Preemptive apology: It’s late. I’m tired. My grammar here may (probably will) suck. Please don’t send me to the you-know-what.
So, I guess it is somewhat funny that I name-dropped an anarchist (Joseph Déjacque, strictly due to Paulo Freire’s usage of the word “libertarian” (2)) into a conversation about an author who was a Marxist (as I believe was stated during class; however, I did the big no-no and looked him up on Wikipedia to discover that he was a Marxist humanist). It’s also somewhat embarrassing. However, this shows how effective propaganda can be when used correctly.
I decided, as an experiment, to reread “The “Banking” Concept of Education” and highlight every instance where the words “reactionary” (or any word closely related, i.e., “reaction”) or “revolutionary” (or any word closely related) were used. The first time I stumbled across the word “oppression” (Freire 1), I decided to highlight any employment of that word (and any word closely related to it), as well. Needless to say, by the end of the second page, I realized that this task was going to be quite large. I also started highlighting additional words as I continued reading (I’ll do a small list at the end).
What this task taught me was two-fold. First, while I’ve always understood the power of words, and the importance of repetition with key words, I don’t believe I had a full understanding of how powerful they actually can be. As I stated in my previous post, by the end of the article, I had visions of barricades in my head. I had originally thought that this was simply a part of my character. While there can be no doubt that my own personal feelings played a part in this, I now understand that this was Freire’s intention. By appealing to my emotions, especially as they were already highly sympathetic to Freire, Freire transformed me from a simple radical into one of his “revolutionary educators” (3).
The second thing I learned was far simpler. I have way too much free time.
Words/Ideas (with number of appearances)*, in no particular order: Alienated (8), Oppression/Suppression/Subordination/Repression (28), Freedom/Liberty (12), Domination (8), Dehumanization/Domestication (5), Revolution/Revolutionary (11), Reaction/Reactionary (2, but I probably missed some), Solidarity (3). *I did all of this with a physical copy, so I know that I probably missed quite a few words.