Friday, February 2, 2007

You Learn Something New Every Day

I had a meeting with some people from the Boston Faith & Justice Network (BFJN) tonight. There a group that I'm involved with that is seeking Justice as an expression of Gods Love in Boston. Check it out. Anyway, we were evaluating a recent retreat that we had over Martian Luther King weekend. We ended up talking about education. Ah the US educational System, packing a building with hormonal teenagers, giving them sugar at lunch, and expecting miracles.

But.....There is another way. Popular Education. This guy, Paulo Freire, developed this idea that there are two methods of educating people, Bank & Popular. In the Bank method there is someone who holds all the knowledge and he deposits it in his students brain's. This as you can tell is the education system used most thought the world. Some of us, like myself, never got the hang of it. But Popular education its all about learning from our own experiences and from others. You ask hard questions that encourage people to really think about the world around them.

Not surprisingly this has been a popular tool with Justice minded people. A tile of one of Freire's books is even called "Pedagogy of the Oppressed".

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