In today’s world of barbarism and rampant ignorance, our teachers have a tough task ahead of them: the task of humanising our future generation. Teaching is an “ontological vocation” as Paulo Freire, the revolutionary critical educationist, put it. This means the “work of becoming and being”. Since Freire considered the role of an educator to be that of the person who works with the students in the process of humanising — for both the teacher and students — it is important to see the whole of this ideology as emancipatory and liberating. If we evaluate the process of education from any angle in the critical theorists’ perspective, it is a continuous struggle towards self-realisation in various forms.
In progressive western education — from Aristotle to John Dewey — it is the liberation from traditional thoughts, fixated ideas and learnedness in futility. The purpose of the feminist and subjective pedagogical works of Bell Hooks and Parker Palmer, respectively, establishes the same relation of episteme (idea of true knowledge) to the doxa (belief, personalised opinion). In the works of both these authors, the subjective interpretation of feminism and teaching as a process of individuation redeems the vocational responsibilities of teachers from following the absolute.
Teaching as a vocation cannot fulfill its purpose until it becomes the pursuit of knowledge in a personalised and subjective way. In the great, ongoing debate of knowledge between the focus on absolutism and change as the reason of knowing, or in other words, the Platonic versus Aristotle arguments, we find Freire’s thoughts more inclined towards Aristotle, thus favouring change as the fountain of knowledge. To him, Freire, the knowing through transformation from what we are to qualitatively what we could become, by combining action with words (praxis), was “I think, therefore, I am” what was to Descartes. His practice of teaching encompassed the relational and dialectical existence of students where both co-create meaning and failure on either part, which results in a fiasco of meaningful knowing, and thus existence.
In the colonial and then postcolonial worlds where dehumanisation of the oppressed became the norm and the reason to perpetuate the hegemony, the survival of the oppressed is only possible through humanisation. Freire saw this humanisation was possible only through changing the pedagogical practices of the oppressed because the prevailing pedagogy is tailored only to facilitate the oppressor. Hegemonic discourses always support absolutism and objective reality against subjectivity. Had there been only absolute truth, could there be any possibility for the oppressed to change their predicament? Certainly not because then the dominant discourse would be the only discourse that takes place in oppressive conditions leaving no room for any other form of opinion. In such a case, the notion of objective reality will only be controlled, manipulated and practiced by the dominant and oppressive class, perpetuating the eternal vicious cycle of racism, classism and subjugation of one class by the other in the name of various ideologies.
Ontological vocation in teaching is to teach against all these fixed notions of living. It is an effort to break fossilised ideology to accept authority without questioning. To know the ‘who’, the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of the system to educate ourselves about the manipulations that have taken place to dominate human beings. It is to raise critical consciousness to the level where we are aware of our existence and surroundings. To give meaning to life and the ability to make a meaning for the life we live. “The possibility of the act of knowing through this praxis, by which man transforms reality” is the ontological vocation where the job of the teachers is “humanising the world by transforming it”. This practice of humanisation is at the heart of the pedagogical responsibility of today’s teachers. Demystifying the role of the oppressive system in order to liberate human beings is a cognisant choice our educators have to make. They have to understand and help students understand what the oppressive system can do to them as individuals and as a group of people. Since it is never a choice to remain marginalised, explaining the system that keeps certain people with different literacies at the margins is an emancipatory education. This kind of teaching is an exercise to avoid violence committed in the name of education and help elevate human status.
The writer is a doctoral student in Education at the University of New Mexico