Oleh: Mohamad Raimi Ab Rahim, Presiden, Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM)
Tokoh pendidik Brazil Paolo Freire merupakan tokoh yang terkehadapan dalam membincangkan pedagogi harapan dan aplikasinya dalam mendidik dan merubah masyarakat.
Melalui karyanya Pedagogy of Hope (2004), Freire menegaskan bahawa kepercayaan merupakan keperluan setiap ontologi insan. Tanpa harapan, ujar Freire, manusia akan kehilangan esensi dalam kehidupannya. Tanpa harapan manusia akan kecewa serta berputus asa tatkala berdepan dengan kesulitan.
Namun harapan sahaja tidak memadai kerana harapan terhadap perubahan memerlukan tindakan. Harapan juga menuntut kepada pergorbanan dan perjuangan.
“My hope is enough”. Alone, it does not win. But without it, my struggle will be weak and wobbly. We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water…The idea that hope alone will transform the world, and action undertaken in that kind of naivete, is an excellent route to hopefulness, pessimism, and fatalism. But the attempt to do without hope, in the struggle to improve the world, as if that struggle could be reduced to calculated acts alone, or a pure scientific approach, is a frivolous illusion. To attempt to do without hope, which is based on the need for truth as an ethical quality of the struggle, is tantamount to denying that struggle is one of its mainstays. The essential thing, as I maintain later on, is this: hope needs practice. As ontological need, hope needs practice in order to become historical concreteness. That is why there is no hope in sheer hopefulness. The hoped-for is not attained by dint of raw hoping. Just to hope is to hope in vain.”
Harapan harus sentiasa disemarakkan dan dibajai agar hidup walaupun dalam serba kesulitan. Harapan akan paling bercahaya tatkala diselubungi mendung hitam keputus-asaan. Namun optimisme juga harus sentiasa dalam keadaan waspada.
Kegagalan melaksanakan harapan yang dijanjikan bakal membawa kepada hopelessless yang kemudiaan akan membunuh segala saki baki benih harapan yang masih tinggal untuk menyaksikan perubahan.
“When it becomes a program, hopefulness paralyzes us, immobilized us. We succumb to fatalism, and then it becomes impossible to muster the strength we absolutely need for a fierce struggle that will re-create the world”.
