What Are The Difference Between Freire And Baldwin

Freire and Baldwin: Similarities in Thought Despite living in the same time period, Freire and Baldwin have distinctive ideas. A couple of the ideas that they both touch upon, even briefly—although don’t always agree with each other on the subjects—are education, and one’s place, and the feeling of being an outsider. These two ideas are touched upon frequently in Baldwin’s The Discovery of What It Means to be an American and Freire’s The “Banking” Concept of Education. Despite being born within a decade of each other, Baldwin and Freire lived very different lives that might have contributed to the differences in the details of their thoughts. James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York in 1924. At the age of 24 he became disillusioned with

Baldwin talks about role and how one must change their place in the world in order to appreciate one’s role in society, while Freire talked about how the teachers in the schooling systems needed to change their roles in the lives of those they taught. Baldwin talks about his place in the world and how isolated he felt from the people of America. He had to leave America to find his “role— as distinguished…from [his] “place” — in the extraordinary drama which is America, [he] was released from the illusion that [he] hated America” (Baldwin 2). Going to France released him from the role he thought he was stuck in. Freire adds to this idea when talking about the role of students and teachers who “instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “‘banking ' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits” (Freire 1). Freire discuses the solution to this problem by using “problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical characteristic of banking education [and] can fulfill its function of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction. Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers” (Freire 6). According to Freire one of the main problems with the ‘banking’ is “the banking approach to adult education…will never propose to students that they critically consider reality” (Freire 3). Baldwin also talks about his role when he says that while in France he started listening to Bessie Smith to “ re-create the life that [he] had first known as a child and from which [he] had spent so many years in flight” (Baldwin 1). For years Baldwin had avoided certain activities and foods