Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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.