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.

Last night in class as we were discussing Friere’s Banking model of education, someone wondered why this was just becoming an issue in the sixties and seventies. It seems hard to believe that no one had really thought to question the authority teachers/ instructors/ professors until this time.

It does seem to make sense though, when one considers the lack of universal education. Education was not a given until the relatively recent past. Women, the poor, even just anyone outside the upper elite wouldn’t have really had much of an opportunity for education. So, why would the upperclass elite sons of the aristocracy question what to them appeared as the greatest system on earth? The view would have looked pretty good from up there and if they hoped to stay there, why should they seek to change it?

And perhaps they did have a lively system of debate/ questioning within the confines of the elite tutor/ student relationship. Perhaps it was only when these professors and instructors were leaving these elite estates (which were often private home-schooling situations) for the slums of the city, and teaching the relatively ignorant poor that their professorial egos really got the best of them. Perhaps only then did they begin to see themselves as members of the intellectual elite bestowing their godlike knowledge on the ignorant savages of public education.

The universalization of school attendance may have led the way, and only later on, did the teaching model – which had worked well with small or individual, homogenous groups, but not so well with new groups entering the classroom – begin to catch up.

I was reading through some of the Enculturation articles, and I couldn’t seem to get the Sharon Crowley idea out of my head that, “[The] history of close ties between rhetoric and composition ended in the late-nineteenth century… when ‘composition’ acquired a new meaning and a new praxis…  given it by the Arnoldian humanists who invented the first-year requirement…”

That’s giving a lot of power to one mid-nineteenth century critic and those who would choose to follow.  Or, in Crowley’s words, those who would “kill off the vestiges of rhetorical study that remained in American colleges at the time.”  Why is “kill off the vestiges of” her preferred word choice?  Why not “changed” or “overshadowed” the former methods of rhetorical study?  Why give your enemies the power to take down the classical rhetoricians?  And they are, clearly, her enemies.  But she isn’t a rhetorical purist, either, falling back on the work of Charles Sears Baldwin, a late nineteenth early twentieth century rhetorician, in lieu of the ancient Greek or Roman writers.

It seems as though she is less concerned with the general removal of rhetoric from composition, and more concerned with the resulting methodology.  Sounds like a legitimate concern to me, and by the end of her piece I can’t help but be on board, for the most part, with her argument, but I feel that there is still room for “intellectual sophistication” and rhetoric in my composition class.