We don’t trust the poor (and they don’t trust themselves): Further reflections on Freire

I was happy to see the lively discussion in the comments section after my last blog about literacy, subversion, and Paulo Freire, but realized from several people’s responses that some of what I am trying to communicate has been misunderstood. Some people seemed to think that I am throwing out everything I have previously talked about on this blog (especially Jesus) in order to focus exclusively on education as the answer for all problems faced by humankind. I want to clarify that this is not the case.

I am not saying that learning to read is an end in itself, or the key to human liberation. What I am saying is that learning to read is a means of nurturing critical thought, which is the starting place for human liberation. Many of us in the West have had minimal, if any, contact with illiterate people. Now that I live in a community where the vast majority of people cannot read, I recognize how much I have taken for granted the basic problem-solving and critical thinking skills that my education cultivated in me. Being able to read and write was the beginning of being able to learn about my world, to encounter new ideas, and to develop my sense of self as I expressed and explored my own thoughts, experiences, and opinions. So much of my faith has been mediated to me through the written word. Nearly all of my ideas about the things in the world that I have not seen for myself—economies, food systems, histories of entire societies, foreign countries and the ways that other cultures have interacted with my own—have come from books. It was through the written word that I learned about my body, how to care for it, how to understand what was happening when I got sick or caught an infection, and how to prevent or treat those problems when they occurred. It was through the written word that I learned about nutrition, about child psychology, about democracy. It was through the written word that I became employable. It was largely through the written word that I learned about Jesus.

Now imagine for a moment that you are not able to read your own scriptures. You are not able to read a newspaper. You are not able to look up information on WebMD, or to even read the prescription that a doctor gives you. You are not able to open bank account, to enroll your child in school, or to even write down the address of a friend or an office you want to visit. You rely completely on the local mullah or the rumors going around your neighborhood or the folklore of your grandparents to mediate the world to you.

Imagine how small that world will be; how your ignorance will prevent you from encountering any new ideas, from questioning anything you are told, or from seeking to change any of the destructive or unjust circumstances you find yourself in. Without a means of acquiring any information for yourself, and without the critical thinking skills to investigate the world and to form your own opinions about it, how will you ever know that there is a different way to live than the way that you and all the people you know are living right now? How will you begin to hope for anything?

That is the narrow, constricted world of many of my neighbors. That is why I think it is important for them to learn how to read: not so that I can simply deposit my worldview into their minds like empty containers, but so that I can empower them to think for themselves and have a chance of discovering for themselves the possibility of wholeness in their lives. If they are empowered to think critically and to consider new ideas, then we can dialogue together, learn from each other, and be a community that fosters spiritual, intellectual, and emotional growth. Dialogue will be something we engage in together, imagining new possibilities and shaping one another as equals.

It will take time, and I don’t know where that path of dialogue in community will lead, because I will not be the one controlling it. But I know that the path from ignorance to knowledge, from worthlessness to dignity, from blindness to sight—that path is the path to freedom. And it is only from a place of freedom that human beings are able to love. I believe God wants humans to be free agents capable of choosing love, rather than mindless followers who are motivated by ignorance or fear.

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A few nights ago we attended a meeting centered around promoting literacy in India. An expert in the field was gave a lecture about the dismal failure of the education system to teach students how to read simple sentences or to recognize numbers 10-99 after several years of schooling, and then outlined the literacy curriculum she has designed to take Hindi-speaking children and adults from illiteracy to being able to read a newspaper in the space of approximately a month (A. and I have been trialing this curriculum in our slum with encouraging results). As soon as the lecture was over, a microphone was passed around the room and one dignified personage after another began pontificating about the reasons why the poor don’t want to learn, or aren’t learning. Each person was well-dressed and most of them were addressing the group in English, a conspicuous marker of education and status. Most of them were speaking authoritatively about the poor based on limited experience interacting with the people who worked in their homes as servants. We were sitting in an air-conditioned, wood-paneled room drinking chilled water from plastic bottles. Meanwhile, back in our slum (and perhaps the slums in which their servants live) the power was out and everyone was giving up on the idea of being able to sleep in the stuffy darkness with no air movement and temperatures still hovering above 90 degrees.

As is often the case with such meetings, well-intentioned wealthy people had congregated to applaud each others commitment to social causes and to take shots in the dark about to help the poor without consulting any actual poor people at all. Here we were debating the causes of illiteracy and the way forward, but there was not a single illiterate person in our midst, much less someone who could speak from experience about how they personally had managed to become literate in spite of poverty and the barriers it created. To me, this demonstrates a lack of trust in the poor; an assumption that they would have nothing of value to contribute to our discussion.

Of course, we were at this fancy reception, too, enjoying the air-conditioning and lavish food: wealthy foreigners among the wealthy. Yes, A. and I would go home to the sweaty power outage in the slum at the end of the night, and step over the kids from downstairs who fell asleep in front of our doorway trying to take advantage of any chance breeze that might sweep across the roof. We would breathe a sigh of relief in the unscripted familiarity of “home” after so much awkward social mixing. But the point is that we were invited to this elite gathering that our neighbors would have never been included in. We still move easily between the worlds of the downtrodden and the powerful because although we may have committed ourselves to the cause of the oppressed, we are not the oppressed. And like the elite philanthropists at the literacy meeting, I also struggle with a lack of trust of the poor—even though I have committed myself to my neighbors in many other ways. It would be bad form, bad development, to voice it, but sometimes we agree with our neighbors’ assessment of themselves: “You’re right—you may not be able to do this. It would be a lot easier if I just did it for you. Listen to my advice. Adopt my opinion. Listen to my idea. Become more like me.” We talk about empowerment, but deep down we’re afraid that our neighbors are just going to screw it all up. Their thinking is so narrow, their self-esteem is so low, their dreams are so small.

The poor carry with them the “deformities” of having been oppressed. Often their bodies have not fully developed because of malnutrition. Their minds have not fully developed because in addition to lacking food they have lacked opportunities for learning as well. Their sense of self has not fully developed because they have always been told that they are small, unimportant, and incapable. “Just let us do it for you, you can’t do anything to help yourself,” so many people have communicated to them when they’ve come in to “help.” “No need to think about creative solutions, we have the answer for you, because we are the ones who know,” others have insinuated when they come in with their ready-made programs, assuming complete ignorance and passivity on the part of the poor and never stopping to ask for input or participation. Because of all these factors working against them, poor people often do lack the confidence and the skills to help themselves, and they adopt the passive, dependent role assigned to them. Others’ lack of confidence in them inspires a lack of trust in themselves. The poor have been robbed of the very tools they would need to break free of this cycle: critical thinking to re-imagine themselves and their world, and to realization that their unjust situation “is not a closed world from which there is no exit,” but rather “a limiting situation which they can transform.” This can sometimes make our interactions with poor people extremely frustrating.

We who have enjoyed life’s advantages, on the other hand, are able to problem solve and plan ahead and think critically. We’re well-spoken and capable. But we carry with us the “deformities” of our background, too. One of these is our misconception that we are the ones who know… meaning that they are the ones who don’t know; they are lesser and can’t be entrusted with such an important and difficult task as transforming their lives! We need to be disabused of the idea of our superiority and independence so that we can become more fully human ourselves, by acknowledging our interdependence with others and allowing ourselves to be humbled and changed by our fellow human beings in community. If we want to acknowledge our neighbors’ full humanity and their innate human vocation alongside us as “co-creators” in the world, then we must be willing to work patiently alongside each other.

 

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Conscientização 

n. Critical consciousness. Portuguese origin.
Recently, a friend of ours who was passing through introduced us to the writings of Paulo Freire. Freire is a Brazilian academic who is well-renowned for his alternative education methods, but he’s not your typical university professor—Freire’s adult literacy campaigns in Brazil landed him in jail for over two months and then political exile for several years after that. Since we just began teaching literacy to adults and children in our slum three weeks ago, we probably couldn’t have begun reading his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed at a more appropriate time. His theories concern a lot more than how to teach peasants how to read. They have to do with empowering the oppressed in society to retake their rightful place as full human beings—a task which involves no small amount of social upheaval. Freire says that the true purpose of education should be the process of making the oppressed conscious of their own identity as human beings, conscious of the unjust situation they are in, and conscious of their power to change it. He writes about education as a process of human liberation; a “subversive force” which helps individuals to reclaim their humanity after they have lost it by either dehumanizing others or by being objectified and controlled by others. The bottom line is the pursuit of wholeness for everybody, oppressed and oppressors alike.

In our slum, we see this need for wholeness, and we see the link between illiteracy and oppression. Not being able to fill out a form, to read a prescription, or even to recognize your own name makes you vulnerable to extortion and deceit. It makes it impossible for you to claim your rights (if you can figure out what they are in the first place). It means that you’ll live in unquestioning fear of the police, and bribe them to do what they’re already paid to do, or to refrain from doing what is illegal for them to do. It also means that you’ll have to pay thousands or rupees in “baksheesh” to doctors, nurses, and even cleaning people in order to get a “free” surgery at a government hospital, without ever raising your voice in protest, lest the powerful people get angry and refuse to treat you at all.

This same sense of powerlessness, engendered by lack of education, is a big reason why so many of the skinny, malnourished children we know work long hours at tedious manual jobs polishing furniture in factories owned by fat, wealthy owners who enjoy big profit margins from exporting the finished product. These owners call the expendable, underpaid laborers who create their wealth “dirty” and “cheap”, looking down on them for their ignorance and low station in society.

Meanwhile, the illiterate widows we know travel on foot from their bamboo and plastic shacks to the flashy apartments of the wealthy to wash dishes and clean floors for a few cents a day, knowing that they can’t afford to ask for a fair wage because so many other, more desperate women from the villages are willing to take their places at even lower pay. Their employers give them bonuses, food, or hand-me-down clothes at holidays and imagine themselves to be generous benefactors; the domestic helpers gratefully accept this false charity because they consider themselves helpless and unimportant, and they count themselves fortunate to have attached themselves to such important people who sometimes, on a whim, toss them a bone. In all of these situations, the rich consider themselves divinely ordained to privilege and power over others while the poor consider themselves powerless dependents. Everyone involved ends up with a distorted view of themselves, and no one’s humanity is left in tact.

Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I love the connections between Freire’s concept of education as human liberation and Jesus’ teachings about the role of the oppressed in the Kingdom of God. The book sheds light on what Jesus the servant-King meant when he declared that it is the poor to whom the kingdom belongs: it belongs to the poor because they are the only ones capable of ushering it in through the love and radical forgiveness of their oppressors. Freire writes that “the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity… become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.” The special mission of the oppressed throughout history is to “liberate themselves and their oppressors as well” because those “who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.” The power that springs from weakness is love, and it is exemplified by Jesus in his reliance on forgiveness rather than vengeance to overcome the world.

So the point of marginalized people learning to read isn’t just to open up job opportunities, although literacy does do that. The point is to change the way that the poor perceive themselves. Education should be a process through which “each man wins back his right to say his own word, to name the world.” It should be a process through which the poor begin to think critically about reality instead of just accepting whatever interpretation of reality has been handed on to them from someone else; a growing realization that they, too, are “creators of culture, and that all their work can be creative. ‘I work, and working I transform the world.’” The point of teaching literacy is to help the oppressed recognize the transformative power within themselves.

*All quotes are taken from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire, 1970

The Neglected Center

This week I read a very insightful article* about cultivating a “spirituality of contentment” through living a simple lifestyle that draws us into greater connection with God, our neighbors, the Creation, and ourselves. The author of this article, Dee Dee Risher, writes as a seasoned veteran of this approach to life, and as someone who is well-acquainted with its particular gifts and struggles. She is aware that “simple living” has the ironic tendency of becoming a very complicated existence which obsesses over material concerns: how many things do we own? How much money do we spend? How many square feet do we live in? According to Risher, all of these material concerns as a tell-tale sign that the external changes in our lives have outpaced the inner transformation of our heart, so that we are ascetically denying ourselves of things without moving toward some alternative. Simplicity, she says, is not about going without. Its about building something new: moving positively toward a fuller life that would have been impossible without the clutter in our lives being cleared away. If we try to throw off the yoke of mainstream culture without developing an alternative dream, then we will never be content because we will always be longing for the very things we have decided to set aside. For most of us middle- and upper-class North Americans, the narrative that has been programmed into us is upward mobility, accumulation of possessions, comforts, and status. It involves making a place for ourselves in the world and then sitting back to enjoy the fruits of our labors, letting others compete with us and fare poorly or well as they may. This is essentially the American Dream. If we want to walk a different path, then we need a different dream to guide us, because merely building our identity or our life in opposition to something will only turn us into a hollow inverse of what we wish to change. We won’t have created anything new.

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I resonated with this problem of externals outpacing internals. Perhaps that’s exactly what’s happened to me, living in the slum. Up til now, my spiritual growth has always been driven by external experiences. As I have chosen to act on what I felt was right, what I read in the gospels of Jesus’ life, my experiences of reaching out to others to serve them and to get to know them has always led me into deeper understanding and experience with God. External actions and circumstances have seemed to drive internal transformation, and perhaps that’s as it must be, in the beginning. Until we leave the realm of what we already know, how can we encounter anything new, or challenging, or larger than ourselves?

But I think this necessary and appropriate pattern may have led me, somewhere along the way, to mistake the means for the end. Serving the poor is the ultimate goal, I decided, living as simply as possible in the worst possible place and doing as much as possible to help. Alas, I am discovering that the opposite is true: compassion and service and simplicity should be the means of communing with God, of recognizing God in myself and the people around me (especially the suffering poor), and of joyfully living in Love’s embrace.

How did Jesus live? I asked myself. He hung out with outcasts, poor people, blind people, sick people, enemy soldiers, their yellow-bellied tax collector cronies, and heretical half-breeds like the Samaritans. So that’s what I’ll do, I thought. Find the poor and the outcasts, befriend them, tell them that God loves them, and invite them into the community of the Kingdom in which there is always a place for them at the table.

What I failed to realize until I was smack-dab in the middle of the needy crowds, trying to offer hope to the down-and-out people spit out by the system, was that Jesus didn’t just up and begin his mission with the sheer force of willpower. It takes more than principles or warm fuzzies to sustain any kind of long-term commitment to the messy occupation of loving other people, particularly in a demanding and depressing context like a slum. I neglected to pay attention to the forty days of fasting and prayer in the desert which immediately preceded Jesus’ public life, the lonely hours of prayer and solitude which sustained it, and the 30 years of spiritual preparation that preceded it. Jesus was only able to do what he did because of his strength constantly being renewed by God inside Him. He was only able to maintain hope among misery because of his intense awareness of God’s loving presence; to experience joy in the midst of exhaustion and suffering because he was already well-experienced in cultivating an awareness of God’s presence in all circumstances; to weather frequent rejection and confrontation, and eventually total betrayal, because by the time these things happened to him, he had such an unshakeable sense of his identity as the Beloved of God that he was entirely free from the opinions of others—free enough to serve others without any need of gratitude, to love even those who repaid his compassion with hatred.

This incredible love and courage was only possible for Jesus because he had already experienced this unconditional love in the depths of his own being. It had defined him, and it had become the root of everything he did.

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As for me, all the labor of love has been exhausting, and my feverish attempts to pour myself out has revealed an emptiness in myself that I was never aware of before. Now its impossible to ignore the aching expanse within myself that has yet to be filled with the unconditional love of God. I am yet to claim my identity as the Beloved, and am desperately trying to build an identity for myself out of all the good things I am doing. See how much I suffer! See how much I am willing to sacrifice! My soul yells. I will earn your love yet. And yet…

God is not waiting for a display of faithful obedience, for exploits of courage and self-denial in order to embrace me. He embraces me with my empty hands and tattered clothes, as the beggar that I am. As the child who could ever do anything to make her Parent love her more or less. As the Prodigal son, returned home after all his fruitless attempts at making a life worth living for himself apart from the love of his Father.

I am the poor, I am the sick, I am the rejected. I wait in grief and hope for the mercy of God to reveal my true identity to me, for God to rock me to sleep in strong arms like a newborn baby, safe and wanted and loved. My neighbors often bear their scars and their struggles openly on their faces and in the rough edges of their lives, but mine are hidden inside.

I am the poor and they are me. God is in us, and we are in Him. Perhaps the whole purpose of life is for us to realize, together, the depth of our poverty, and to help one another to accept the Love that will satisfy it.

*Cultivating A Spirituality of Contentment by Dee Dee Risher

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