Dialogue in Education – from Martin Buber to Paulo Freire

 

        Buber’s breakthrough to dialogical thinking was the result not only of his struggle to come to terms with the death of Gustav Landauer but also of his turn to teaching at the Frankfurt Lehrhaus where he developed dialogue into his practice as a teacher. From there he brought dialogue into his work as an educator and theorist in both Germany and Israel. (He was a founding member of the board of governors of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem when it was founded in 1918.)

        Buber’s educational influence extended to Brazil, where Paulo Freire published his theory of liberatory education in Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968. Freire’s liberatory education, emerging as it did alongside liberation theology, was founded on dialogue as he found it in  I and Thou. In this work, Freire extended the dialogical principle to transformative educational practice.

        Freire presents education as “dialogical cultural action” in which subjects meet, not to replicate systems of domination (which would simply extend I-It relations), but rather to name the world in dialogue and thereby to transform it (148). This approach lifts the student from being a mere component part of a preexistent order to being a co-shaper of a possible, emerging liberated world (75).

        In his discussion of dialogue as liberatory action, Freire links it with several spiritual characteristics: love, humility, faith in mankind, mutual trust, hope, and critical thinking (68-75). He writes that

“the dialogical character of education is the practice of freedom.”

        I will never forget participating in a dialogue with Freire at the University of California in March of 1986. He responded to a question from a teacher about finding the balance in between focus on the present and focus on the future in working with students. He used a metaphor which put the emphasis on process and on hope: “the educator must put his or her weight on the foot that is taking the next step.”

        Like Buber, Freire presents us with an either/or, a set of alternatives that we must choose between, perhaps best summed up in the words of Jane Thompson:

There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the "practice of freedom," the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Martin Buber -- The Movie

 

        Martin Buber: Itinerary of a Humanist is a film that documents the life and thought of Martin Buber. It presents him as the third most famous Jewish thinker of the twentieth century along with Freud and Einstein. [Elsewhere, Buber has been regarded along with the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas as the greatest Jewish philosophical thinker since Maimonides in the twelfth century (Levinas and Buber: Dialogue and Difference, 2004).]

        The film uses a rich array of archival photographs and short clips from interviews with Buber experts across Europe and Israel to present Buber’s story. It traces his life journey, beginning with his birth in Vienna, the heart of the Hapsburg Empire, in 1878. Then we see the events in his personal life as well as his responses to the major events of his era, from the Zionist movement to World War I, to the Hitler period, to the founding of the State of Israel. Such events are the contexts within which his thinking evolved. Over the course of his life he interacted with a wide range of people in his correspondence if not face to face—Herzl, Kafka, Jung, Barth, Gandhi, and Hammarskjöld stand out.  In these relations and more broadly, the film shows how Buber courageously brought dialogue to concrete situations: to Jewish-Christian relations, to Arab-Israeli relations, and to the quest for world peace.

        The subtitle of the film—“Itinerary of a Humanist”—is of interest. In what sense was Buber a humanist? He wrote essays on “Biblical Humanism” and “Hebrew Humanism” and titled the lecture he gave on receiving the Erasmus Prize in Amsterdam in 1963 “Believing Humanism.” As he stated in that lecture, his concept of humanism was his vision of our humanity and our faith as fully interpenetrating. For this interpenetration, Buber referred to the Italian Renaissance as a European reference point in order to reach beyond it to the foundational expressions of faith within community enshrined in the Hebrew Bible. The film makes clear that Buber’s fidelity to Judaism was inseparable from his fidelity to the commonality of universal human reality. (For further discussion of this hybridity of the tradition-specific and the universal in Buber’s thought, see my Turning to the Other, pages 4-5 and 289-92.)

        Buber expressed the duality of tradition-specific truth and universal truth in a summative statement of his lifelong understanding:

The central truth of Judaism and Hasidism . . . has its origin in the immovable central existence of values that in the history of the human spirit and in the uniqueness of every great religion has again and again given rise to the basic attitudes concerning the authentic way of man.   (“Interpreting Hasidism” (1963) 221.)

        The film does a masterful job of presenting the spirit of a great man, a great thinker, in the context of his tumultuous times.

        Martin Buber: Itinerary of a Humanist [54 minutes] was produced in France in 1915 and is available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video.