Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. (Simone de Beauvoir, in Freire).1
I picked up Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed this morning to reread chapter 2 for #moocmooc and, as I read it was struck by how much it resonated with my feelings about our awful, bullying conservative government and the edicts of the eejits like Gove and the rest of them, trying to turn all of our children into obedient little drones to service the capitalist empire that they and their cronies own.
I came into work this morning ready to rant about capitalism and oppression in this blog post and found that Maha wrote a blog post yesterday about how Freire chimed with her in the context of the Jan 25th revolution in Egypt (and see Michael Weller‘s comment on the post), so I’m not the only one making connections to my own perceptions of our modern society.
Cameron@s recent attitude towards data encryption comes from a concern, I would argue, that the masses revolt against his government’s oppressive austerity. Another world is possible. (I found the link to this book by googling, keep meaning to read it.)
