What I’ve Needed to Know as Told by Paulo Freire and Amy Phoeler

"To the oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion." (Freire, pg. 47)

And now, please enjoy this clip of Amy Poehler’s address to the 2011 Harvard graduates. And yes, I am going to try to combine this with Freire; hang with me.

In case you didn’t have 15 minutes to give to this video, let me summarize. Basically, Poehler (a comedic genius) puts forth her best advice for this graduating class (which is a group of students who were mere middle-schoolers when 9/11 occurred which gave new meaning to ‘fear’) that life is best lived when you surround yourself with a group of people that “challenge and inspire you” and that the “answers to life’s questions are in someone else’s face.” She so eloquently points out that although these Harvard graduates have achieved an academic feat both rare and idolized; the reality is that the world in which we live is far more complex than a degree can make sense of. She basically challenges these graduates to place themselves among people who can give them new understandings and move to a place where fear no longer dominates our world.

Harvard graduates are not oppressed. Or are they? These are the people who have followed the oppressors guidelines and come out on top, but (without getting too Woodson on you) have still been mis-educated. They were told that the best way to find “human completion” was to get that outstanding degree. This was probably acquired, for many, as a gift based purely on their class status (oh, hello Bettie) and have not proceeded to find freedom through any true conquest of their own. I might suggest that the Harvard graduates of 2011 are fearful of freedom.

With this in mind, I think Phoeler does an incredible job of pointing out the fact that you’ve really only made when you’ve found solace in another person’s eyes or that you’ve found a way to work as a group towards a common goal. She is basically saying that your mis-educated guidance through an educational banking system (I don’t know how Harvard actually does it, but I would suggest that all institutions of higher education miss Freire’s pedagogy as a whole) isn’t going to be able to fulfill you entirely. She points to the facts that you must work as a group to “constantly and responsibly” defeat all methods of oppression in a “quest for human completion.”

Perhaps my admiration for Amy Phoeler gave her more credit than was actually due, but I know that this is something that I would have liked to know straight out of college. There I was, a college graduate, ready to journey out into the world I thought I understood thanks to books and tests was welcomed by a reality I was not prepared for. We all need to be reminded that our quest towards human completion does not come by academia alone, but rather with through being challenged and inspired and looking into someone else’s eyes when the fear of freedom/oppression becomes to heavy.