Our Practices

“The awakening of critical consciousness leads the way to the expression of social discontents precisely because these discontents are real components of an oppressive situation”

• Critical consciousness is the way in which a person is finally aware of their surroundings. As the unoppressed, it is so easy to fall into the life we know and accept without question, so when critical consciousness is introduced to us before our very eyes, it is as if we are using our eyes through a new lense. Furthermore, this lense exposes the reality of the oppressed to the unoppressed, and allows for a conversation to begin between the two in order to make a better world together.
• There are opposers of critcal consciousness that believe that it will bring about archaism and destruction, but Freiere notes the declaration of a past factory-worker’s liberation using critical consciousness and how its effects are far from that: “…when I began this course I was naive, and when I found out how naive I was, I started to get critical. But this discovery hasn’t made me a fanatic, and I don’t feel any collapse either.” When the man understood the corruption of the system set in place that he labored for, it brought upon his ability to self-reflect and be able to understand society and its deepest flaws.
• Dehumanization is the struggle for humanization. The two are determined by the vocation of the people. I don’t know what he means by vocation here:
• The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.
• Dehumanization is not concrete; there is a constant fight against it. “The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.”
• “I started also recognizing the fantastic importance of the way people think, speak, act — — the design of it all. Then I have to understand the experience, the practice of the people. But I also know that wihtout practice there’s no knowledge; at least it’s difficult to know without practice.”
• Practice is a person’s way of living, while knowledge is created by practice, and spread to others regarding that practice.
• My understanding of authentic knowledge is best described here: “…I would say that we have to go beyond the common sense of the people, with the people. My quest is not to go alone but to go with the people…I can go beyond the common-sense understanding of how society works — -not to stay at this level but, starting from this, to go beyond.”
• The best way to gather authentic knowledge is to not separate myself from the people I encounter at Spahr Center. I want to be at the same human level with them mentally and absorb what I can about who they are and their kind of “practice.”