solidaridad: Harvard

First published on @TCFKSM on May 31, 2013

"I stayed with Marx in the worldliness,
looking for Christ in the transcendentality." — Paolo Freire

On May Day 2013, Harvard's Askwith Forum commemorated the 45th anniversary of the publication of Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed with a discussion about the book's impact and relevance to education today. Chuck Leddy tweeted about his write up of the event entitled Subversive education, and the video posted of the entire talk.

"To achieve critical consciousness of the facts that it is necessary to be the "owners of one's own labor," that labor "constitutes part of the human person," and that "a human being can neither be sold nor can he sell himself" is to go a step beyond the deception of palliative solutions. It is to engage in authentic transformation of reality in order, by humanizing that reality, to humanize woman and men." — Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

While those of us that eat, breath, and sleep critical pedagogy would have probably selected different speakers (Macedo, Giroux, and P. L. Thomas perhaps?) to discuss the book's anniversary, it's refreshing that Harvard would even discuss it at all.

The best part of the video occurs at around the 50:00 mark when a young woman from India, who says Freire was a major component in her education there, makes a very profound statement condemning Harvard saying that "there's no space for Marxist thought..." at the university (any surprise?). Professor Bruno della Chiesa's criticisms of the PISA tests around the 56:00 mark are interesting too.

Professor Noam Chomsky's various insights make sense if you are familiar with his work, and the fact that he's always a little uncomfortable discussing ideas of Marxist scholars like Freire as opposed to those of anarcho-syndicalists. Chomsky finally hits stride around 1:06:00 where he sets up the purpose of education under class society, and several minutes later calls out "No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top, which means Every Child Left Behind and Race to the Bottom."

Freire's watershed book does far more than explain the oppressions of class society, and make the case against the banking concept of education. His framework of critical pedagogy challenges students to formulate problem posing questions in response to limit situations. That framework is as radical, and, as Chomsky mentions, dangerous, a skill as one can possess during this age of total corporate domination.

I find the best introduction to provide those unfamiliar with Freire's work is Adrienne Johnstone and Elizabeth Terzakis' "Pedagogy and Revolution: Reading Freire in Context" chapter in Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation. An excerpt of the chapter is available online. However, there's no substitute for reading Freire's canon itself.

END RACIST SCHOLARSHIP! DEMAND A PUBLIC APOLOGY TO THE LATINO COMMUNITY BY JASON RICHWINE AND HIS HARVARD DISSERTATION COMMITTEE!

Sign the Online Petition:

https://www.change.org/petitions/end-racist-scholarship-demand-a-public-apology-to-the-latino-community-by-jason-richwine-and-his-harvard-dissertation-committee

INTRODUCTION Jason Richwine in his capacity as a Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation, co-authored a controversial report arguing that immigration reform will cost about 6.3 trillion more in benefits than the country can collect from undocumented immigrants in taxes, attributing the gap to lack of human capital while cynically noting that the cost would be lower if the workers remain undocumented as this would keep them from accessing public benefits.

In his Heritage report, Richwine builds on the same arguments found in his 2009 doctoral dissertation, “IQ and Immigration”, from Harvard University. Based on outdated and repudiated research and methods, which we consider irresponsible and racist, the dissertation argues:

“Hispanic immigrants and their children have a low average IQ, which prevents the second generation from achieving equality with the native majority. Parental expectations for their children are not met, because they cannot be, given the level of intelligence present in the community.”

This kind of pseudo-science disguised as “scientific scholarship”, employs deficit reasoning that positions ethnic “minorities” and the working class as deficient rather than viewing people in dignified ways. We believe that Harvard University needs to apply stricter criteria in assessing not just the merits of scholarship but weigh its ideological content and effect.

DEMANDS: WE DEMAND A PUBLIC APOLOGY TO THE LATINO COMMUNITY BY JASON RICHWINE AND HIS DISSERTATION COMMITTEE, DR. GEORGE J. BORJAS, DR. RICHARD J. ZECKHAUSER, AND DR. CHRISTOPHER JENCKS.

WE DEMAND HARVARD UNIVERSITY CHANGE ITS RESEARCH POLICIES.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Support this cause by signing on to this online petition and help us reach our goal of 5,000 signatures. We call on all progressive scholars, community members, educators and students, to denounce this kind of work and pressure universities so that they are responsible in their research.

You can contact directly members of Jason Richwine’s committee, who we believe are just as responsible for this kind of scholarship as Jason Richwine, and Harvard’s Institutional Review Board.

Dissertation committee:
George J. Borjas, gborjas@harvard.edu http://gborjas@harvard.edu , 617-495-1393 617-495-1393
Richard J. Zeckhauser, richard_zeckhauser@harvard.edu http://richard_zeckhauser@harvard.edu , 617-495-1174 617-495-1174
Christopher Jencks, christopher_jencks@harvard.edu http://christopher_jencks@harvard.edu , 617-495-0546 617-495-0546

Harvard University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB):
Fanny Ennever, Senior IRB Administrator, fennever@fas.harvard.edu http://fennever@fas.harvard.edu, 617-495-1775 617-495-1775

Organizational Endorsements of This Campaign: Send organizational endorsements of this online petition campaign to RACE.organization@gmail.com<http://RACE.organization@gmail.com>

Access Jason Richwine’s dissertation: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/08/jason-richwine-dissertation_n_3240168.html