Chapter three

Friere paints a beautiful picture of what it means to be a part of true dialogue. There are certain 'musts' for dialogue to occur, first of all, no one can dialogue alone. There must be humility in dialogue, there must be an intense faith in humankind, faith in people and dialogue cannot exist without hope.

Friere points out in chapter three that dialogue is similar to education in the form of praxis. To have real dialogue, like education the praxis of dialogue must involve respect and reflection and re-presentation of information through conversation. Like education dialogue is work towards the truth shared by open-minded parties. It can not be a deposit of information from one person to be consumed by another.

Like is typical with Friere we see a polar opposite of dialogue which is unauthentic word. Unauthentic word involves the speaker speaking to serve a purpose, the object of unauthentic dialogue typically seems to be meaningless. The purpose is to maintain staus-quo or to achieve dominance or hold power over an object, person or world.

I think it is all too often that we experience unauthentic word rather than dialogue in our society. This is exemplified for me by the current state of our governments politics and the manipulative nature of bipartisanism. Unfortunately for our society the sound bites created by politicians that spin through the media monster come off for many people in our society as true. This constant redundantness of our governments politics has created a limit-situation for me in my own life. Maybe it is through true dialogue that we can begin to work on the unauthentic word which is spoken so often in todays society.