Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Paulo Freire is a South American educator (pedagogue) involved first in Brazil in the 1960's, then in the literacy campaign of Chile under Allende as well as other literacy campaigns in Africa. His book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, exposes the faults of capitalist education and lays the base for revolutionary education. His approach inspired the great revolutionary literacy campaigns in Cuba and Nicaragua. In 1986 he was awarded the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education.

Freire criticizes the banking concept of education which "maintains and even stimulates" the contradictions of "oppressive society as a whole:"

(a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught;

(b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;

(d) the teacher talks and the students listen-meekly;

(e) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;

(f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;

(g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;

(h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;

(i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;

(j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

Banking education "serves the interest of the oppressors who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed."

The humanist, revolutionary educator must work in another way. "From the outset, his efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in men and their creative power. To achieve this, he must be a partner of the students in his relations with them."

What is needed, says Freire, is problem-posing education in which "the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow."

Problem-posing education, says Freire, is "revolutionary futurity" "It affirms men as beings who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, for whom immobility represents a fatal threat, for whom looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future."

Freire's work is a major contribution to education for nonviolence and democracy which lies at the heart of a culture of peace.

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