your teachers in the course of your first year. But I doubt you were lazier, or even much more introverted, than you had been in other pedagogical relationships in the past. (You may well have been more depressed. Depressed people often blame themselves for being depressed. This is usually a category error, and is itself, of course, a symptom of the distress.)

It's even less clear than before what Paolo Freire actually has to do with the situation, however, if you are going to blame yourself for the condition in which you find yourself with respect to the learning you are doing. It's partly an implicit recognition, it seems to me, that Freire's framing takes one only so far in discussing the professional education of university-trained young adults. He becomes just a hook to hang the idea of resisting oppression on.

Perhaps in the end this is more about Gramsci than about Freire, less about the pedagogy that initially socializes us and more about the education, in Weber's sense—distinguished from mere pedagogy—that tells us what can be contested and what "just is." The concern then is less oppression (a category of social treatment that seems poorly selected to define the position of law students here) than hegemony, which affects everyone.

But my own sense is that this is less about either Gramsci or Freire than it is about you. A better revision seems to me to be the one that drops the outsiders. It would eschew both ritual self-criticism and ritual affirmation of aspirational intent, for questions more specific and insights more local. What did you learn this past year? Which learning, in your view, added to your social effectiveness and power? How and why did the learning you accomplished, or your difficulties in accomplishing learning, affect your future intentions? From the actual material of your learning process, not from someone else's theories about someone else's learning process conducted somewhere else in another time, we might learn how to help your learn better and enjoy learning more.

Transforming Education

Are Freire's Theories Applicable to Legal Education?

To truly understand the significance of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, one cannot divorce Freire's theories from the economic and political context in which they were formed. It is necessary to acknowledge the extent to which Freire's experiences with the oppressor-oppressed dynamic in Brazil influenced his dedication to advancing a system of education that humanizes both the oppressor and the oppressed. The force of Freire's proposed education reform, however, need not be contained within the boundaries of South America and can be instrumental in effecting change in any system of education that encourages students to conform to the world rather than to engage with and transform it.

Though Columbia students come from varied socioeconomic backgrounds, not one of us is a member of the oppressed illiterate class whose liberation Freire was dedicated to facilitating. We are, rather, a "cohort of extremely privileged young adults." This privileged status diminishes the applicability of Pedagogy of the Oppressed to an extent - Columbia's adoption of problem-posing education cannot liberate us from oppression we do not suffer under - but does not eliminate it completely. The world remains in need of transformation and the banking approach to education, whether imposed on members of the dominant class or the dominated, discourages its subjects from attempting that transformation. Abandoning the banking system in favor of the problem-posing system empowers the dominated class - by enabling them to engage with the world and fight for their humanity - and the dominant class - by enabling them also to engage with the world and to acknowledge the humanity of those they have dominated. However weak a form of social control the law may be, a legal education can and should arm members of the dominant class with all available tools for change/humanization rather than encourage complacency with the status quo. To the extent that Columbia's approach to legal education encourages passivity rather than engagement with the world and cements our position of privilege, Freire's theories on education can provide some guidance.

Freire identifies the "humanist revolutionary educator" as the source of the transformation. These educators, Freire argues, cannot wait for formerly passive students to challenge the system. That argument, I think, must also flow in the opposite direction - formerly passive students cannot wait for revolutionary educators. I do not know if Columbia requires professors or career counselors to read Freire's work or to engage with any theories of education reform. If such a requirement exists, the staff and faculty I have met have either ignored that requirement or resisted its lessons in shaping their courses or formulating their advice. Though I can acknowledge the necessity of teaching "law talk" in the first semester of law school, feeling now that I learned how to do very little else, I am not satisfied that the 1L curriculum provided a chance to become co-investigators with professors in the classroom and to engage with the world. I cannot profess to know how to change law school. I know only that I can change my approach to legal education now that I am aware of what, so far, seem to be its limitations. I did little this year to offset the impact of an establishment interested primarily in providing access to Big Law jobs. I did not attempt to engage with my professors in class, as I did with my philosophy professors in college, and I failed to foster relationships with them outside of the classroom. I think this is because I am slightly introverted and slightly lazy. Despite this, I am determined now to graduate from law school with the tools necessary to define myself, not as an oppressor, but as a professional capable of engaging with the world. I think I can do this by seeking out next year what I was expecting to have handed to me this year.

(1000 words)

-- ElizabethSullivan - 24 Apr 2012

The first term of law school, as I have previously mentioned, is a language-acquisition exercise. The request to state facts, holdings, reasoning, in the classroom is a request for the production of sentences in law-talk. This conforms to neither Freire's paradigms of God or the Devil. Arguments in that style have been made for or against this approach to language instruction, and were to the process of teaching second languages in the 1960s what the "new math" was to mathematics instruction. In these environments, I think it is fair to say, neither Plato nor Freire turns out to be completely right.

By three or four weeks into the second term of law school, however, the language acquisition process for students like ours is largely concluded for those whose learning is not impeded by severe contingent obstacles. The process shifts towards acculturation and the professional use of the language acquired. So the criminal law teacher who told my students in his section one year that "This isn't a humanities course like some of your others [meaning mine]. I don't want to read what you think on the exam," was indeed providing an example that could charitably be referred to as "narratively sick." But one ugly, Hemlock-proof, narcissistic jerk isn't "law school."

You might begin by wondering about the social psychology underlying the ideas you've been handling. What is their developmental component? Is "teaching" the same thing when done in the company of five-year-olds that it is in a cohort of extremely privileged young adults who have already finished university educations? Is "lifelong learning," or "adult education" the same as the pedagogy that socializes children before puberty while teaching them the various necessary literacies in their societies? How is "mentoring" distinguished from "teaching"? How does the political economy of professional services delivery affect the instructional styles of professional preparation institutions like law schools or medical schools? Paolo Freire, like most other great writers on "education," is a mine full of valuable ore. The problem is refining it and working it into practically useful tools. The extent to which you can do nothing but throw up your hands at the end of the essay is your confession that you left it unworked.

But do you really expect to be able to prescribe correctly what needs to change about law school, let alone how to bring that change about, on the basis of twenty-four weeks of experience? I have more than fifty times as much experience as you have, have read more than you, thought more than you, and experimented more than you in search of wisdom on the problems you are meditating. I would not attempt to write in 1,000 words either a specification of "the problem" tout court, nor a solution in general terms, because all I have learned inclines me to believe that neither the problems nor their solutions are comprehensible on that scale.

The route to improving the piece is to make it less general, both in the way you treat Freire and in the way you treat "law school." You need to handle your material in a fashion that doesn't make your relative lack of experience a fatal weakness, and Freire's material in a way that relates basic concepts to the details of pedagogy in the social context where you actually find it. Law professing means acclimatizing young adults to work in an unfamiliar symbolic system built up over 1,000 years, for the subtle and effective mastery of which both cognitive skills—industrial strength reading, strengthened memory, improved a-linguistic social cognition—and expressive skills—terse analytic writing, persuasive public speaking, effective social tactics, the nature of strategic as opposed to tactical execution—must be taught. Individual mentoring needs to occur, which concentrates not only on "co-learning" but on instilling social discipline at the same time that awareness and emotional self-equilibration must be encouraged, and—if necessary—helped to grow by means more "therapeutic" than "pedagogical." No doubt one can find Plato and Freire useful in the effort, but what's really needed is something less general and more situational.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

The Problem: Narration Sickness and the "Banking Concept"

Last week, in an attempt to distance myself a bit from law school, I spent some time re-reading portions of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book by Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire. In the second chapter, Freire asserts that "education is suffering from narration sickness." Teachers, he explains, who consider themselves knowledgeable, talk "about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable" and assume that their students are ignorant receptacles to be filled with the contents of their knowledge. Freire calls this process "banking" - the teacher, as depositor, is rewarded for filling the receptacles as completely as he can, and the student, as depository, is rewarded for receiving the information as meekly as possible. The assumption that students are ignorant receptacles, Freire argues, "negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry" and creates an oppressive class system within education. Students become dependent upon and subordinated to teachers of "superior" knowledge and are forced to accept their "ignorance" as justifying their teachers' existence. The harder students work at becoming passive receptacles (which they are encouraged to do in the banking system), the less capable they become of critical thinking and the less interested they are in actively participating in and transforming the world.

The oppressors in society, who are not interested in seeing the world transformed, profit from a system of education that renders students incapable of anything more than recording and memorizing. They are not interested, therefore, in dismantling the banking system and "react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality."

Is Law School Suffering From Narration Sickness?

When I read Pedagogy of the Oppressed for the first time in college, Freire's ideas did not resonate with me. I viewed his discussion merely as an interesting dissection of a system of education that at the time had little bearing on or relevance to my life and that I believed would never have any bearing on or relevance to my life. As a philosophy major my classes were small and functioned almost entirely without narration, my professors challenged my views and cared little about the amount of information I memorized, and my peers were interested enough in critical thought to commit to a major they knew would almost certainly lead them into career oblivion. The problems of banking education exited my consciousness almost immediately after finishing Pedagogy of the Oppressed and didn't return until the first day of this class. After spending a little over one semester in law school, I think I am finally beginning to understand the alienating force of being treated like an ignorant receptacle, capable only of memorization and unconcerned with transforming the world. Though the Socratic Method purports to stimulate critical thinking and encourage student debate, I cannot understand how a request to "recite the facts" or to "state the assignment of error" in a particular case functions as anything more than a demand for the regurgitation of information deposited by a teacher who considers him/herself to be knowledgeable and in a position of superiority. In an attempt to "get it right" so they can at some point "get a job," students hardly ever manage to communicate anything in class or on exams that might challenge the information deposited during the teacher's narration.

The Solution: Reconciliation of the Teacher-Student Contradiction

Freire proposes an alternative to the banking system that, he claims, undermines the power of oppression. Deposit-making must be abandoned completely in favor of "problem-posing" education, a system in which cognition takes the place of narration. Students and teachers become "teacher-students" and "student-teachers," who both teach and are taught by each other. "The students -- no longer docile listeners -- are now--critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher." As teacher-students and student-teachers begin to grapple with problems relating to themselves in and with the world, they feel challenged and more obliged to respond to such challenges. Responding to challenges results in more challenges and thus more understandings. The comprehension they gain brings them closer to reality and farther from alienation. When education is a practice of freedom, not domination, Freire argues, it confirms that man is not isolated and unattached to the world.

Is it Really a Solution?

Though Freire recognizes that the oppressed must fight for emancipation from the banking system, he proposes no course of action that might enable such emancipation. He assumes, instead, the existence of "revolutionary educators" dedicated to the "quest for mutual harmonization" and willing to be the partners of their students. Though truly revolutionary educators might exist, the education system seems instead to be plagued by individuals claiming to be proponents of liberation, but who continue to employ the banking method as an expedient "interim measure." I am persuaded by Freire's argument that the banking system of education must be replaced by a system that treats teachers and students as co-investigators. I am not sure at this point what exactly that entails in the context of law school. I am hoping that what I learn in this class will help me to better understand the requirements of such a goal. I think it will take more than merely acknowledging that most law professors at most law schools have their heads up their asses. Beyond that, I feel a bit clueless. I think, perhaps, a major roadblock for most law students in attempting to transform the experience is that they (me included) treat law school as some form of hell that has to be dealt with and then disposed of as quickly as possible. The idea of attempting a revolution, the impact of which might be felt only once we've departed, on top of the daily frustrations of law school life, is daunting. Without the presence of more "revolutionary educators," what can we, as students, do?

(999 words)