Our surroundings affect reality, and therefore reality is constantly redefined as the world changes. An individual's perception of reality will never stay the same from one moment to another, because everything a person reads, hears, or sees changes his or her perception. Freire expands on the concept of a constantly changing reality; people are "unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality." The interpretation of reality for a given person is constantly changing, and is related to what a person has been exposed to.
As a person matures into an adult, individual experiences are reflected in how they interpret reality. Freire explains how people build on previous experiences to discover new things by laying out the following:
As women and men, simultaneously reflecting on themselves and on the world, increase the scope of their perception, they begin to direct their observations towards previously inconspicuous phenomena. That which existed objectively but had not been perceived in it's deeper implications begins to "stand out," assuming the character of a problem and therefore of challenge.
People take in the objects around them and "reflect upon them", categorizing the objects into "their action and cognition." Then, the people use everything they have been exposed to in defining their world.
Coupling abstract ideas to reality requires the use of language.
Changing seasons are an abstract way of talking about a group of separate events. Take spring for example; green grass, flowers, warm breezes, all of which can be associated in memory with a certain time of year.
However, while the events are experienced by the body, the abstraction can only be experienced in the mind, by using memories. Concepts in language, like "spring," are useful words used to talk about the world. Language is an effective tool, and the world would not have developed in its course with out it.
By using language a person can take an abstraction and make it real. To say that the only thing that is real is something that can be observed using senses, would mean that only the grass, trees, flowers and the individual components of spring would be real.
Stephen Hester and David Francis stated in their article "Reality Analysis in a Classroom Storytelling" found in The British Journal of Sociology, "the real is in the seeing not in the saying."
However, most who have experienced this time of year would argue that "spring" is very real. Abstract concepts need language to define objects and feelings in reality.
Defining events that a person has not yet experienced, and expanding the thoughts and ideas a person has, is accomplished by using language and knowledge. Using and, relating to experiences that one has had, is how a person can explain to others, things they (the others) have not seen, and even more importantly ideas they have not had or been exposed to.
The purpose of knowledge, or education then, is to expose the student to as many ideas as possible. When explaining the education of a population, Freire noted that "Education is based on the fact that a student is handed information by the teacher" (349). A student takes information and stores it for a later use. Along those lines, Rodreguez also alluded to the "consequence of literacy," by noting that the consequence of literacy is to become educated.
Throughout life, education and knowledge, are fed into a person, then mixed in with the person's own ideas and past information. The more information someone is exposed to, the easier it is for them to relate to other ideas and formulate ideas of their own. A cycle is created, the more someone knows, the more one changes his or her reality, Freire calls this the "unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality"(357).
By constantly appending knowledge, a person's reality remains fluid. Language is used to convey and expose a person to more things than they could possibly experience in a lifetime, shaping their individual reality.
Next time, we'll continue by looking at how language can change what we perceive as reality.
Comments