Seymour Papert:

Somebody is going to ask me a question like, "What did you learn from Paulo Freire?" So I was wondering, then . . . the answer is, well, everything . . . a lot. But this question made me think about what I learned from Paulo Freire.
I used to have cut out on my wall -- a cartoon, a joke from Punch Magazine, which showed a little girl who came to the teacher after class and said to the teacher, "What did I learn today?" And the teacher said, "That's a funny question. Why do you ask me that?" The little girl said, "When I get home, Daddy will ask me, 'What did you learn today?' and I never know what to say."

And I think maybe the serious thing that I learned from Paulo Freire is that the cartoon is not just a joke, that it sort of says what's so wrong with the whole school idea. This girl . . . the teacher's doing something to the girl. The girl is not conscious, doesn't have a consciousness of what it's all about. And that what we're really trying to do in education in small children is to…you can say it all sorts of ways: give them more consciousness of the process, more control, or allow them to throw themselves into it. But however you describe it, it's the opposite of them wanting to ask …having to ask … the teacher, "What did I learn today?"

Paulo Freire:

I think that what Papert has just said with a sense of humor is indeed much more humor than irony in the profound meaning and distinction between humor and irony. Joking is good; mocking is not.
The story emphasizes the mechanically quantitative comprehension of knowledge, which is absurd. The girl could have asked, "Teacher, how many envelopes of knowledge have you deposited in me today?" This is an understanding of the act of teaching, and that's why Seymour Papert says with humor that what somebody can learn with Paulo Freire is exactly the opposite of traditional "learning".

 

Part 1: http://www.papert.org/articles/freire/freirePart1.html