Reflection Friday: Paulo Freire, my life's work, and the ball goes wee.
A new introspective series.
Welcome to Reflective Fridays. A new series (hopefully I’ll stick with it) where I self analyze some truth about myself or something. We’ll see how it goes. Enjoy.
As I rode my bike the other day, I thought about Paulo Freire. Perhaps for no particular reason other than for the simplistic brilliance of his main idea- trust. For Freire, what made much of the modern world so impossibly bleak was epitomized and easily understood by looking at how we educate. In making each and every level of our systematized learning something of a codified and repeatable process, we have robbed the vast majority of people of an essential faculty. Through what Freire would deem the 'banking problem of education,' he surmised that one singular entity -in this case, the teacher or professor- gatekeeping the knowledge necessary to advance was both a light and reflection of the issue of our day.
Freire then proposes a simple but powerful solution. The problem-solving method of learning would allow people of any age to be presented with a problem and find an answer in whatever way they saw fit. Given ample time and resources, removing the safeguards of our systematized education could open up a world of greater possibilities once people were allowed to have a sense of agency. In essence, Freire advocated for people to trust the common person. Instead of pedagogizing well-intentioned solutions to the masses, allowing people to arrive at whatever conclusions they will when given the love and trust necessary to Freire's solution would free us from so many societal ills. Empowering every person to engage as many others have before would result in a more holistic and authentic sense of education, rather than one that shows its validity through regurgitation and inorganic understanding.
Maybe this sounds a bit pie in the sky to you, and while I should commend the positives systematized education has had for the Earth, it's hard not to project a more perfect view of the world onto a concept that predicates its functionality on love and trust. Like many philosophical ideas, however, Freire's solution has deeper epistemological consequences that must be examined. Mainly, that if one is to agree or liken to the idea of doing away with a sense of gatekeeping, one must examine the state of being their knowledge takes and has taken onto the world.
For myself, this reality has only really recently settled in. Initially, I read Freire some years ago, but only now has it truly melded onto my synapses and allowed me to confront the inconvenient truth of my incongruous being. As many of you know, I have spent the better part of the last five years writing about greater tactical and analytical truths within the game of football. Dissecting seemingly innocuous bits of play and codifiable information to suggest a greater truth about what's *really* happening on the field.
Even as I think about it now, the mental pathways that have deepened and calcified in my brain, ones that clearly outline a 3-2-5 set up or a discernible counterpress when teams lose the ball, tell me 'NO.' They directly oppose the conclusion that sits idly by, taunting me with the reality of its inevitable arrival. That which suggests, 'the ball goes wee.'
While I am perhaps not entirely ready to admit it, it's hard not to look back on everything that tactical writing has done for me over the past six years and feel a contradictory sense of empty fulfillment. While I'm proud of the ideas put forth, the friends I made, and the places I went, I also feel like the theoretical ideas serviced exist on something of a treadmill. With little progress made regarding a greater understanding of the myopic sense of ‘truth’ I sought to unearth, my stalwart convictions of such things feel childish.
With that said, I'm willing to accept something of a superposition of understanding. While I still yearn to believe in some greater truth about what someone like Pep Guardiola supposedly intends to do, I also disagree with purporting the kind of guarded knowledge Freire so bravely tried to do away with. With equal belief on this particularly reflective Friday, I'd like to acknowledge that half-spaces and positional manipulations are as valid as saying the ball goes wee.