ICT and education: neutrality or pedagogical policies? An approach from the Paulo Freire's Pedagogy

Abstract

The paper aims to address the incorporation of technologies of communication and information (ICT) in the field of education in the Latin American context. The purpose is to discuss the naive conception of ICT that understands them like politically-pedagogically neutral. We will use the theoretical framework of the pedagogy of liberation elaborated by Paulo Freire. This theoretical framework points out that education is always a political fact: we educated to form a kind of citizen and for a kind of society. The article raises four discussions of high political-pedagogical content about ICT: free software vs. proprietary software (or copyrigths vs. copyleft); web peer to peer vs. web server/customer-user; free and secure information and communication vs. mass espionage; knowledge community vs. neocoloniality of knowledge. Finally we argue in favor of the paradigm in ICT that we consider pedagogical, ethical and technically more appropriate for the field of education especially in the countries of the Latin American context.