Miller, Richard E. “The Arts of Complicity:

Miller, Richard E. “The Arts of Complicity: Pragmatism and the Culture of Schooling” (655).
“Citing Freire is, thus, a way of establishing one’s credentials in the field, of showing one’s true colors” (655).
“That there are problems involved in adopting Freire’s pedagogy –originally developed to address the needs of the inlliterate and dispossessed peoples of Brazil—to teach undergraduates in the United States is now commonly recognized . . .” (657)
“why is it that this image of the teacher as liberator of the oppressed, upon which Freire’s pedagogy relies so heavily, has had such a perduring appeal? . . .”what can we learn by problematizing our community’s most cherished self-representation” (657).
“Freire insisted from the beginning that the problem-posing approach had to ‘be forged with, not for, the oppressed. . .’(657).
“In effect, then, Freire, the educator, is saying that it is those who have been most successful in school who are the ones most likely to be deeply wedded to the ideology that stands in the way of communal action” (660).
“what puzzles me is why this vision of teaching and the rhetoric that surrounds it should appeal to teachers, particularly teachers of reading and writing. Why, as a profession, would we be drawn to an approach that depicts professionals in such a negative light?” (660).
Paraphrasing Scott—“The higher one climbs the social ladder, the more one must, in all phases of one’s life, ascribe to the dominanat ideology, the more confined are those spaces for voicing one’s doubts about that ideology the more one must see oneself as always on stage” (663).
So, the point being that we are as locked into ideology by priveledge and education as by the oppressivness that overwhelms the poor and the oppressed. I think there is something to this.
“by noting that students occupy a subordinate position in the educational system, I mean only to suggest that they, too, have their ‘hidden transcripts’ where they store their reservations about what is happening to them in the classroom” (664).
Good point.
“The classroom is, of course, one such place where the labor of others—both teachers and students—is constrained to meet the demands of outside forces. It is to that compromised space that we must now, turn our attention” (666).
“The classroom is, of course, one such place where the labor of others—both teachers and students—is constrained to meet the demands of outside forces. It is to that compromised space that we must now turn our attention” (666).
“Were I a polemicist, I might say what I was after is a pragmatic pedagogy, one grounded in “the arts of complicity, duplicity, and compromise,” the very same arts that are deployed, with such enervating effect, by the host of social, bureaucratic, and corporate institutions that govern our lives” (670).
This article is murky, hard to grasp, I’m not sure at all where this guy is coming from!