9b: Liberation Literacy

Freire’s article reminds me of a quote I once came across by Edward Sapir. He says, “Language and our thought-grooves are inextricably related, are, in a sense, one and the same.” In this sense, language is more than a mere technology as Ong suggests. It would seem, according to Freire, Sapir and others in their school of thought, that language is a crucial organizational tool for our development and progression toward understanding and conceptualizing our human condition. Language helps us cope with and convey to others the chaotic world which we inhabit. Without language, humans would not be – well, human. For all human situations around the world, and as deep into our history as we have been able to explore, language has been and continues to be the driving force of human society. The evolution of language has expanded our dictionaries into massive volumes and our libraries into sprawling estates as we try to define our very core existence and essence in words. For some people, language can be a frustrating labyrinth through which they struggle to reach a point. For others, language is like the air, flowing in and out as easily as a breath. To capture the vast phenomena of life in a capsule as limiting as language is a frustratingly fascinating struggle with which we will continue to toil. To marginalize man from language is to marginalize him from humanity altogether. It is to expel him from his species and shackle him in the cuffs of animalistic primitivism. Because, as Freire states, “language is impossible without thought, and language and thought are impossible without the world to which they refer” (7), language is experienced as the medium through which the world and man affect each other. Without the knowledge of language, and without the language to cultivate knowledge, illiterates are subjugated by those who possess language. Although teachers are not Hitler or the Catholic Church, manipulation through the “’digestive’ concept of knowledge so common in current educational practice” (3) reinforces power imbalance and marginalization of students. To liberate the objects of such practice is to allow learners to take possession of language (and thus their world). Freire brilliantly outlines why and how adult literacy processes should recognize and implement more effective uses of this Inception concept of literacy.