Pedagogy of the Oppressed

The fear of freedom is a recurrent motif in Freire’s analysis and description of oppression. Though our vocation as human beings means we must seek freedom as the essential condition of our humanity, the oppressed are wary of exchanging their status quo for the unknown consequences of open confrontation with the oppressor. They are willing to tolerate intolerable conditions by reducing their humanity and retreating to a state of dependence, depression, and passive fatalism. The oppressor, having lodged himself within the mind of the oppressed, complicates the difficulty of overcoming this fear. Housing the oppressor within, the oppressed suffer from a dual consciousness that divides their loyalties. Through the oppressor’s manipulation and cultural invasion, the oppressed are conditioned to believe that their conscientization is a threat to freedom itself. The security of the status quo seems preferable to the undeniable risks of freedom and the unavoidable responsibility a commitment to it entails.

Freire addresses the problem of the fear of freedom in terms of his profound sense of humanism. We must risk an act of love, he asserts, since the commitment to the liberation of all human beings is a courageous exercise of love. Freedom is our capacity to exist authentically, as self-reflective beings aware of our history and empowered to create ourselves and world in the light of our humanist values. While the fear of freedom divides and dispossess the oppressed, unity and abundance is the fruit of freedom.

Freire describes the traditional approach to education, which involves a clearly defined hierarchical opposition of teacher and student, as the “banking” method. In this form of education, the teacher dispenses fragments of information to the student who receives and stores these “deposits.” Banking education invests the teacher with authority, agency, and knowledge, while the student is assumed to be ignorant and functionsas a passive receptacle for information. The student’s role is to record and memorize; the teacher’s is to lecture and discipline. In this narrative form of teaching, students are treated as objects that have no voice or creative role in the process of acquiring knowledge, which is the sole possession of the teacher.

The effect of banking education is to debilitate the student and indoctrinate her with the ideology of the dominant socioeconomic class. The banking method presents reality as fragmented and static, thus alienating the student from the totality of reality and the historical process through which social structures and knowledge itself are constructed. Banking education masks the political context in which knowledge is created and education administered to the public. It thus serves the interest of the dominant class, which attempts to portray the oppressive social order as natural, rational, and unchangeable.

For Freire, the pedagogy of the oppressed requires a completely different structure, method, and content than those of the banking approach. This form of education is grounded on humanist values and a commitment to dialogue between teacher and student. The hierarchical opposition of teacher and student is replaced by a genuine collaboration in which teacher and students learn from each other as they become co-investigators of the object being studied. The focus of problem-posing education is on the sharing of acts of cognition between teacher/student and student/teachers. In this way, the acquisition of knowledge becomes a cooperative and flexible venture, rather than a gift handed out from teacher to student. While the banking method is authoritarian and anti-dialogical, problem-posing education is based on a process of continuing dialogue and respect for the knowledge and experience of all participants in the learning environment.

Freire holds that education is inescapably political. Rather than try to de-politicize education, the problem-posing method addresses students as historical beings with political hopes, fears, and challenges specific to their concrete historical situation. The task of the educator is to investigate with the students the significant dimensions of their experience that embody the inherent contradictions of the exploitative capitalist system. Through posing these themes to them as problems, the educator enables students to develop an increasingly objective awareness of their oppression, its historical causes, and their own thinking. The problem-posing method is specifically designed to engage students as subjects responsible for their own humanization, and to overcome the “culture of silence” that afflicts many of the indigent oppressed with whom Freire worked in Latin America.

In developing the content of problem-posing education, teacher and students collaboratively identify certainthemes that crystallize the experience of the oppressed. These themes embody concretely the beliefs, ideas, values, hopes and challenges of the historical moment, as well as their opposing counterparts. The task of the educator is to present the people’s themes to them as problems. Themes always imply “limit-situations,” which are obstacles to individuals’ freedom, and “limit-acts,” the actions that can be taken to overcome these obstacles.

The teacher and students’ mutual investigation of the people’s themes deepens historical awareness; it provides knowledge of the concrete conditions of oppression as well as of the characteristic patterns of the people’s thought which has been conditioned by their oppression. Generative themes imply the possibility of other related themes, revealing more dimensions of the social totality. Through investigating the thematic universe of the focus group an increasingly comprehensive picture develops of the social conditions of their existence. For Freire, the fundamental theme of our historical epoch is domination; this theme both implies and necessitates its opposite, liberation, as the means by which dominance and oppression can be overcome.