Paulo Freire, born on the 19th of September in 1921, was a Brazilian philosopher and radical pedagogue most known for his 1968 work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. “Language is never neutral.”

Paulo was born in Recife, the capital of the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. Initially affluent, his family experienced hardship during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and Freire’s education suffered due to his own experiences with poverty and hunger.

Freire began working as a schoolteacher in the 1940s, beginning to serve as the director of the Pernambuco Department of Education and Culture in 1946. Due to the 1964 Brazilian coup d’état, where a military dictatorship was put in place with the support of the United States, Paulo Freire was exiled from his home country, an exile that lasted 16 years.

Freire then worked in Chile, until April 1969 when he accepted a temporary position at Harvard University. It was during this period, in 1968, that Freire published his most famous work, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”.

In this text, Freire criticizes what he calls the “banking method” of education, wherein a teacher “deposits” knowledge into an empty vessel, the student, or “bank”. Instead, Freire calls upon teacher to engage in a more dialog-centric or creative education, one in which the suppressed experiences of the oppressed help create knowledge, fostering a social reality in which the marginalized are humanized.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed has since become the third most cited book in the social sciences, according to Elliott D. Green. As of 2000, the book had sold over 750,000 copies worldwide.

“Manipulation, sloganizing, depositing, regimentation, and prescription cannot be components of revolutionary praxis, precisely because they are the components of the praxis of domination.”

Paulo Freire

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    • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netMEnglish
      6·
      17 hours ago

      It is probably deliberate. They prefer to use their own private IT infrastructure rather than infrastructure provided by the state. This bypasses all sorts of records-keeping and transparency regulations (things along the lines of FOIA). Crucially, it prevents their private communications from falling into the hands of a subsequent, potentially hostile, administration, or some “boy scout” whistleblower in the federal bureaucracy. This is the new normal. It was the root of the whole Clinton e-mail server controversy (who was singled out for doing the sketchy thing most of these people are doing). It is being done by every crooked politician and every local police department across the country, where their day-to-day communications take place on unofficial channels like private Signal chats instead of official mechanisms like state-provided e-mail accounts where their communications could potentially be obtained through a court order. It also means their IT security is all over the place rather than being up to DOD / NSA standards.

      The only thing notable about it in Trump’s case is that the private infrastructure carries very high profile branding and a playpen for the hogs, rather than being some nondescript Slack chat at a URL nobody would normally discover. The smarter people in his administration (various staffers actually doing the work) are probably using more discrete channels, but the political leadership of Fox News personalities who are dumb enough to excel in that line of work probably lack this competency.