Notes on the role of functional language in contemporary culture and education

Abstract

Paulo Freire: Dialogue and Anti-Dialogical Action What distinguishes human beings from animals, in Paulo Freire's view, is the ability to combine reflection andaction, the "praxis" as he calls it, which enables men and women to transform the world in which they live. In the Freirean scheme of things, reflection is a precondition for action, and a form of action itself: "naming the world" engaging in a dialogue about the world, is a precondition for changing it (Freire, 1983, espec, pp. 119, 123). From such premises it follows logically that those who do not want to see change in the world, that is, in their world or in the society which they dominate and from which they profit, do not want the world to be "named"; in particular, they abhor the thought that those whom they dominate and from whose labour they profit the "oppressed" of the title of Freire's book -might engage in a Freirean "dialogue" about their world. Conversely, the oppressed do have an interest in naming the world, because a genuine kind of dialogue about the world entails action and therefore holds the promise of change and of liberation from their oppression. Wherever oppression exists, then, the oppressor s try with all means at their disposal to prevent the oppressed from engaging in a genuine dialogue. And one of those means is the use (or abuse) of language by the oppressors on behalf of the system from which they profit. By manipulating language as a tool of oppression, the oppressors seek to silence the people, to prevent a dialogue of the oppressed. In the fictitious totalitarian society described by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, dissent and opposition are thus virtually eradicated by means of a new kind of language, "Newspeak:' In the real world, too, language can function as a potent anti-dialogical weapon, and all too often it amounts to the cornerstone of what Fre~re calls the "culture of silence:' While Latin America is the oppressed world Freire has in mind, it can be argued that a culture of silence also serves to obfuscate -and thus to preserve -the admittedly less crude but no less real forms of oppression which are a feature of the capitalist system of the northern half Of the American continent and, for that matter, of the entire "'liberal" "democratic" "western" world. Even in countries such as Canada and the United States, vast masses of people who may be described as oppressed -the poor, women, native people, Blacks, migrant workers, etc. -are prevented by their oppressors from naming the world, from using language for the purpose of engaging in a Freirean dialogue, because that might some day inspire them to try to change that world. Anti-dialogical action in general, and anti-dialogical manipulation of language in particular, are features not only of far away Latin American "banana republics" but also of our own North American world and "western" society. And subtle but real -as opposed to purely fictitious -forms of Orwellian Newspeak should not only be associated, as they usually are, with "totalitarian"