Pedagogy and how it relates to power

My take of chapter one in “Pedagogy of the oppressed“. 

Seeing the author, Paulo Freire, has over used “Oppressor” and “Oppressed”, I’m going to go ahead and change them.  While keeping the same meaning, oppressor becomes “King” and oppressed becomes “Peaseant(peon for short).  I understand this complicates the process a bit, but I enjoy history and we all know the hierarchy of King over Peaseants.  So why not?(rhetorical)

The King dominates the Peaseants by any means possible, including physical and mental techniques.  At times this forces the Peaseants to lose humanity and become dehumanized.  When the Peons reach the last rung in the ladder of dehumanization they are stuck doing one of two things.  Either meet with the Grim Reaper or start a revolution to fight for their rights as human beings and not objects. 

The thing I find funny is that humans weren’t even aware of these problems until generally recently.  It wasn’t until, we as human beings, realized a concern for ourselves that any of this became an issue.  I guess them bloody Yank’s and their need for freedom from oppression started it all by starting a new country.  Skewed to our own perception we borrowed Democracy from some old men and called it our own.

I guess the only question I have is; Why are we reading this book instead of “Pedagogy of the City“?

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Power and how the King uses it to keep his Peons down.

I’ll start with defining Power using  en.wikipedia.org  “Power is a measure of an entity’s ability to control the environment around itself, including the behavior of other entities. The term authority is often used for power, perceived as legitimate by the social structure. Power can be seen as evil or unjust, but the exercise of power is accepted as endemic to humans as social beings.”  Simply put and in reference to what we’re working on, its the measure of the King’s ability to control the environment and behavior of his loyal subjects, the Peons.

Techniques used by Kings to maintain power include influence, inducement, persuasion, authority, coercion, and direct force.  There is always going to be a hierarchy of those who have power that are on top and those who don’t have power who happen to be on the bottom.  We see this hierarchy in our life every day.  You start school at pre-K at the lowest possible power status and rise to the top simply by reaching 8th grade(or 6th if you went to a middle school).  Once you hit the top you drop, yet again, to the bottom when you start High School.  It doesn’t matter if you go to college or join the work force, you still end up at the bottom and must work your way up.  Even if you graduate college and make it to the top at your chosen business you still havent reached the top.  There still is other people who out rank you with their power.  If you think the President of the United States is the highest you can go, you are wrong.  Think about when he goes home to his wife, who’s the boss then?  I guess that leaves you wondering who the top dog is.

I’m going to go into the techniques a little deep when I get time.

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Time after time, history demonstrates that when people dont want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether.

In every society people can be divided into categories, either the elites that posses power and influence or the masses who are lacking power and influence.

Legitimacy can be viewed as a sense that an individual or group who has power holds such power properly.  If the people whom they hold influence over dont view them as legitimate, their power will likely be short lived.