Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Dr Jay Seitz
If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
– Charles Darwin (1839, Voyage of the Beagle)
“Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” by Paulo Freire (first published in English in 1970), is an excellent background introduction to our text on Lifespan Human Development. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
“Paulo Freire’s work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world and has taken on special 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 ongoing.”
Chapters 2 and 3 are the key chapters.
From Chapter 2:
Students are not containers to fill up with knowledge. What Freire calls the “banking method of education.”
The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to “fill” the students with the contents of his narration—contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity. The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power.
From Chapter 3:
Dialogue is essential to education and learning. Learning, at its core, is dialogical and creative.
If it is in speaking their word that people, by naming the world, transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which they achieve significance as human beings. Dialogue is thus an existential necessity. And since dialogue is the encounter in which the united reflection and action of the dialogues are addressed to the world which is to be transformed and humanized, this dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person’s “depositing” ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be “consumed” by the discussants.
