A Note From Paulo Freire.....
Firstly, I want to say how sorry I am that I cannot attend the Conference, to exchange ideas with participants, to have the experience of being in communication with them, learning and teaching, since it is impossible to learn without teaching.
I would really like to be there, to listen carefully to what men and women from other countries and cultures have to say about their dreams or against dreaming itself; about utopias or their denial. I not only wish but I need to find out how the conference participants characterise what is 'modern', without which it is impossible to talk about what is 'postmodern'. What makes us, say, describe a certain thinker as having a postmodern or just a modern education?
I would like actively to follow the discussions about whether the issue of postmodernity is an historical province in itself, a kind of sui generis meant in History as the starting point of a new History, almost without continuity with what went before or what is to come; without ideologies, utopias, dreams, social classes or struggles. It would be a 'round time', 'filled out', 'smooth', without 'edges', in which men and women would eventually discover that its main feature is neutrality. Without social classes, struggles or dreams to fight for, without the need for choice or, therefore, for changes, without the game of conflicting ideologies, it would be an empire of neutrality. It would be a denial of History itself.
I would like to discover whether, on the contrary, post modernity, like modernity, and traditionalism, on which presses a substantial number of connotations, implies a necessary continuity which characterises History itself as a human experience whose form of being can filter from one moment in time to another. In this sense, each moment in time is characterized by the predominance and not by the exclusivity of its connotations.
For me, postmodernity today, like modernity yesterday, by conditioning the men and women caught up in it, does not destroy nor did it destroy what we call their nature, which not being a priori of History, has been socially constructed exclusively through it.
Maybe we can say, using my own argument, that the strength of History, on whose experience human is constructed, or is being constructed and reconstructed, is sufficient to reshape it totally in such a way that one day men and women might no longer recognise themselves in general terms as beings resembling their ancestors.
It seems clear, however, that certain expressions, or certain ways of being human, reveal themselves in time or space in different ways. But we cannot negate the different ways they manifest themselves.
Throughout History, for instance, the need for certainty about the world has been imposed upon men and women. Certainty contrasted by doubt.
This need was imposed on human beings to such an extent that its absence was an obstacle to human fellowship.
One of the characteristics of modernity was the mystification of certainty. Scientific thinking dogmatically established certainty as being too certain about certainty. As religiosity had previously dogmatised its certainty.
Rigorous methods of approaching and understanding the object turned certainty into a myth (which was previously of a different quality), in the absence of methodical precision. It was modernity's methodical precision, or the mythification of that precision, or perhaps the myth of even greater precision in its findings, that denied the importance of the senses, desires, emotions, of passion in the ways or practice of knowing.
I understand, on the other hand, that as well as there being progressives and reactionaries in former times and modernity, we also find them in postmodernity. There is a reactionary as well as a progressive way of being postmodern.
Postmodernity is not free from conflicts, therefore from choices, changes, and decisions.
For me, a progressively postmodern educational practice - which I have followed ever since I emerged shyly into the limelight in the 1950s - is based on democratic respect for the learner as one of the subjects of the process. It treats teaching-learning as an inquisitive and creative moment when educators recognise and reform knowledge previously known and when learners grasp and reproduce what was previously unknown. It is one that uncovers truths instead of hiding them. It is one that encourages purity as a virtue and fights against puritanism as a denial of virtue.
It is one that humbly learns from differences and rejects arrogance.
Paulo Freire
São Paulo, Brazil September 1993
Fonte: Nota de Paulo Freire para a “Internacional Conference and Development in a Postmodern Era: Re-evaluating the Freirean Legacy”, 6-9 December 1993, Universiti Sains Malaysia. Penang, Malaysia
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