Freire and Fish - an opportunity for a beautiful friendship

When I first began reading Stanley Fish’s Save the World on Your Own Time I was fully prepared to disagree with everything he said. I was primed with the idea that Fish would be contradictory to the material we read in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  After reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed I was prepared to take on Freire’s ideas and implement them into my classroom, specifically: opening up space for dialogue, so that both the student and teacher are in a continual state of learning from each other’s experiences. I believe that with this type of education, we can achieve higher levels of learning, specifically in regards to understanding perspectives outside of our own experiences.

I read Fish’s introduction and thought to myself, this guy is a real asshole. My jaw dropped when he wrote that he had told his students, “I hadn’t the slightest interest in whatever opinions they might have and didn’t want to hear any.” I interpreted this to mean that Fish did not care about his students, and was in the profession for all the wrong reasons. In he next section of the introduction however, he describes a situation in which a student was struggling with the material, and Fish worked through the problem, attacking it from a wide variety of angles until he understood. I was conflicted. Then I started in on his material, and when Fish writes in a less abrasive manner, his ideas actually seem quite reasonable.

Fish claims that teachers should not try to impose their own personal ideologies on students – rather they should focus on teaching the students the material at hand. While some people might argue that it is impossible to separate personal politics from the classroom, I think there is value in this idea. As I mentioned earlier, I found myself drawing connections between Fish and Freire. I found this section of fish relatable to Freire’s idea that in order to allow learners to liberate themselves, we should provide them with foundational tools. In order to develop critical thinkers in the classroom, we cannot impose our beliefs on them, but rather give them the tools necessary to understand and evaluate the world around them, and then open up a dialogic sphere, where students and teachers can debate, test, and refine their theories and opinions.

Then, Fish becomes an asshole again. As soon as he’s got me buying into his pedagogical theories, he defined “academizing” in such a way, that my conclusion about this theory is nullified. “To academize a topic is to detach it from the context of its real world urgency, where there is a vote to be taken or an agenda to be embraced, and insert it into a context of academic urgency, where there is an account to be offered or an analysis to be performed (27).” To separate one’s own political ideologies from the classroom does not mean that we have to detach the subjects from their real world urgency. To insert these topics into a context of academic urgency is not mutually exclusive from allowing the students to recognize the real life implications and real world impacts of the topics that arise in classroom discussion.

Thus begins my back and forth struggle through reading Stanley Fish. I believe that he has relevant concerns, and decent ideas, but he takes them to such an extreme where he precludes the possibility of allowing his students to grow on their own, and his ability to learn from his students. Another prime example of this comes on page 54, where he lists “no-no’s” of universities.

• ·      A classroom that teaches the virtues of critical analysis and respectful debate can go at least some way to form citizens for a more deliberative democracy.
• ·     A liberal arts college or university that helps young people to learn to speak in their own voices and to respect the voices of others will have done a great deal to produce thoughtful and potentially creative world citizens.
• ·      The aims of a strong liberal education include… shaping ethical judgment and a capacity for insight and concern for others.
• ·      Contemporary liberal education must look beyond the classroom to the challenges of the community, the complexities of the workplace, and major issues in the world.
• ·      Students need to be equipped for living in a world where moral decisions must be made.

I simply don’t understand why he sees these stances as so polarized and opposite to his own teaching philosophy. He overgeneralizes these positions in his response to them to the point of absurdity. Like when he says, “You shouldn’t respect the voices of others simply because they are others… you should respect the voices of those others whose arguments and recommendations you find coherent and persuasive (54).” I don’t know of a single educator who would argue that we should respect the opinions of others that are sexist, racist or bigots simply because they are others. Instead, we seek to provide the foundational tools to help our students understand where these opinions come from, and break down the historical context that allows these opinions to permeate the media and popular opinion, so that they might form their own new opinions on these subjects.

As an educator, I will heed some of the advice of Stanley Fish. I believe that it is important to separate my own political ideologies from the classroom to allow space for students to develop their own opinions and arguments. I hope that I am able to effectively provide them with the foundational tools to be able to do this. Certainly I hope that my students will come to conclusions that jive with my own opinions, but ultimately what I care about is that they are able to make informed decisions, critically evaluate the information that they use to develop these decisions, and defend them intelligently. I believe that in this light, Fish and Freire are not as diametrically opposed as I was originally led to believe.