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2 reviews for:
Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished (Critical Narrative)
Paulo Freire
3.5 AVERAGE
2 reviews for:
Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished (Critical Narrative)
Paulo Freire
3.5 AVERAGE
This was a randomly picked up book from the library. It is short, and sweet, and just a collection of odds-and-ends, but I found it endearing and surprisingly intimate. One of the chapters that will stay with me for a long time was where Paulo engaged in a conversation with 7th and 8th grade students about the nature of reading difficult things. I have always found Freire to be such an inspirational thinker, but it was here that I also saw his way of relating to others. I deeply enjoyed reading the talks that were transcribed here.
This was put together posthumously by his wife, and the writings about Freire's life and legacy also added a special quality to this volume. This is a wonderful book to read if you are an educator and need encouragement, particularly as we encounter ever more turbulent times. Freire reminds us that our work is always, and must be, political. And that the struggle is a part of what makes the journey worthwhile.
Some quotations I liked:
There is no tomorrow without a project, without a dream, without utopia, without hope, without creative work, and work toward the development of possibilities, which can make the concretization of that tomorrow viable. It is in that sense that I have said on different occasions that I am hopeful not out of stubbornness, but due to an existential imperative. p. 26
In other words, in the world there are always hidden things; in life, there are always hidden things, and one of the roles of the educator is to draw attention to those things. Sometimes it is not even necessary to show the hidden thing, but rather it is about helping the student to know that there are hidden things for him or her to discover. p. 35
The education I speak about is an education of now, and it is an education of tomorrow. it is an education that must set us, permanently, on a questioning, a remaking, and an inquiring of ourselves. It is an education that does not accept, in order to be good, that it should suggest sadness to the learners. I believe in the serious and rigorous education that makes me joyous and happy. I disbelieve completely in an education that, in the name of rigor, makes the world ugly. I do not believe, not in any way, in the relationships between seriousness and ugliness. As if, for example, it were necessary to write ugly in order to write rigor or rigorously. If one writes what is more beautiful, soon they’ll be saying, “that is not scientific.” I only write ugly when I am not capable, which I am not competent.
That education for freedom, the education linked to human rights in that perspective, has to be encompassing, totalizing; it has to do with critical knowledge of the real and with the joy of living. It does not only have to do with rigorousness of analysis on how society moves, how it progresses, gets along, but it has also to do with the feast that is life itself. p. 69-70
For this reason, I am a thinker of education. I do not enjoy saying that I am a thinker of the field, because it becomes a bit aristocratic. However, in reality, that is what I have been, a thinker of education, who cannot dissociate thinking from doing. p. 74
There is no reality that is because it has to be. Reality can and must be mutable; it must be transformable. p. 84
I would like, therefore, to share with you a soul full of hope. To me, without hope there is no way we can even start thinking about education. In fact, the matrixes of hope are matrixes of the very educability of beings, of human beings. It is not possible to be unfinished beings, such as we are, conscious of that inconclusiveness, and not seek. Education is precisely that seeking movement, that permanent search. p. 87
That is what is important for us to hold on to, important for us to keep. In spite of everything, in spite of any failure! We must even know that failures or suffering are part of the search for efficacy. There is no efficacy that does not trip up on bumps toward success. It is necessary to work through failures and turn them into accomplishment. p. 88
This was put together posthumously by his wife, and the writings about Freire's life and legacy also added a special quality to this volume. This is a wonderful book to read if you are an educator and need encouragement, particularly as we encounter ever more turbulent times. Freire reminds us that our work is always, and must be, political. And that the struggle is a part of what makes the journey worthwhile.
Some quotations I liked:
There is no tomorrow without a project, without a dream, without utopia, without hope, without creative work, and work toward the development of possibilities, which can make the concretization of that tomorrow viable. It is in that sense that I have said on different occasions that I am hopeful not out of stubbornness, but due to an existential imperative. p. 26
In other words, in the world there are always hidden things; in life, there are always hidden things, and one of the roles of the educator is to draw attention to those things. Sometimes it is not even necessary to show the hidden thing, but rather it is about helping the student to know that there are hidden things for him or her to discover. p. 35
The education I speak about is an education of now, and it is an education of tomorrow. it is an education that must set us, permanently, on a questioning, a remaking, and an inquiring of ourselves. It is an education that does not accept, in order to be good, that it should suggest sadness to the learners. I believe in the serious and rigorous education that makes me joyous and happy. I disbelieve completely in an education that, in the name of rigor, makes the world ugly. I do not believe, not in any way, in the relationships between seriousness and ugliness. As if, for example, it were necessary to write ugly in order to write rigor or rigorously. If one writes what is more beautiful, soon they’ll be saying, “that is not scientific.” I only write ugly when I am not capable, which I am not competent.
That education for freedom, the education linked to human rights in that perspective, has to be encompassing, totalizing; it has to do with critical knowledge of the real and with the joy of living. It does not only have to do with rigorousness of analysis on how society moves, how it progresses, gets along, but it has also to do with the feast that is life itself. p. 69-70
For this reason, I am a thinker of education. I do not enjoy saying that I am a thinker of the field, because it becomes a bit aristocratic. However, in reality, that is what I have been, a thinker of education, who cannot dissociate thinking from doing. p. 74
There is no reality that is because it has to be. Reality can and must be mutable; it must be transformable. p. 84
I would like, therefore, to share with you a soul full of hope. To me, without hope there is no way we can even start thinking about education. In fact, the matrixes of hope are matrixes of the very educability of beings, of human beings. It is not possible to be unfinished beings, such as we are, conscious of that inconclusiveness, and not seek. Education is precisely that seeking movement, that permanent search. p. 87
That is what is important for us to hold on to, important for us to keep. In spite of everything, in spite of any failure! We must even know that failures or suffering are part of the search for efficacy. There is no efficacy that does not trip up on bumps toward success. It is necessary to work through failures and turn them into accomplishment. p. 88
A series of unfinished essays or talks, these were not meant to be published works. The ideas are often glimpses of transcendence, but the execution makes the bulk of the text difficult if not inaccessible.