Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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. It was first published in Portuguese in 1968, and was translated and published in English in 1970.

Dedicated to what is called "the oppressed" and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between what he calls "the colonizer" and "the colonized." The book remains popular among educators all over the world and is one of the foundations of critical pedagogy.

In the book Freire calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model" because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggybank. However, he argues for pedagogy to treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.

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 ; Arizona's secretary of education, Tom Horne, objects to its use in classrooms. 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" (oppressors-oppressed distinction). 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 dehumanization 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 conscientization, 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.

More detailed chapter by chapter summaries are available through The Communication Initiative.

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 Anti-Apartheid 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.

Criticism
Sol Stern, of the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, states that Freire’s magnum opus isn’t actually about schooling, because it mentions none of the issues that education reformers throughout the twentieth century have preoccupied themselves with, such as testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students, etc. Instead, Stern argues, Pedagogy is "a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies." Stern argues that teachers who adopt its "pernicious" ideas risk harming their students.

Issues in Freirean pedagogy

 * Quotes on WikiQuote
 * Conscientization
 * Critical consciousness
 * Critical pedagogy
 * Popular education
 * Teaching for social justice
 * Adult literacy
 * Adult education
 * Praxis