Concerning Education "Reform": A Freire-Dewey Dialogue in Celebration of the 100th Anniversary of Democracy and Education

• In Event: 42.083 - Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: 42.083-6 - Freire, Democracy, and Anticolonial Research

Abstract

Corporate education “reform” is having a tragic impact in upstate New York. What would Freire and Dewey say about such state of affairs? I describe events observed in a typical kindergarten classroom after school reform and the impact of four categories of outsiders: corporate; the State; local district and school administration; and peer. I make theoretical connections to Dewey’s Democracy and Education and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in particular the precondition of dialogue for learning to take place. The authoritarian public school reform in some school districts are barriers to the development of democratic experience. Freirean and Deweyan thought support visions of democratic practices in schools. They call upon educators’ imaginative capacities for ethical leadership, which are always dialogic.

Author

• Tania Ramalho, SUNY - College at Oswego