Unit 8 - 20th Century philosophy - DuBois and Freire

In the first paragraph of Chapter I of The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois frames his analysis with a question that is often implicitly posed to him by whites, which is:

"How does it feel to be a problem?" DuBois names a number of points of typical conversation he has experienced with white people, which have behind them "the real question, How does it feel to be a problem"?

What is liberation, in Freire's view?

Action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it For Freire, liberation is action and reflection by men and women upon their world in order to transform it, rather than the work of populist revolutionaries to replace oppressors.

how is duBois views different from booker t washington?

BTW called for black progress through education and entrepreneurship, rather than trying to challenge directly the Jim Crow segregation and the disenfranchisement of black voters in the South. secretly, he also supported court challenges to segregation and passed on funds raised for this purpose.[1] Black militants in the North, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, at first supported the Atlanta compromise but after 1909, they set up the NAACP to work for political change. They tried with limited success to challenge Washington's political machine for leadership in the black community but also built wider networks among white allies in the North. Du Bois in the souls of black folk dared to challenge the most famous African-American intellectual of the day, Booker T. Washington, and to assert an opposing principle to Washington's belief that industrial education alone would lead to equality. Du Bois argued instead that African-Americans must be given the chance to attain the most sophisticated, higher education as well, so that they might partake of the goods of civilization as well as be fit candidates to educate other African-Americans in turn (a task not to be left fully to whites).

how does duBois define the negro soul?

Du Bois uses souls to present prototypes of the central figures in the black community: the preacher, the teacher, the intellectual, the laborer, and the bourgeois black. Du Bois digs into the "souls" or essence of these prototypes to show the roles these individuals play in an organic society that the larger world fails to see. Through his commanding rhetorical skills and his sociological training, Du Bois leads the reader to infer that, minus full participation in American society, each black person is one step removed from being a criminal. The black woman is absent from his list of prototypes. The normative premise of Du Bois's trenchant discussion is a world that is black and male; women are subsumed under the prototype "teacher" and relegated to the domestic sphere. For Du Bois, the black woman as racial, rather than as gendered subject, provides him with a strategy for interrogating the construction of patriarchy and sexuality within America.

What is "problem-posing education," according to Freire?

Education based on a dialogue in which students and teachers mutually communicate with one another Freire says that problem-posing education is based on a dialogue in which students and teachers mutually communicate with and teach one another, undoing the opposition between teacher and student in which the student only receives information from the teacher.

What is "banking education", according to Freire?

Education that treats students as depositories into which the teacher puts their own values and ideas Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.

What is DuBois' point in Chapter II when he outlines the work done by government on behalf of emancipated slaves between 1861 and 1872?

He aims to show that despite compromise, war, and struggle, African Americans are still not free DuBois shows through this historical analysis the extent to which, despite compromise, war and struggle, African Americans are still not free.

How does Freire define "education as the practice of freedom"?

He says it is based on conscious, authentic reflection by people about their relations with the world Education as the practice of freedom involves students' authentic, conscious reflection upon themselves and their relations with the world. Rather than enacting a scene where one person dominates another and transfers to her his ideologies about the world, students are seen as equal to teachers and they are challenged to draw upon their own wisdom and experience to consider what is true. Knowledge is not "given" to them; they find it for themselves through reflection.

What is DuBois' opinion about the outcome of the emancipation of slaves in the United States?

It has been a disappointment to African Americans because it did not bring true freedom for them Reflecting upon the disappointment felt by African Americans that emancipation did not translate into true freedom, DuBois wrote, "the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people".

what is Paulo Freire's banking model?

Oppressed, Freire argues that education is suffering from "narration sickness" (1972a, p. 45). Whether inside or outside schooling settings, the relationship between teacher and students tends to be overwhelmingly monological: The teacher narrates the subject matter to students who are expected to passively receive, memorize, and (if requested) repeat the content of the narration. This is the basis of the "banking" model of education. Teachers "deposit" ideas into students, who become receptacles or "depositories," waiting to be filled with the knowledge the teacher is assumed to possess Banking education is inherently oppressive; it regards students as "adaptable, manageable beings" teacher teaches, student is taught

Summarize Freire's two types of education

Problem-posing and banking education

what is problem-posing education according to Freire?

Problemposing education begins with the resolution of the "teacher-student contradiction" (p. 53). Teachers become both teachers and students (and vice versa): the relationship is one of "teacher-student" with "studentsteachers" (p. 53). Dialogue becomes the pivotal pedagogical process. Instead of issuing communique ´ s, the teacher communicates with students, and in so doing learns (and relearns) with them. The relationship between teacher and students, then, is horizontal rather than hierarchical. the teacher no longer teaches but one who himself taught in dialogue with students; constant unveiling of reality; based on creativity

How did duBois view progress?

Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly. Du Bois asserts that "the color line" divides people in the States, causes massive harm to its inhabitants, and ruins its own pretensions to democracy. He shows, in particular, how a veil has come to be put over African-Americans, so that others do not see them as they are; African-Americans are obscured in America; they cannot be seen clearly, but only through the lens of race prejudice. African-Americans feel this alien perception upon them but at the same time feel themselves as themselves, as their own with their own legitimate feelings and traditions. This dual self-perception is known as "double consciousness."

What does Freire mean when he says that education is suffering from a "narration sickness"?

Students are forced to memorize a narrative of facts and cultural values provided by a teacher According to Freire, education is suffering from a narration sickness in which teachers narrate "values or empirical dimensions of reality" to students who are forced to memorize them as facts without reflecting on whether any of it is meaningful for them personally.

What is "double-consciousness," as DuBois explains it?

The African American experience of seeing themselves from the point of view of whites and therefore not having full self-consciousness of themselves DuBois called double-consciousness "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity". It is the way in which African Americans are deprived of actual self-consciousness because they only know themselves through the image that is projected upon them by mainstream white society.

Restate DuBois' understanding about the experience of being African American

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

What did DuBois name as "the problem of the twentieth century"?

The problem of the color-line DuBois said that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line".

Appraise the applicability of DuBois' claims about the "Problem of the Twentieth Century" to a contemporary context

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. Masses of Negroes stood idle, or, if they worked spasmodically, were never sure of pay; and if perchance they received pay, squandered the new thing thoughtlessly. The Secretary of War could issue rations, clothing, and fuel to the destitute, and all abandoned property was placed in the hands of the Bureau for eventual lease and sale to ex-slaves in forty-acre parcels.promising every free AA 40 acres and a mule Negroes were not recognized in them as free; establish the institution of marriage among ex-slaves, and keep records; see that freedmen were free to choose their employers, and help in making fair contracts for them the freedmens bureau tried to put 30,000 black men to work. First, thirty thousand black men were transported from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms, back to the critical trial of a new way of working. Plain instructions went out from Washington: the laborers must be free to choose their employers, no fixed rate of wages was prescribed, and there was to be no peonage or forced labor. (sharecropping)

what is critical pedagogy?

the study of how race, class, colonialism shaped education - teachers asking why and students freely asking why am i learning this