A couple of days ago I started Reinventing Paolo Freire and yesterday I watched Amistad. It made for a particularly powerful juxtaposition. I read Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Opressed while a graduate student and appreciated the vision of constructivism as empowerment. I still don't buy transmissionism as an intentional means of reifying existing power structures: I think that most transmissionists believe they are doing the best possible things for their students. Still, I hadn't appreciated the truly revolutionary vision of Freire from reading Pedagogy of the Opressed.
The first couple of chapters of Revinventing are primarily a critique of capitalism. Capitalism is described fundamentally as having the goal of replacing happiness with something that can be bought and sold. The result of capitalism is to distort human power relationships based on how much money people have, resulting inevitably in the concentration of money and power in the hands of the few. As I read these chapters, I was frustrated that the book is only a critique -- it offers no solution other than an idealistic vision that if people were educated to understand how capitalism distorts human relationships, they would fix things.
I didn't buy it. As Robert Reich has argued in The Future of Work, companies are relatively constrained in what they can do because if they slip too far from maxmizing shareholder return, someone else will simply buy the company, fire the management, and install management that will. I agree largely with the critique of capitalism -- I simply don't see how even enlightened people will be able to fix it.
Watching Amistad filled in a missing piece for me. I have often wondered what issues, invisible to us today, will stand out in the future as the great injustices of the day. In Amistad, people didn't want to be reminded of the fundamental inequity in the United States. In a powerful scene, Senator Calhoun argues slavery necessary for the economy of the south and if it is renounced by the government, then the south will rise and civil war will ensue. John Quincy Adams, arguing before the Supreme Court, says that we should not be blind to our actions: if we cannot live up to our ideals, then we should get rid of them. If that in order to not live a lie, civil war must ensue, then let it come and let's get it over with.
Our country went along for 100 years with slavery, trading economic profit for moral blindness, unable to confront our own internal contradictions between our ideals and our actions. What are we unwilling to see now, in order to preserve our economic position? Environmental degradation? Political ties to other peoples driven solely by economic interests? Exchanging our own chance for happiness for something that can be bought and sold?