Learning-Teaching and Loving-Being Angry - thoughts from Freire (and a bit beyond)

  Several years ago, Paulo Freire's work, Pedagogy of Freedom was recommended to me as a favorite work. While I got it shortly thereafter, I am just now getting around to reading it, and it has most certainly been worth it. It immediately joins my list of favorite books on good teaching such as Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach, Peter Elbow's various works (supposedly on teaching writing, but much more widely applicable), and Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children. 

There is, in fact, no teaching without learning. One requires the other. And the subject of each, despite their obvious differences, cannot be educated to the status of object. Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.  

[...]

To learn, then, logically precedes to teach. In other words, to teach is part of the very fabric of learning. This is true to such an extent that I do not hesitate to say that there is no valid teaching from which there does not emerge something learned and through which the learner does not become capable of recreating and remaking what has been thought. In essence, teaching that does not emerge from the experience of learning cannot be learned by anyone. 

When we live our lives with the authenticity demanded by the practice of teaching that is also learning and learning that is also teaching, we are participating in a total experience that is simultaneously directive, political, ideological, gnostic, pedagogical, aesthetic, and ethical. In this experience the beautiful, the decent, and the serious form a circle with hands joined. (pp. 31-32). 

The kind of education that does not recognize the right to express appropriate anger against injustice, against disloyalty, against the negation of love, against exploitation, and against violence fails to see the educational role implicit in the expression of these feelings. (p. 45). 

One of the most important tasks of critical educational practice is to make possible the conditions in which the learners, in their interaction with one another and with their teachers, engage in the experience of assuming themselves as social, historical, thinking, communicating, transformative, creative persons; dreamers of possible utopias, capable of being angry because of a capacity to love. Capable of assuming themselves as “subject” because of the capacity to recognize themselves as “object.”  (pp. 45-46). 

To question, to search, and to research are parts of the nature of teaching practice. What is necessary is that, in their ongoing education, teachers consider themselves researchers because they are teachers.

 (p. 130, footnote 5). 

[The bold emphasis is mine throughout the above quotations.]

 I found the thoughts on the appropriateness of anger to be particularly interesting as I've been giving thought to this topic as part of a group study that I was invited to join. The readings are in Turkish, but the English edition is called "Putting Off Anger." So far, it has been valuable, and it has talked also about proper anger. 

 Random question I've had recently: What situations made Jesus angry in the New Testament?