Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paulo Freire
Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the most widely known of educator Paulo
Freire's works. It proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between
teacher, student, and society.
Dedicated to what is called "the oppressed," Freire includes a detailed
Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between what
he calls "the colonizer" and "the colonized." From his own experience
helping Brazilian adults to read and write, the book remains popular among
educators all over the world and is one of the foundations of critical
pedagogy.
According to Donaldo Macedo, a former colleague of Freire and University
of Massachusetts professor, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a revolutionary
text, and people in totalitarian states risk punishment reading it. The book
has sold over 750 000 copies worldwide.
Summary
Translated into several languages, most editions of Pedagogy of the
Oppressed contain at least one introduction/foreword, a preface, and four
chapters.
The first chapter explores how oppression has been justified and how it is
overcome through a mutual process between the "oppressor" and the
"oppressed". Examining how the balance of power between the colonizer
and the colonized remains relatively stable, Freire admits that the
powerless in society can be frightened of freedom. He writes, "Freedom is
acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and
responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an
idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the
quest for human completion." (47) According to Freire, freedom will be the
result of praxis--informed action—when a balance between theory and
practice is achieved.
The second chapter examines the "banking" approach to education—a
metaphor used by Freire that suggests students are considered empty
bank accounts that should remain open to deposits made by the teacher.
Freire rejects the "banking" approach, claiming it results in the
dehumanisation of both the students and the teachers. In addition, he
argues the banking approach stimulates oppressive attitudes and practices
in society. Instead, Freire advocates for a more world-mediated, mutual
approach to education that considers people incomplete. According to
Freire, this "authentic" approach to education must allow people to be
aware of their incompleteness and strive to be more fully human. This
attempt to use education as a means of consciously shaping the person
and the society is called conscientisation, a term first coined by Freire in
this book.
The third chapter developed the use of the term limit-situation with regards
to dimensions of human praxis. This is in line with the Alvaro Viera Pinto's
use of the word/idea in his "Consciencia Realidad Nacional" which Freire
contends is "using the concept without the pessimistic character originally
found in Jaspers"(Note 15, Chapter 3) in reference to Karl Jaspers's notion
of 'Grenzsituationen'.
The last chapter proposes dialogics as an instrument to free the colonized,
through the use of cooperation, unity, organization and cultural synthesis
(overcoming problems in society to liberate human beings). This is in
contrast to antidialogics which use conquest, manipulation, cultural
invasion, and the concept of divide and rule. Freire suggests that populist
dialogue is a necessity to revolution; that impeding dialogue dehumanizes
and supports the status quo. This is but one example of the dichotomies
Freire identifies in the book. Others include the student-teacher dichotomy
and the colonizer-colonized dichotomy.
Spread
Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the
Oppressed has achieved "near-iconic status" in America’s teacher-training
programs, according to Sol Stern. A 2003 study looking at the curricula of
16 schools of education, 14 of them among the top in the country, found
that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned
texts in their philosophy of education courses. Such course assignments
are a large part of the reason the book has sold almost 1 million copies,
which is a remarkable number for a book in the education field.
Influences
The work was strongly influenced by Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx.
One of Freire's dictums is that: “there neither is, nor has ever been, an
educational practice in zero space-time—neutral in the sense of being
committed only to preponderantly abstract, intangible ideas.” According to
later critics, heirs to Freire's ideas have taken it to mean that since all
education is political, "leftist math teachers who care about the oppressed
have a right, indeed a duty, to use a pedagogy that, in Freire’s words,
'does not conceal—in fact, which proclaims—its own political character.'’
The first four Chapters of Freire's major work used to be available online.
They were removed by the request of Freire's estate. However, pirate
copies still proliferate on the Internet. During the South African AntiApartheid Struggle, for example, the copyrights of Pedagogy of the
Oppressed were violated and illegal copies were distributed underground as
part of the "ideological weaponry" of various revolutionary groups like the
Black Consciousness Movement. In the 1970's and 1980's the book was
banned and kept clandestine.
Influence
Freire was a major influence on the development of community arts,
particularly with regard to Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As cultural activists
began to link social, cultural and political development, Freire was one of the few
contemporary thinkers who married a range of issues that dealt with the
development of society in a holistic way rather than just a single issue based
approach. Many artists were influenced by his teachings throughout the 1970s
and 80s, including Augusto Boal and his Theatre of the Oppressed, a direct echo
of Freire’s book.