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.