CUADRO Nº 2.11: MATRIZ DE ESTRATEGIAS DE CAMBIO

Linehan and Hogan’s research is a comprehensive account of the status and position of migrants seeking access to higher education opportunities in Ireland. However, there are gaps in their research study. There is a specific lack of focus on the humanistic perspective of the development of human potential on a holistic level. The adult is entitled to flourish through education: a basic fundamental human right. Education should provide an individual with knowledge and opportunities to increase their employability status but it is also a very important asset in itself:

A great many people have a strong interest in higher education since they understand that educational attainment and achievement may be one of the most important assets a person can acquire in a lifetime (Moxley et al, 2001, 73).

Freedom of speech as a fundamental right is quite useless if someone is not educated enough to state something worth stating (Marshall, 1950). There is another important aspect to education. When Freire said ‘I see “education as the practice of freedom” above all as a truly gnosiological situation’ (1976, 147) this shows his understanding of the true power of education; not only does it provide the opportunity for radical social change by providing the tools to better one’s social and economic environment, education also equips the individual with knowledge that awakens their consciousness. He further states:

dialogue awakens an awareness. Within dialogue and problem-posing educator-educatee and educatee-educator go forward together to develop a critical attitude. The result of this is the perception of the interplay of knowledge and all its adjuncts. This knowledge reflects the world; reflects human beings in and with the world explaining the world. Even more important it reflects having to justify their transformation of the world

(Freire, 1976, 125).

Freire sees education as a process that informs, develops, and evolves because ‘people become aware of their manner of acquiring knowledge and realize the need to knowing even more. In this lies the whole force of education in the gnosiological condition’ (Freire, 1976, 153), or as Torres describes it, ‘education is not the key to transformation, but transformation is in itself educational’ (Torres, 1999). It is a

75 process of social change. Freire believes that through learning people learn that they can re-make themselves and are ‘capable of knowing – of knowing that they know and of knowing that they don’t. They are able to know what they know better and to come to know what they do not yet know’ (Freire, 2004, 15). Through his experience of working with peasants, Freire noted that the more informed they were, the more they understood the oppressive nature of the society in which they lived. Knowledge gave them the power to understand and readdress this oppressiveness:

By predisposing men to reevaluate constantly, to analyze “findings,” to adopt scientific methods and processes, and to perceive themselves in dialectical relationship with their social reality, that education could help men to assume an increasingly critical attitude toward the world and so to transform it

(Freire, 1976, 33-34).

It is through this thinking process that, according to Freire, (1976, 47), a person can come to ‘discover the value of his person’. This is an important argument in respect of the role of education and the development of people’s creativity. It is through the process of exploring knowledge and informing oneself that one increases knowledge. He states ‘the more I inform myself on the substantiveness of what I read, the more and the better will I read and become able to re-write what is read in my way, becoming also able to write what I have not yet written’ (Freire, 2004, 71-72). Using what you have come to know to further explore, understand and create more knowledge, this is the real power of knowing, putting knowledge into practice of ownership. Or to use the simple words of a peasant who said ‘before this, words meant nothing to me; now they speak to me and I can make them speak’ (cited by Shaull, 1990, 13).

In addition, education should present an individual with the opportunity to develop their full potential as an intelligent rational human being, because education is a basic fundamental human right laid down in international law. It is one of the ‘most affirmed economic, social and cultural rights’ (Chapman, 2007, 122). It is a social justice issue. On an international level, currently, there is a rights-based approach to education which advocates an ‘inalienable right of the individual to education’ (UNICEF, 2008, 1). The human rights approach ensures that rights are realised, protected, facilitated and fulfilled. They are ‘indivisible’ because they are interdependent on other rights

76 (UNICEF, 2008). Rights-based approaches promote strategies of empowerment. The ‘goal is to give people the power to change their own lives, their communities and their destinies (UNICEF, 2008). The rights-based approach pays special attention to the status of vulnerable groups, particularly around issues of equality and discrimination, including ethnic minority groups. A ‘defining feature of a rights-based approach is its explicit linkage to human rights standards’ (Sandkull, 2005, 4). Education in itself is a goal but it is also a goal in realising all other human rights (Sandkull, 2005). Human rights, social justice and democracy are strongly interrelated and interlinked.