Part 8: Issues Beyond the Classroom
p. 487-561
The Role of Fear in Mass Media
What role does fear play in perpetuating the notion of acquiring a formal education? Does the corporate elite have a hidden agenda?
What's Wrong with Our Education System?
With this excerpt in mind, and after viewing the TedTalk, consider the following question:
Is the working class believed to not be "educated enough" because we are not being educated in a way that arms us with the skills needed to compete in today's workforce?
"In this battle for economic justice and racial social equality, TV, regardless of its sordid past, can play an important role" (Darder, p, 518).
The Attainment of Justice
How can television help us attain justice when "television in the United States is largely controlled by five massive transnational corporations" and these corporations are benefiting from the television audience becoming zombies, unable to critically examine the injustices the programming perpetuates? (p. 501).
or
Leistyna and Alper (2009) posit that we need to "encourage the widespread development of critical widespread media literacy" because "critical media literacy encourages us to not only think about culture politically, but also to think about politics culturally" (p. 517). Will the development of critical medial literacy skills help to attain justice?
Paulo Freire
Let's Talk about Love
After reading Darder’s moving epilogue about Paulo Freire I got so distracted/focused on all the videos of interviews with him and his many friends and colleagues. Thinking about Freire and love, listening to those who loved him, and tying it all in with learning, I felt an immense feeling of connection. As I tried to come up with a couple of provocative questions I realized that for me it all came down to, well, love. And, despite trying to create clever questions, it all came down to this:
1) What’s love got to do with it? (To borrow from a cheesey old song by Tina Turner)
AND
2) How did you feel after reading Darder’s epilogue?
“It is impossible to teach without the courage to try a thousand times before giving up. It is impossible to teach without a forged, invented, and well-thought-out capacity to love” (Freire, 1998. In Darder, p. 575)
Freire deeply believed that the rebuilding of solidarity among educators was a vital and necessary radical objective because solidarity moved against the grain of “capitalism’s intrinsic perversity, its anti-solidarity nature” (Freire, 1998. In Darder, p. 572)
“Freire’s brand of love stood in direct opposition to the insipid “generosity” of teachers or administrators who would blindly adhere to a system of schooling that fundamentally transgresses every principle of cultural and economic democracy” (Darder, p. 567).