Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Born on Septermber 19. 1921 in Recife, Brazil, Paulo  Freire was a philosopher, educator and activist who developed a radical approach to transforming how we approach education. While he was born into a middle class family, Freire’s father died during the economic depression of the thirties, and as a young child, Freire came to know the crippling and dehumanizing effects of hunger which ad a radicalising and transformative effect upon him. Freire saw himself being forced by the circumstances to steal food for his family, and he ultimately dropped out of elementary school to work and help his family financially. It was through these hardships that Freire developed his unyielding sense of solidarity with the poor. From childhood on, Freire made a conscious commitment to work in order to improve the conditions of marginalized people.

He recalled in Moacir Gadotti’s book, Reading Paulo Freire, “I didn’t understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn’t dumb. It wasn’t lack of interest. My social condition didn’t allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge”  Because Freire lived among poor rural families and laborers, he gained a deep understanding of their lives and of the effects of socio-economics on education.

Freire became a grammar teacher while still in high school. Even then his intuition pushed him toward a dialogic education in which he strived to understand students’ expectations. While on the Faculty of Law in Recife, Freire met his wife, Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, an elementary school teacher and an important force in his life. They married in 1944 when Freire was 23 and eventually had five children, three of whom became educators  Gadotti asserts that it was Elza who influenced Freire to intensely pursue his studies, and helped him to elaborate his groundbreaking educational methods.

Between 1947 and 1962 he developed effective dialogical methodologies for educating adult illiterates; Freire developed his thinking during a long career teaching Portuguese in secondary schools and literacy campaigns. Later he was appointed as the director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. 

It was here that he started working with illiterate poor people. His results were so impressive that he was invited to become director of the national literacy programme. He set out to establish 20,000 cultural learning circles throughout Brazil, for which he planned to import 35,000 slide projectors from Poland. However he was  forced  to flee his native Brazil following a military coup in 1964.

Freire drew upon Catholic liberation-theology and Marxist ideas to forge a concept of popular literacy education for personal and social liberation. So formidable was his work that the Harvard Educational Review published a recapitulation of his formative essays in 1999.

Freire wrote  his seminal book Pedagogy of the Oppressed while in exile in Chile  while working with the democratically elected Allende government which fell to a CIA-manufactured coup. He spent the next 15 years in what he called exile, working at Harvard  University and for the World Council of Churches in Geneva, organizing and writing books for social justice and he remains a touchstone figure for social justice and equality activists in the global North and South. after a military coup in April 1964, Freire after being imprisoned  as a traitor had to flee from Brazil.  He returned to Brazil in 1979, joined the Workers’ Party and became Sao Paolo’s Secretary for Education in 1988.

Over a lifetime of work with revolutionary organizers and educators,  Paulo Freire created an approach to emancipatory education and a lens through which to understand systems of oppression in order to transform them. He flipped mainstream pedagogy on its head by insisting that true knowledge and expertise already exist within people.Pedagogy of the Oppressed. which was originally published in 1968 (in Portuguese, in 1970 first English translation) but has been reprinted and translated numerous times and has become a source of inspiration for people throughout the world. 

It is a profound statement of faith in humanity and a challenge for us all to consider our place, our responsibilities and our actions on the humanisation-dehumanisation spectrum. His philosophy, compassion and commitment inspire real (but searingly realistic) hope for the oppressed in all societies. Freire's work has taken on much urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm.

Paulo Freire was highly critical of traditional formal models of education which he argued made people dependant in much the same way as a commercial bank does. Students are treated as if they were empty bank accounts in which the teacher can make deposits. Under this `banking concept` of education, "knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing". 

This results in a dichotomy between teacher and students: the teacher talks and the students listen. As a consequence, both are dehumanized. Freire’s analysis of traditional education is similar to the critique developed by Ivan Illich in his book Deschooling Society (1971).

Freire asserted that education can never be neutral. Either it is an instrument for liberating people or it is used to dominate and disempower them. To avoid being a tool of oppression, education needs to involve a new relationship between teacher and students as well as with society. The difference is not to be found in the curriculum contents or the enthusiasm of the teacher, but in the pedagogical approach.

He found that people were more motivated to learn how to read and write if the experience gave them insight into the power networks to which they are subjected. Freire urged teachers to identify and use key political words, which he labelled as `generative themes` because they generated discussion. 

A key concept in Freire`s approach is conscientization, meaning the ways in which individuals and communities develop a critical understanding of their social reality through reflection and action.

This involves examining and acting on the root causes of oppression as experienced in the here and now. This goes beyond simply acquiring the technical skills of reading and writing. It is a cornerstone to ending the culture of silence, in which oppression is not mentioned and thereby maintained. Existentialism was another significant influence on Freire’s philosophy. Freire believed that human beings are free to choose and thus responsible for their choices.

While on one hand, Freire did very much take into account the historical context created by the legacy of slavery in Brazil, he never believed the historical conditions determined the future for him, his students, or Brazilian society. On the contrary, Freire espoused the existential belief that humans need not be determined by the past. When Freire taught literacy classes, he not only taught his students how to read and write. Freire shared conscientização and, with this, the awareness that his students were free to choose the life they created for themselves.

In what he referred to as the `archaeology of consciousness`, Freire identified three different levels of political awareness: magical consciousness, naïve consciousness and critical consciousness. It was the role of the educator to foster a process of dialogue and liberation that would enable citizens to reach critical consciousness.

Whilst the unpacking of the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed is at the core of his work; his related concepts of dialogical (or problem-posing) and anti-dialogical (or banking education) are also crucial. His warnings regarding oppressive traits such as cultural invasion, false generosity and manipulation explain,  the cultural disconnect and distrust that typifies many student-teacher relationships.

Whereas Freire saw both humanization and dehumanization as real choices for mankind, he saw only the former as man’s true vocation. Thus, he saw the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed (in all contexts) as dialectical contradictions that must be resolved if liberation (for both) is to occur. The “lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressors’ violence” can only be defeated by acts of love from the oppressed. 

However he warns that the values of the oppressor can instead become housed in the oppressed, which may, in turn, lead them to aspire to become oppressors themselves. In the oppressor, the oppressed see the very model of manhood, to which they should aspire. Thus they view themselves in purely individualistic terms, fail to see their position as part of a group and have a “fear of freedom”. For Freire, the resultant false consciousness meant that the “great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: (is) to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well”. 

One way in which the oppressor-oppressed relationship is maintained is through the use of prescription. This is where one ‘man’s choices or opinions are forced upon another, thus depriving him of a voice and forcing him to accept the oppressors worldview. This can lead to self-deprecation where the oppressed feel that they do not have opinions of value and have low feelings of self-worth. The oppressed feel unable to act against the oppressor but all too frequently practice horizontal violence instead against their neighbours.. In time, the oppressed may come to evict the negative self-concepts that they house within them. 

 Freire was recognized worldwide for his profound impact on educational thought and practice. He received numerous awards including honorary doctorates, the King Balduin Prize for International Development, the Prize for Outstanding Christian Educators in 1985 with Elza, and the UNESCO 1986 Prize for Education for Peace . In 1986, Freire’s wife, Elza died. He remarried to Ana Maria Araújo Freire, who continues with her own radical educational work. On May 2, 1997, Paulo Freire died of heart failure at the age of 75.

Friers influence is still hotly debated in Brazil.  Having been posthumously made a Patron of Education in 2012, an ally of far-right president Bolsonaro, tried (and failed) to have the title stripped from Freire in 2018 (Lima, 2019).  Pedagogy of the Oppressed was banned in apartheid South Africa, parts of Latin America and, in 2010 in Tucson, Arizona by right-wing policymakers who prohibited texts that ‘promote the overthrow of the US government’ (Rodriquez, 2018).  ‘Pedagogy’ was one of the texts used on an ethno-studies programme taught to Native Americans and Chicanos, and the books ‘were seized  from classrooms right in front of students’, who learned first-hand about oppression (Bernstein, 2012).  

Friere's methods, which used critical dialogue and consciousness-raising are not only applicable in his country of origin (Brazil) but  are widely used by a whole generation of social and development workers working in deprived neighbourhoods across poor and rich countries alike, and  continues to wield enormous influence on research and educational practice across the world as a tool for social change.

 More important than all of the recognitions Freire received and the scholars he influenced, Freire’s life was his most significant legacy. His life’s example continues to inspire. He created the conditions by which thousands of people, the children and grandchildren of former slaves, could learn to read and write, learn about their agency and freedom, and learn to love.

Here is a link to a pdf annivesary od Frier's acclaimed book :-

https://libcom.org/library/pedagogy-oppressed