Life in These United States

An angry teacher in New Jersey assaulted a student who would not stand for the national anthem. Another student used a phonecam to record a video of the assault and of the teacher's shouted verbal abuse and later posted it to the Internet.

Reaction of local authorities has been swift: Students involved with recording and publicizing the teacher's outburst of rage have been charged with criminal mischief.

The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society, which must therefore adjust these "incompetent and lazy" folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be "integrated," "incorporated" into the healthy society that they have "forsaken."

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not "marginals," are not people living "outside" society. They have always been "inside" – inside the structure which made them "beings for others." The solution is not to "integrate" them into the structure of oppression, but to transform the structure so that they can become "beings for themselves." Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors' purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientização [critical consciousness].

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 74

(via boingboing)