Today, education is progressively perceived as key to creating peace and harmony by transforming conflict into peace and accommodating differences. It features the significance of stopping violence and challenging the main drivers of violence while dealing with the structures and institutions that reproduce power and inequalities. Hence, there has been an increasing need in recent times for critical peace education.
Freiran concept of consciousness goes to control, authority, local/contextual meaning of themes, empowering voice, and agency integral to peaceful coexistence. Globalization has increased the importance of critical pedagogies across various disciplines: youth education, gender, terrorism, and wellbeing.
While doing Lorde's reading for class today, I was thinking about applying it to the general themes that Friere discusses in his writings. Lorde points out that different institutions are made to function a certain way, benefiting certain factions. Educators might not be able or reluctant to utilize their position for freedom, instead control those over which they (possibly) have power. It is likely that if they introduce changes, they promote their agendas under the pretext of empowering the marginalized. (further, enabling the reproduction of inequalities.) . Therefore, to understand the power structures that our society operates under, we must first question those things, themes, structures that we assume are "right" and "wrong." We need to be able to diagnose and unpack the meanings and purpose of different tools to ascertain the outcomes. However, this is a systemic change, and it requires transformative programming of the education system from the banking style to critical pedagogies.
I totally agree with Lorde's position here, that our institution benefit only a small fraction of people. Its all about power. Those who have power and who administer these institutions obviously run these institutions in a way that benefit that same group.
Very interesting post. I agree with what Lorde said that different institutions are made to function a certain way, benefiting certain factions. It is true for our education institutions as well. We have a hierarchy in our education system which benefits people from different social classes.
This ties very well with our discussion of Focault in class where we discussed that there is no fundamental truth to anything, and how power is everywhere around us. It is upto us to recognize the biases of people in power and the inequalities exacerbated by their use of power. Be it a teacher or a dictator.
While i do agree with you that there is a need to question what is right and what is wrong and that not everything is as it seems ,it may be more difficult than what it seems to identify hidden agendas and whom the power structure benefits as the education system is both very vast as well as highly complex.Actually going about the way lorde suggests is not that easy
Right points raised!