I think that the most overwhelming similarity between both
Dewey and Freire was the idea that the individual and community are not separate
concepts in the education of the individual. Rather, they are linked to one another and
have to be seen as reciprocal concepts. They do not exist in isolation, as if one has
to make a choice between them. Rather, one has to seen them in conjunction with one
another. Freire's idea that education is a tool for social policy and to express
political reality is an important idea in his work. He does not see the education of
the individual as separate from the social condition in which one lives. Either one is
using education as a tool to remedy social inequality or one perpetuates it, in Freire's
writing. To this extent, the individual and their social condition are strongly
linked. In terms of Dewey, his critique of Rousseau as being too individualistic in his
beliefs of education as well as Plato for being too socially driven in his reflects how
Dewey himself believed that educational thought is one whereby the individual is taught
to see themselves as part of a larger configuration. The development of the mind was a
part of "the communal process" by which individuals do not have to be separate from
society, but rather seek to develop education of the individual within it. Like Freire,
this construct of education is one where the traditional philosophical binary division
between individual and society is not as apparent:
Thus [Dewey believes] the individual is only a
meaningful concept when regarded as an inextricable part of his or her society, and the
society has no meaning apart from its realization in the lives of its individual
members.
In here, there is a
convergence of educational ideas between both thinkers in seeking to make the education
of the individual a process of social construction, whereby elitism and oppression is
replaced in a notion of community enhancement of the individual.
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