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PAULO FREIRE PEDAGOGY of the OPPRESSED ; • 30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION • Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos With an Introduction by Donaldo Macedo A continuum • I f N E W YORK • LONDON 2005 The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc 15 East 26,h Street, New York, NY 10010 The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX Copyright © 1970, 1993 by Paulo Freire Introduction © 2000 by Donaldo Macedo All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Freire, Paulo, 1921[Pedagogia del oprimido. English] Pedagogy of the oppressed / Paulo Freire ; translated by Myra Bergman Ramos ; introduction by Donaldo Macedo.—30th anniversary ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8264-1276-9 (alk. paper) 1. Freire, Paulo, 1921- 2. Education—Philosophy. 3. Popular education—Philosophy. 4. Critical pedagogy. I. Title. LB880.F73 P4313 2000 370.11*5—dc21 00-030304 To the oppressed, and to those who suffer with them and fight at their side Contents Publisher's Foreword 9 Introduction to the Anniversary Edition b y DONALDO MACEDO 11 Foreword by RICHARD SHAULL 29 Preface 35 Chapter 1 ^ 43 The justification for a pedagogy of the oppressed; the contradiction between the oppressors and the oppressed, and how it is overcome; oppression and the oppressors; oppression and the oppressed; liberation: not a gift, not a self-achievement, but a mutual process. Chapter 2 71 The "banking" concept of education as an instrument of oppression— its presuppositions—a critique; the problem-posing concept of education as an instrument for liberation—-its presuppositions; the "banking" concept and the teacher-student contradiction; the problem-posing concept and the supersedence of the teacherstudent contradiction; education: a mutual process, world-mediated; people as uncompleted beings, conscious of their incompletion, and their attempt to be more fully human. 8•CONTENTS Chapter 3 87 Dialogics—the essence of education as the practice of freedom; dialogics and dialogue; dialogue and the search for program content; the human-world relationship, "generative themes," and the program content of education as the practice of freedom; the investigation of "generative themes" and its methodology; the awakening of critical consciousness through the investigation of "generative themes"; the various stages of the investigation. Chapter 4 125 Antidialogics and dialogics as matrices of opposing theories of cultural action: the former as an instrument of oppression and the latter as an instrument of liberation; the theory of antidialogical action and its characteristics: conquest, divide and rule, manipulation, and cultural invasion; the theory of dialogical action and its characteristics: cooperation, unity, organization, and cultural synthesis. Publisher's Foreword This is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication in the United States of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Since the original publication, this revolutionary work has gone into more than a score of printings and sold over 750,000 copies worldwide. In his foreword to the first edition, which is included in this one, Richard Shaull wrote: In this country, we are gradually becoming aware of the work of Paulo Freire, but thus^far we have thought of it primarily in terms of its contribution to the education of illiterate adults in the Third World. If, however, we take a close look, we may discover that his methodology as well as his educational philosophy are as important for us as for the dispossessed in Latin America.... For this reason, I consider the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in an English edition to be something of an event. These words have proved prophetic. Freire's books have since taken on a considerable relevance for educators in our own technologically advanced society, which to our detriment acts to program the individual—especially the disadvantaged—to a rigid conformity. A new underclass has been created, and it is everyone's responsibility to react thoughtfully and positively to the situation. This is the underlying message of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As times change so do attitudes and beliefs. The translation has been modified—and the volume has been newly typeset—to reflect the connection between liberation and inclusive language. An important introduction by Donaldo Macedo has been added. This revised thirtieth-anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed thus represents a fresh expression of a work that will continue to stimulate and shape the thought of educators and citizens everywhere. Introduction Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined when I first read Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1971 that, a decade later, I would be engaged in a very close collaboration with its author, Paulo Freire— a collaboration that lasted sixteen years until his untimely death on May 2, 1997. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that, today, I would have the honor to write an introduction to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book that according to Stanley Aronowitz, "meets the single criterion of a 'classic' " in that "it has outlived its own time and its authors." I remember vividly my first encounter with Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as a colonized young man from Cape Verde who had been struggling with significant questions of cultural identity, yearning to break away from the yoke of Portuguese colonialism. Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed gave me a language to critically understand the tensions, contradictions, fears, doubts, hopes, and "deferred" dreams that are part and parcel of living a borrowed and colonized cultural existence. Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed also gave me the inner strength to begin the arduous process of transcending a colonial existence that is almost culturally schizophrenic: being present and yet not visible, being visible and yet not present. It is a condition that I painfully experienced in the United States, constantly juggling the power asymmetry of the two worlds, two cultures, and two languages. Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed gave me the critical tools to reflect on, and understand, the process through which we come to know what it means to be at the periphery of the intimate yet fragile relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. 12 • INTRODUCTION Paulo Freire's invigorating critique of the dominant banking model of education leads to his democratic proposals of problem-posing education where "men and women develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation." This offered to me— and all of those who experience subordination through an imposed assimilation policy—a path through which we come to understand what it means to come to cultural voice. It is a process that always involves pain and hope; a process through which, as forced cultural jugglers, we can come to subjectivity, transcending our object position in a society that hosts us yet is alien. It is not surprising that my friends back in Cape Verde—and, for that matter in most totalitarian states—risked cruel punishment, including imprisonment, if they were caught reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I remember meeting a South African student in Boston who told me that students would photocopy chapters of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and share them with their classmates and peers. Sometimes, given the long list of students waiting to read Freire, they would have to wait for weeks before they were able to get their hands on a photocopied chapter. These students, and students like them in Central America, South America, Tanzania, Chile, Guinea-Bissau and other nations struggling to overthrow totalitarianism and oppression, passionately embraced Freire and his proposals for liberation. It is no wonder that his success in teaching Brazilian peasants how to read landed him in prison and led to a subsequent long and painful exile. Oppressed people all over the world identified with Paulo Freire's denunciation of the oppressive conditions that were choking millions of poor people, including a large number of middle-class families that had bitterly begun to experience the inhumanity of hunger in a potentially very rich and fertile country. Freire's denunciation of oppression was not merely the intellectual exercise that we often find among many facile liberals and pseudocritical educators. His intellectual brilliance and courage in denouncing the structures of oppression were rooted in a very real and material experience, as he recounts in Letters to Cristina: INTRODUCTION • 13 It was a real and concrete hunger that had no specific date of departure. Even though it never reached the rigor of the hunger experienced by some people I know, it was not the hunger experienced by those who undergo a tonsil operation or are dieting. On the contrary, our hunger was of the type that arrives unannounced and unauthorized, making itself at home without an end in sight. A hunger that, if it was not softened as ours was, would take over our bodies, molding them into angular shapes. Legs, arms, and fingers become skinny. Eye sockets become deeper, making the eyes almost disappear. Many of our classmates experienced this hunger and today it continues to afflict millions of Brazilians who die of its violence every year.1 Thus, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has its roots in Paulo Freire's lived experiences. The experience of hunger as a child of a middle-class family that had lost its economic base enabled Freire to, on the one hand, identify and develop "solidarity with the children from the poor outskirts of town"2 and, on the other hand, to realize that "in spite of the hunger that gave us solidarity... in spite of the bond that united us in our search for ways to survive—our playtime, as far as the poor children were concerned, ranked us as people from another world who happened to fall accidentally into their world."3 It is the realization of such class borders that led, invariably, to Freire's radical rejection of a class-based society. Although some strands of postmodernism would dismiss Freire's detailed class analysis in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it is an enormous mistake, if not academic dishonesty, to pretend that we now live in a classless world. Although Freire understood very well that "material oppression and the affective investments that tie oppressed groups to the logic of domination cannot be grasped in all of their complexity within a singular logic of class struggle/'4 he consistently argued that a thorough understanding of oppression must always take a detour through some form of class analysis. Until his death, he courageously denounced the neoliberal position that promotes the false notion of the end of history and the end of class. Freire always viewed history as possibility, "recognizing that History is time filled with possibility and not inexorably determined— 14 • INTRODUCTION that the future is problematic and not already decided, fatalistically,"5 In like manner, Freire continued to reject any false claim to the end of class struggle. Whereas he continually revised his earlier class analyses, he never abandoned or devalued class as an important theoretical category in our search for a better comprehension of conditions of oppression. In a long dialogue we had during his last visit to New York—in fact, the last time we worked together—he again said that although one cannot reduce everything to class, class remains an important factor in our understanding of multiple forms of oppression. While poststructuralists may want to proclaim the end of class analysis, they still have to account for the horrendous human conditions that led, as Freire recounted, a family in Northeast Brazil to scavenge a landfill and take "pieces of an amputated human breast with which they prepared their Sunday lunch/' 6 Freire also never accepted the ' poststructuralism tendency to translate diverse forms of class, race, and gender based oppression to the discursive space of subject positions/'7 He always appreciated the theoretical complexity of multifactor analyses while never underestimating the role of class. For example, he resisted the essentialist approach of reducing all analysis to one monolithic entity of race. For instance, African functionaries who assimilate to colonial cultural values constitute a distinct class with very different ideological cultural values and aspirations than the bulk of the population. Likewise, it would be a mistake to view all African Americans as one monolithic cultural group without marked differences: United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is black, after all (and conservative). Somewhat similar gulfs exist between the vast mass of African Americans who remain subordinated and reduced to ghettoes and middle-class African Americans who, in some sense, have also partly abandoned the subordinated mass of African Americans. I am reminded of a discussion I had with a personal friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had joined him in the important struggle to end segregation and oppression during the 1960s. During our discussion, King's friend remarked, "Donaldo, you are right. We are using euphemisms such as Economically marginal' and avoid more pointed terms like 'oppres- I N T R O D U C T I O N • 15 sion/ I confess that I often feel uneasy when I am invited to discuss at institutions issues pertaining to the community. In reality, I haven't been there in over twenty years." Having achieved great personal success and having moved to a middle-class reality, this African American gentleman began to experience a distance from other African Americans who remain abandoned in ghettoes. In a recent discussion with a group of students, a young African American man who attends an Ivy League university told me that his parents usually vote with the white middle class, even if, in the long run, their vote is ^detrimental to the reality of most black people. Thus, we see again that race, itself, is not necessarily a unifying force. Freire never abandoned his position with respect to class analysis as theorized in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. However, as he continually did, he reconstituted his earlier position throughout the years, particularly in our co-authored book Ideology Matters. In it Freire argues that whereas, for example, "one cannot reduce the analysis of racism to social class, one cannot understand racism fully without a class analysis, for to do one at the expense of the other is to fall prey into a sectarianist position, which is as despicable as the racism that we need to reject."8 In essence, Freire's later works make it clear that what is important is to approach the analysis of oppression through a convergent theoretical framework where the object of oppression is cut across by such factors as race, class, gender, culture, language, and ethnicity. Thus, he would reject any theoretical analysis that would collapse the multiplicity of factors into a monolithic entity, including class. Although Freire was readily embraced in societies struggling against colonialism and other forms of totalitarianism, his acceptance in the so-called open and democratic societies, such as the United States and the nations of Western Europe, has been more problematic. Even though he has an international reputation and following, his work is, sadly, not central to the curricula of most schools of education whose major responsibility is to prepare the next generation of teachers. This relative marginality of Freire's work in the school-of-education curricula is partly due to the fact that most of 16 • I N T R O D U C T I O N these schools are informed by the positivistic and management models that characterize the very culture of ideologies and practices to which Freire was in opposition all his life. For example, the Harvard Graduate School of Education sanctions a graduate course called "Literacy Politics and Policies" without requiring students to read, critique, and analyze the work of Freire. In fact, one can get a doctoral degree from this school, or from others, without ever learning about, much less reading, Paulo Freire. This is tantamount to getting a doctoral degree in Linguistics without ever reading Noam Chomsky, The following illustrates my point. In a lecture at Harvard that analyzed Paulo Freire's theories, given by Professor Ramon Flecha from the University of Barcelona, a doctoral student approached me and asked the following: "I don't want to sound naive, but who is this Paulo Freire that Professor Flecha is citing so much?" I wonder, how can one expect this doctoral student to know the work of "perhaps the most significant educator in the world during the last half of the century" in the words of Herbert Kohl,9 when his graduate school pretends that Paulo Freire never existed? Whereas students in the Third World and other nations struggling with totalitarian regimes would risk their freedom, if not their lives, to read Paulo Freire, in our so-called open societies his work suffers from a more sophisticated form of censorship: omission. This "academic selective selection" of bodies of knowledge, which borders on censorship of critical educators, is partly to blame for the lack of knowledge of Paulo Freire's significant contributions to the field of education. Even many liberals who have embraced his ideas and educational practices often reduce his theoretical work and leading philosophical ideas to a mechanical methodology. I am reminded of a panel that was convened to celebrate Freire's life and work at Harvard after his death. In a large conference room filled to capacity and with people standing in hallways, a panelist who had obviously reduced Freire's leading ideas to a mechanized dialogical practice passed a note to the moderator of the panel suggesting that she give everyone in the room twenty seconds to say something in keeping with the spirit of Freire. This was the way not to engage Freire's belief in INTRODUCTION • 17 emancipation—unless one believes that his complex theory of oppression can be reduced to a twenty-second sound bite. Part of the problem with this mechanization of Freire's leading philosophical and political ideas is that many psudocritical educators, in the name of liberation pedagogy, often sloganize Freire by straitjacketing his revolutionary politics to an empty cliche of the dialogical method. Pseudo-Freirean educators not only strip him of the essence of his radical pedagogical proposals that go beyond the classroom boundaries and effect significant changes in the society as well: these educators also fail to understand the epistemological relationship of dialogue. According to Freire, In order to understand the meaning of dialogical practice, we have to put aside the simplistic understanding of dialogue as a mere technique. Dialogue does not represent a somewhat false path that I attempt to elaborate on and realize in the sense of involving the ingenuity of the other. On the contrary, dialogue characterizes an epistemological relationship. Thus, in this sense, dialogue is a way of knowing and should never be viewed as a mere tactic to involve students in a particular task. We have to make this point very clear. I engage in dialogue not necessarily because I like the other person. I engage in dialogue because I recognize the social and not merely the individualistic character of the process of knowing. In this sense, dialogue presents itself as an indispensable component of the process of both learning and knowing.10 Unfortunately, in the United States, many educators who claim to be Freirean in their pedagogical orientation mistakenly transform Freire's notion of dialogue into a method, thus losing sight of the fact that the fundamental goal of dialogical teaching is to create a process of learning and knowing that invariably involves theorizing about the experiences shared in the dialogue process. Some strands of critical pedagogy engage in an overdose of experiential celebration that offers a reductionistic view of identity^ leading Henry Giroux to point out that such pedagogy leaves identity and experience removed from the problematics of power, agency, and history. By overindulging in the 18 • INTRODUCTION legacy and importance of their respective voices and experiences, these educators often fail to move beyond a notion of difference structured in polarizing binarisms and uncritical appeals to the discourse of experience. I believe that it is for this reason that some of these educators invoke a romantic pedagogical mode that "exoticizes" discussing lived experiences as a process of coming to voice. At the same time, educators who misinterpret Freire's notion of dialogical teaching also refuse to link experiences to the politics of culture and critical democracy, thus reducing their pedagogy to a form of middle-class narcissism. This creates, on the one hand, the transformation of dialogical teaching into a method invoking conversation that provides participants with a group-therapy space for stating their grievances. On the other hand, it offers the teacher as facilitator a safe pedagogical zone to deal with his or her class guilt. It is a process that bell hooks characterizes as nauseating in that it brooks no dissent. Simply put, as Freire reminded us, "what these educators are calling dialogical is a process that hides the true nature of dialogue as a process of learning and knowing. . . .Understanding dialogue as a process of learning and knowing establishes a previous requirement that always involves an epistemological curiosity about the very elements of the dialogue."11 That is to say, dialogue must require an ever-present curiosity about the object of knowledge. Thus, dialogue is never an end in itself but a means to develop a better comprehension about the object of knowledge. Otherwise, one could end up with dialogue as conversation where individual lived experiences are given primacy. I have been in many contexts where the over-celebration of one's own location and history often eclipses the possibility of engaging the object of knowledge by refusing to struggle directly, for instance, with readings involving an object of knowledge, particularly if these readings involve theory. As Freire himself decidedly argued, Curiosity about the object of knowledge and the willingness and openness to engage theoretical readings and discussions is fundamental. However, I am not suggesting an over-celebration of I N T R O D U C T I O N • 19 theory. We must not negate practice for the sake of theory. To do so would reduce theory to a pure verbalism or intellectualism. By the same token, to negate theory for the sake of practice, as in the use of dialogue as conversation, is to run the risk of losing oneself in the disconnectedness of practice. It is for this reason that I never advocate either a theoretic elitism or a practice ungrounded in theory, but the unity between theory and practice. In order to achieve this unity, one must have an epistemological curiosity—a curiosity that is often missing in dialogue as conversation.12 That is, when students lack both the necessary epistemological curiosity and a certain conviviality with the object of knowledge under study, it is difficult to create conditions that increase their epistemological curiosity in order to develop the necessary intellectual tools that will enable him or her to apprehend and comprehend the object of knowledge. If students are not able to transform their lived experiences into knowledge and to use the already acquired knowledge as a process to unveil new knowledge, they will never be able to participate rigorously in a dialogue as a process of learning and knowing. In truth, how can one dialogue without any prior apprenticeship with the object of knowledge and without any epistemological curiosity? For example, how can anyone dialogue about linguistics if the teacher refuses to create the pedagogical conditions that will apprentice students into the new body of knowledge? By this I do not mean that the apprenticeship process should be reduced to the authoritarian tradition of lecturing without student input and discussion. What becomes very clear is that the bureaucratization of the dialogical process represents yet another mechanism used by even some progressive educators to diminish Freire's radical revolutionary and transformative proposals through a process that gives rise to politics without content. Thus, it is not surprising that some liberals join conservative educators to critique Freire for what they characterize as "radical ties." For example, Gregory Jay and Gerald Graff have argued that Freire's proposal in Pedagogy of the Oppressed to move students toward "a critical perception of the world"—which "implies a correct method of approaching reality" so that they can get "a comprehension of total 20 • INTRODUCTION reality"—assumes that Freire already knows the identity of the oppressed. As Jay and Graff point out, "Freire assumes that we know from the outset the identity of the Oppressed' ahd their 'oppressors/ Who the oppressors and the oppressed are is conceived not as an open question that teachers and students might disagree about, but as a given of Freirean pedagogy."13 This form of critique presupposes that education should be nondirective and neutral, a posture that Freire always opposed: "I must intervene in teaching the peasants that their hunger is socially constructed and work with them to help identify those responsible for this social construction, which is, in my view, a crime against humanity."14 Therefore, we need to intervene not only pedagogically but also ethically. Before any intervention, however, an educator must have political clarity—posture that makes many liberals like Graff very uncomfortable to the degree that he considers "Radical educational theorists such as Freire, Henry Giroux, and Stanley Aronowitz . . . [as having a] tunnel-vision style of. . . writing . . . which speaks of but never to those who oppose its premises."15 The assumption that Freire, Giroux, and Aronowitz engage in a "tunnel-vision style of. . . writing" is not only false: it also points to a distorted notion that there is an a priori agreed-upon style of writing that is monolithic, available to all, and "free of jargon." This blind and facile call for writing clarity represents a pernicious mechanism used by academic liberals who suffocate discourses different from their own. Such a call often ignores how language is being used to make social inequality invisible. It also assumes that the only way to deconstruct ideologies of oppression is through a discourse that involves what these academics characterize as a language of clarity. When I was working with Freire on the book Literacy: Reading the Word and the World, I asked a colleague whom I considered to be politically aggressive and to have a keen understanding of Freire's work to read the manuscript. Yet, during a discussion we had about this, she asked me, a bit irritably, "Why do you and Paulo insist on using Marxist jargon? Many readers who may enjoy reading Paulo may be put off by the jargon." I was at first taken aback, but proceeded to explain calmly to her that the equation of Marxism with jargon did INTRODUCTION ' 2 1 not fully capture the richness of Freire's analysis. In fact, I reminded her that Freire's language was the only means through which he could have done justice to the complexity of the various concepts dealing with oppression. For one thing, I reminded her, "Imagine that instead of writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire had written "Pedagogy of the Disenfranchised.77 The first title utilizes a discourse that names the oppressor, whereas the second fails to do so. If you have an "oppressed," you must have an "oppressor/' What would be the counterpart of disenfranchised? "Pedagogy of the Disenfranchised77 dislodges the agent of the action while leaving in doubt who bears the responsibility for such action. This leaves the ground wide open for blaming the victim of disenfranchisement for his or her own disenfranchisement. This example is a clear case in which the object of oppression can also be understood as the subject of oppression. Language like this distorts reality. And yet, mainstream academics like Graff seldom object to these linguistic distortions that disfigure reality. I seldom hear academics on a crusade for "language clarity" equate mainstream terms such as "disenfranchised" or "ethnic cleansing," for example, to jargon status. On the one hand, they readily accept "ethnic cleansing," a euphemism for genocide, while, on the other hand, they will, with certain automatism, point to the jargon quality of terms such as "oppression/' "subordination," and "praxis." If we were to deconstruct the term "ethnic cleansing" we would see that it prevents us from becoming horrified by Serbian brutality and horrendous crimes against Bosnian Muslims. The mass killing of women, children, and the elderly and the rape of women and girls as young as five years old take on the positive attribute of "cleansing," which leads us to conjure a reality of "purification" of the ethnic "filth" ascribed to Bosnian Muslims, in particular, and to Muslims the world over, in general. I also seldom heard any real protest from the same academics who want "language clarity" when, during the Gulf War, the horrific blood bath of the battlefield became a "theater of operation," and the violent killing of over one hundred thousand Iraqis, including innocent women, children, and the elderly by our "smart bombs," was sanitized 22 • INTRODUCTION into a technical term: "collateral damage." I can go on with examples to point out how academics who argue for clarity of language not only seldom object to language that obfuscates reality, but often use the same language as part of the general acceptance that the "standard" discourse is given and should remain unproblematic. Although these academics accept the dominant standard discourse, they aggressively object to any discourse that both fractures the dominant language and bares the veiled reality in order to name it. Thus, a discourse that names it becomes, in their view, imprecise and unclear, and wholesale euphemisms such as "disadvantaged," "disenfranchised," "educational mortality," "theater of operation," "collateral damage," and "ethnic cleansing" remain unchallenged since they are part of the dominant social construction of images that are treated as unproblematic and clear. I am often amazed to hear academics complain about the complexity of a particular discourse because of its alleged lack of clarity. It is as if they have assumed that there is a mono-discourse that is characterized by its clarity and is also equally available to all. If one begins to probe the issue of clarity, we soon realize that it is class specific, thus favoring those of that class in the meaningmaking process. The following two examples will bring the point home: Henry Giroux and I gave a speech at Massasoit Community College in Massachusetts to approximately three hundred unwed mothers who were part of a GED (graduate-equivalency diploma) program. The director of the program later informed us that most of the students were considered functionally illiterate. After Giroux's speech, during the question-and-answer period, a woman got up and eloquently said, "Professor Giroux, all my life I felt the things you talked about. I just didn't have a language to express what I have felt. Today I have come to realize that I do have a language. Thank you." And Paulo Freire told me the story of what happened to him at the time he was preparing the English translation of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He gave an African American student at Harvard a chapter of the book to read to see how she would receive it. A few days later when he asked the INTRODUCTION ' 2 3 woman if she had read it, she enthusiastically responded, "Yes. Not only did I read it, but I gave it to my sixteen-year-old son to read. He read the whole chapter that night and in the morning said, 'I want to meet the man who wrote this. He is talking about me/ " One question that I have for all those "highly literate" academics who find Giroux's and Freire's discourse so difficult to understand is, Why is it that a sixteen-year-old boy and a poor, "semiliterate" woman could so easily understand and connect with the complexity of both Freire and Girouxs language and ideas, and the academics, who should be the most literate, find the language incomprehensible? I believe that the answer has little to do with language and everything to do with ideology. That is, people often identify with representations that they are either comfortable with or that help deepen their understanding of themselves. The call for language clarity is an ideological issue, not merely a linguistic one. The sixteen-year-old and the semiliterate poor woman could readily connect with Freire's ideology, whereas the highly literate academics are "put off by some dimensions of the "same ideology. It is, perhaps, for this reason that a university professor I know failed to include Freire's work in a graduate course that she taught on literacy. When I raised the issue with her, she explained that students often find Freire's writing too difficult and cumbersome. It could also be the reason that the Divinity School at Harvard University offers a course entitled "Education for Liberation," in which students study Freire and James Cone extensively, whereas no such opportunities are available at Harvard's School of Education. For me, the mundane call for a language of "simplicity and clarity" represents yet another mechanism to dismiss the complexity of theoretical issues, particularly if these theoretical constructs interrogate the prevailing dominant ideology. It is for this very reason that Gayatri Spivak correctly points out that the call for "plain prose cheats." I would go a step further and say, "The call for plain prose not only cheats, it also bleaches." For me, it is not only plain prose that bleaches. Gerald Graffs pedagogy of "teaching the conflict" also bleaches to the extent that it 24 • INTRODUCTION robs students of the opportunity to access the critical discourses that will enable them not only to deconstruct the colonial and hegemonic paradigms, but will also help them realize that one cannot teach conflict as if, all of a sudden, it fell from the sky. The conflict must be anchored in those competing histories and ideologies that generated the conflict in the first place. David Goldberg captures this problem when he argues that Graffs suggestion: presupposes that educators—even the humanists of Graffs address—occupy a neutral position, or at least can suspend their prejudices, in presenting the conflicts, and that the conflicts are fixed and immobile. One cannot teach the conflicts (or anything else, for that matter) by assuming this neutral "view from nowhere," for it is no view at all. In other words, the Assumption of a View from Nowhere is the projection of local values as neutrally universal ones, the globalizing of ethnocentric values, as Stam and Shohat put it.16 The problem with the teaching of the conflict is that the only referent for engaging authority is a methodological one. As a result, Graff demeans the ability of oppressed people to name their oppression as a pedagogical necessity and, at the same time, he dismisses the politics of pedagogy that "could empower 'minorities' and build on privileged students' minimal experience of 'otherization' " to help them imagine alternative subject positions and divergent social designs.17 As one can readily see, the mechanization of Freire's revolutionary pedagogical proposals not only leads to the depolitization of his radically democratic work but also creates spaces for even those liberals who embrace Freire's proposals to confuse "the term he employs to summarize his approach to education, pedagogy' [which] is often interpreted as a 'teaching method rather than a philosophy or a social theory. Few who invoke his name make the distinction. To be sure, neither does The Oxford English Dictionary. "lH This seeming lack of distinction is conveniently adopted by those educators who believe that education is neutral as they engage in a social construction of not INTRODUCTION ' 2 5 seeing. That is, they willfully refuse to understand that the very term "pedagogy," as my good friend and colleague Panagiota Gounari explains it, has Greek roots, meaning "to lead a child" (from pais: child and ago: to lead). Thus, as the term "pedagogy" illustrates, education is inherently directive and must always be transformative. As Stanley Aronowitz so succinctly argues, "Freire's pedagogy is grounded in a fully developed philosophical anthropology, that is, a theory of human nature, one might say a secular liberation theology, containing its own categories that are irreducible to virtually any other philosophy."19 The misinterpretation of Freire's philosophical and revolutionary pedagogical proposals in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and his subsequent books lies not only in the depolitization of his revolutionary aim "to transform what Frantz Fannon terms 'the wretched of the earth' from 'being for others' to 'beings for themselves,' "20 but also in the disarticulation of Freire's thinking from his enormous debt to a philosophical tradition that included Marx, Gramsci, Hegel, and Sartre among others. Although I was immobilized when I received the devastating news that Paulo Freire, my friend, my collaborator, my teacher, and my mentor, had died, I found comfort in the certainty that Pedagogy of the Oppressed had indeed "outlived its own time and its author's." I found comfort in the immeasurable hope that Paulo represented for those of us who are committed to imagine a world, in his own words, that is less ugly, more beautiful, less discriminatory, more democratic, less dehumanizing, and more humane. In his work and in his life, Paulo teaches us and the world—with his hallmark humility—what it means to be an intellectual who fights against the temptation of becoming a populist intellectual. As always, he teaches us with his penetrating and unquiet mind the meaning of a profound commitment to fight sopial injustices in our struggle to recapture the loss of our dignity as human beings. In Paulo's own words: We need to say no to the neoliberal fatalism that we are witnessing at the end of this century, informed by the ethics of the market, an ethics in which a minority makes most profits against 26 • INTRODUCTION the lives of the majority. In other words, those who cannot compete, die. This is a perverse ethics that, in fact, lacks ethics. I insist on saying that I continue to be human . . . I would then remain the last educator in the world to say no: I do not accept. . . history as determinism. I embrace history as possibility [where] we can demystify the evil in this perverse fatalism that characterizes the neoliberal discourse in the end of this century.21 Paulo Freire did not realize his dream of entering the twenty-first century full of hope for "a world that is more round, less ugly, and more just." Although he did not hold our hands as we crossed the threshold of the twenty-first century, his words of wisdom, his penetrating and insightful ideas, his courage to denounce in order to announce, his courage to love and "to speak about love without fear of being called ascientific, if not antiscientific," his humility, and his humanity make him immortal—a forever-present force that keeps alive our understanding of history as possibility. I always accepted with humility Paulo's challenge through the coherence and humility he exemplified. With much sadness, magoa, but also with much affection and hope, I say, once more, thank you Paulo: for having been present in the world, for having given us Pedagogy of the Oppressed, for having taught us how to read the world and for challenging us to humanize the world. DONALDO MACEDO Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education University of Massachusetts, Boston INTRODUCTION -27 Notes 1. Paulo Freire, Letters to Cristina. (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 15. 2. Ibid. p. 21. 3. Ibid. 4. Henry A. Giroux, "Radical Pedagogy and Educated Hope: Remembering Taulo Freire." Typewritten manuscript. 5. Ibid. 6. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Ideology Matters (Boulder CO.: Rowman & Littlefield), forthcoming. 7. Henry A. Giroux, "Radical Pedagogy and Educated Hope." 8. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Ideology Matters. 9. Herbert Kohl, "Paulo Freire: Liberation Pedagogy" in The Nation, May 26, 1997, p. 7. 10. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, "A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and Race" in Harvard Educational Review, vol. 65, no. 3, fall 1995, p. 379. 11. Ibid. p. 382. 12. Ibid. 13. Gregory Jay and Gerald Graff, "A Critique of Critical Pedagogy," Higher Education under Fire, ed. Michael Barube and Gary Nelson (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 203. 14. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, "A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and Race," p. 379. 15. Gerald Graff, "Academic Writing and the Uses of Bad Publicity," Eloquent Obsessions, ed. Mariana Torgormick (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 215. 16., David Theo Goldberg, "Introduction," Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994), p. 19. 17. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, "Contested Histories? Eurocentrism, Multiculturalism, and the Media," Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, p. 19. 18. Stanley Aronowitz, "Paulo Freire's Radical Democratic Humanism" in Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard, Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 8. 19. Ibid. p. 12. 20. Ibid. p. 13. 21. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Ideology Matters. Forewoid Over the years, the thought and work of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire have spread from the North East of Brazil to an entire continent, and have made a profound impact not only in the field of education but also in the overall struggle for national development. At the precise moment when the disinherited masses in Latin America are awakeningfromtheir traditional lethargy and are anx­ ious to participate, as Subjects, in the development of their coun­ tries, Paulo Freire has perfected a method for teaching illiterates that has contributed, in an extraordinary way, to that process. In fact, those who, in learning to read and write, come to a new awareness of selfhood and begin to look critically at the social situation in which they find themselves, often take the initiative in acting to transform the society that has denied them this opportunity of participation. Education is once again a subversive force. In this country, we are gradually becoming aware of the work of Paulo Freire, but thus far we have thought of it primarily in terms of its contribution to the education of illiterate adults in the Third World. If, however, we take a closer look, we may discover that his methodology as well as his educational philosophy are as important for us as for the dispossessed in Latin America. Their struggle to become free Subjects and to participate in the transformation of their society is similar, in many ways, to the struggle not only of blacks and Mexican-Americans but also of middle-class young peo­ ple in this country. And the sharpness and intensity of that struggle in the developing world may well provide us with new insight, new models, and a new hope as we face our own situation. For this reason, I consider the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in an English edition to be something of an event. 30-PAULO FREIRE Paulo Freire's thought represents the, response of a creative mind and sensitive conscience to the extraordinary misery and suffering of the oppressed around him. Born in 1921 in Recife, the center of one of the most extreme situations of poverty and underdevelopment in the Third World, he was soon forced to experience that reality directly. As the economic crisis in 1929 in the United States began to affect Brazil, the precarious stability of Freires middle-class family gave way and he found himself sharing the plight of the "wretched of the earth." This had a profound influence on his life as he came to know the gnawing pangs of hunger and fell behind in school because of the listlessness it produced; it also led him to make a vow, at age eleven, to dedicate his life to the struggle against hunger, so that other children would not have to know the agony he was then experiencing. His early sharing of the life of the poor also led him to the discovery of what he describes as the "culture of silence" of the dispossessed. He came to realize that their ignorance and lethargy were the direct product of the whole situation of economic, social, and political domination—and of the paternalism—of which they were victims. Rather than being encouraged and equipped to know and respond to the concrete realities of their world, they were kept "submerged" in a situation in which such critical awareness and response were practically impossible. And it became clear to him that the whole educational system was one of the major instruments for the maintenance of this culture of silence. Confronted by this problem in a very existential way, Freire turned his attention to the field of education and began to work on it. Over the years, he has engaged in a process of study and reflection that has produced something quite new and creative in educational philosophy. From a situation of direct engagement in the struggle to liberate men and women for the creation of a new world, he has reached out to the thought and experience of those in many different situations and of diverse philosophical positions: in his words, to "Sartre and Mounier, Erich Fromm and Louis Althusser, Ortega y Gasset and Mao, Martin Luther King and Che Guevara, PEDAGOGY OF THE O P P R E S S E D ' 3 1 Unamuno and Marcuse." He has made use of the insights of these men to develop a perspective on education which is authentically his own and which seeks to respond to the concrete realities of Latin America. His thought on the philosophy of education was first expressed in 1959 in his doctoral dissertation at the University of Recife, and later in his wbrk as Professor of the History and Philosophy of Education in the same university, as well as in his early experiments with the teaching of illiterates in that same city. The methodology he devel­ oped was widely used by Catholics and others in literacy campaigns throughout the North East of Brazil, and was considered such a threat to the old order that Freire was jailed immediately after the military coup in 1964. Released seventy days later and encouraged to leave the country, Freire went to Chile, where he spent five years working with UNESCO and the Chilean Institute for Agrarian Reform in programs of adult education. He then acted as a consult­ ant at Harvard University's School of Education, and worked in close association with a number of groups engaged in new educational experiments in rural and urban areas. He is presently serving as Special Consultant to the Office of Education of the World Council of Churches in Geneva. Freire has written many articles in Portuguese and Spanish, and hisfirstbook, Educagdo como Prdtica da Liberdade, was published in Brazil in 1967. His latest and most complete work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is the first of his writings to be published in this country. In this brief introduction, there is no point in attempting to sum up, in a few paragraphs, what the author develops in a number of pages. That would be an offense to the richness, depth, and com­ plexity of his thought. But perhaps a word of witness has its place here—a personal witness as to why I find a dialogue with the thought of Paulo Freire an exciting adventure. Fed up as I am with the abstractness and sterility of so much intellectual work in aca­ demic circles today, I am excited by a process of reflection which is set in a thoroughly historical context, which is carried on in the 32'PAULO FREIRE midst of a struggle to create a new social order and thus represents a new unity of theory and praxis. And I am encouraged when a man of the stature of Paulo Freire incarnates a rediscovery of the humanizing vocation of the intellectual, and demonstrates the power of thought to negate accepted limits and open the way to a new future. Freire is able to do this because he operates on one basic assump­ tion: that mans ontological vocation (as he calls it) is to be a Subject who acts upon and transforms his world, and in so doing moves toward ever new possibilities of fuller and richer life individually and collectively. This world to which he relates is not a static and closed order, a given reality which man must accept and to which he must adjust; rather, it is a problem to be worked on and solved. It is the material used by man to create history, a task which he performs as he overcomes that which is dehumanizing at any par­ ticular time and place and dares to create the qualitatively new. For Freire, the resources for that task at the present time are provided by the advanced technology of our Western world, but the social vision which impels us to negate the present order and demonstrate that history has not ended comes primarily from the suffering and struggle of the people of the Third World. Coupled with this is Freires conviction (now supported by a wide background of experience) that every human being, no matter how "ignorant" or submerged in the "culture of silence" he or she may be, is capable of looking critically at the world in a dialogical encoun­ ter with others. Provided with the proper tools for such encounter, the individual can gradually perceive personal and social reality as well as the contradictions in it, become conscious of his or her own perception of that reality, and deal critically with it. In this process, the old, paternalistic teacher-student relationship is overcome. A peasant can facilitate this process for a neighbor more effectively than a "teacher" brought in from outside. "People educate each other through the mediation of the world." As this happens, the word takes on new power. It is no longer an abstraction or magic but a means by which people discover them- PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED ' 3 3 selves and their potential as they give names to things around them. As Freire puts it, each individual wins back the right to say his or her own wordy to name the world. When an illiterate peasant participates in this sort of educational experience, he or she comes to a new awareness of self, has a new sense of dignity, and is stirred by a new hope. Time and again, peasants have expressed these discoveries in striking ways after a few hours of class: "I now realize I am a person, an educated person." "We were blind, now our eyes have been opened." "Before this, words meant nothing to me; now they speak to me and I can make them speak." "Now we will no longer be a dead weight on the cooperative farm." When this happens in the process of learning to read, men and women discover that they are creators of culture, and that all their work can be creative. "I work, and working I transform the world." And as those who have been completely marginalized are so radically transformed, they are no longer willing to be mere objects, responding to changes occurring around them; they are more likely to decide to take upon themselves the struggle to change the structures of society, which until now have served to oppress them. For this reason, a distinguished Brazilian student of national development recently affirmed that this type of educational work among the people represents a new factor in social change and devel­ opment, "a new instrument of conduct for the Third World, by which it can overcome traditional structures and enter the modern world." At first sight, Paulo Freire's method of teaching illiterates in Latin America seems to belong to a different world from that in which we find ourselves in this country. Certainly, it would be absurd to claim that it should be copied here. But there are certain parallels in the two situations that should not be overlooked. Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system. To the degree that this happens, we are also becoming submerged in a new "culture of silence." The paradox is that the same technology that does this to us also 3 4 ' P A U L O FREIRE creates a new sensitivity to what is happening. Especially among young people, the new media together with the erosion of old concepts of authority open the way to acute awareness of this new bondage. The young perceive that their right to say their own word has been stolen from them, and that few things are more important than the struggle to win it back. And they also realize that the educational system today—from kindergarten to university—is their enemy. There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes "the practice of freedom," the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. The development of an educational methodology that facilitates this process will inevitably lead to tension and conflict within our society. But it could also contribute to the formation of a new man and mark the beginning of a new era in Western history For those who are committed to that task and are searching for concepts and tools for experimentation, Paulo Freires thought will make a significant contribution in the years ahead. RICHARD SHAULL Preface These pages, which introduce Pedagogy of the Oppressed, result from my observations during six years of political exile, observations which have enriched those previously afforded by my educational activities in Brazil. I have encountered, both in training courses which analyze the role of conscientizagao1 and in actual experimentation with a truly liberating education, the "fear of freedom" discussed in the first chapter of this book. Not infrequently, training course participants call attention to "the danger of conscientizagao" in a way that reveals their own fear of freedom. Critical consciousness, they say, is anar­ chic. Others add that critical consciousness may lead to disorder. Some, however, confess: Why deny it? I was afraid of freedom. I am no longer afraid! In one of these discussions, the group was debating whether the conscientizagao of men and women to a specific situation of injustice might not lead them to "destructive fanaticism" or to a "sensation of total collapse of their world." In the midst of the argument, a person who previously had been a factory worker for many years spoke out: "Perhaps I am the only one here of working-class origin. I cani say that I've understood everything you've said just now, but I can say one thing—when I began this course I was naive, and when I found out how naive I was, I started to get critical. But this discovery hasn't made me a fanatic, and I don't feel any collapse either." 1. The term consctentizagdo refers to learning to perceive social, political and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality. See chapter 3.—Translator s note. 36-PAULO FREIRE Doubt regarding the possible effects of conscientizagdo implies a premise which the doubter does not always make explicit: It is better for the victims of injustice not to recognize themselves as such. In fact, however, conscientizagdo does not lead people to "destructive fanaticism." On the contrary, by making it possible for people to enter the historical process as responsible Subjects,2 conscientizagdo enrolls them in the search for self-affirmation and thus avoids fanaticism, The awakening of critical consciousness leads the way to the expression of social discontents precisely because these discontents are real components of an oppressive situation.3 Fear of freedom, of which its possessor is not necessarily aware, makes him see ghosts. Such an individual is actually taking refuge in an attempt to achieve security, which he or she prefers to the risks of liberty. As Hegel testifies: It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; . . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.4 Men and women rarely admit their fear of freedom openly, however, tending rather to camouflage it—sometimes unconsciously—by presenting themselves as defenders of freedom. They give their doubts and misgivings an air of profound sobriety, as befitting custodians of freedom. But they confuse freedom with the maintenance of the status quo; so that if conscientizagdo threatens to place that status quo in question, it thereby seems to constitute a threat to freedom itself. 2. The term Subjects denotes those who know and act, in contrast to objects, which are known and acted upon.—Translator's note. 3. Francisco Weffort, in the preface to Paulo Freire, Educagdo como Prdtica da Liberdade (Rio de Janeiro, 1967). 4. Georg Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (New York, 1967), p. 233. PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED ' 3 7 Thought and study alone did not produce Pedagogy of the Oppressed; it is rooted in concrete situations and describes the reac­ tions of laborers (peasant or urban) and of middle-class persons whom I have observed directly or indirectly during the course of my educative work. Continued observation will afford me an oppor­ tunity to modify or to corroborate in later studies the points pro­ posed in this introductory work. This volume will probably arouse negative reactions in a number of readers. Some will regard my position vis-a-vis the problem of human liberation as purely idealistic, or may even consider discus­ sion of ontological vocation, love, dialogue, hope, humility, and sym­ pathy as so much reactionary "blah." Others will not (or will not wish to) accept my denunciation of a state of oppression that gratifies the oppressors. Accordingly, this admittedly tentative work is for radicals. I am certain that Christians and Marxists, though they may disagree with me in part or in whole, will continue reading to the end. But the reader who dogmatically assumes closed, "irrational" positions will reject the dialogue I hope this book will open. Sectarianism, fed by fanaticism, is always castrating. Radicalization, nourished by a critical spirit, is always creative. Sectarianism mythicizes and thereby alienates; radicalization criticizes and thereby liberates. Radicalization involves increased commitment to the position one has chosen, and thus ever greater engagement in the effort to transform concrete, objective reality. Conversely, sectar­ ianism, because it is mythicizing and irrational, turns reality into a false (and therefore unchangeable) "reality." Sectarianism in any quarter is an obstacle to the emancipation of mankind. The rightist version thereof does not always, unfortu­ nately, call forth its natural counterpart: radicalization of the revolu­ tionary. Not infrequently, revolutionaries themselves become reactionary by falling into sectarianism in the process of responding to the sectarianism of the Right. This possibility, however, should not lead the radical to become a docile pawn of the elites. Engaged in the process of liberation, he or she cannot remain passive in the face of the oppressors violence. 38'PAULO FREIRE On the other hand, the radical is never a subjectivist. For this individual the subjective aspect exists only in relation to the objective aspect (the concrete reality, which is the object of analysis). Subjectivity and objectivity thus join in a dialectical unity producing knowledge in solidarity with action, and vice versa. For his or her part, the sectarian of whatever persuasion, blinded by irrationality, does not (or cannot) perceive the dynamic of reality—or else misinterprets it. Should this person think dialectically, it is with a "domesticated dialectic." The rightist sectarian (whom I have previously termed a born sectarian5) wants to slow down the historical process, to "domesticate" time and thus to domesticate men and women. The leftist-turned-sectarian goes totally astray when he or she attempts to interpret reality and history dialectically, and falls into essentially fatalistic positions. The rightist sectarian differs from his or her leftist counterpart in that the former attempts to domesticate the present so that (he or she hopes) the future will reproduce this domesticated present, while the latter considers the future pre-established—a kind of inevitable fate, fortune, or destiny. For the rightist sectarian, "today," linked to the past, is something given and immutable; for the leftist sectarian, "tomorrow" is decreed beforehand, is inexorably preordained. This rightist and this leftist are both reactionary because, starting from their respectively false views of history, both develop forms of action that negate freedom. The fact that one person imagines a "well-behaved" present and the other a predetermined future does not mean that they therefore fold their arms and become spectators (the former expecting that the present will continue, the latter waiting for the already "known" future to come to pass). On the contrary, closing themselves into "circles of certainty" from which they cannot escape, these individuals "make" their own truth. It is not the truth of men and women who struggle to build the future, running the risks involved in this very construction. Nor is it the truth of men and women who fight side by side and learn together 5. In Educagdo como Prdtica da Liberdade. PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED - 3 9 how to build this future—which is not something given to be re­ ceived by people, but is rather something to be created by them. Both types of sectarian, treating history in an equally proprietary fashion, end up without the people—which is another way of being against them. Whereas the rightist sectarian, closing himself in "his" truth, does no more than fulfill a natural role, the leftist who becomes sectarian and rigid negates his or her very nature. Each, however, as he re­ volves about "his" truth, feels threatened if that truth is questioned. Thus, each considers anything that is not "his" truth a lie. As the journalist Marcio Moreira Alves once told me, "They both suffer from an absence of doubt." * The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a "circle of certainty' within which reality is also imprisoned. On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them.6 This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side. The pedagogy of the oppressed, the introductory outlines of which are presented in the following pages, is a task for radicals; it cannot be carried out by sectarians. I will be satisfied if among the readers of this work there are those sufficiently critical to correct mistakes and misunderstandings, to deepen affirmations and to point out aspects I have not perceived. It is possible that some may question my right to discuss revolutionary cultural action, a subject of which I have no concrete experience. The fact that I have not personally participated in revolutionary action, however, does not negate the possibility of my reflecting on 6. "As long as theoretic knowledge remains the privilege of a handful of 'academi­ cians* in the Party, the latter will face the danger of going astray." Rosa Luxembourg, Reform or Revolution, cited in C. Wright Mills, The Marxists (New York, 1963). 40-PAULO FREIRE this theme. Furthermore, in my experience as an educator with the people, using a dialogical and problem-posing education, I have accumulated a comparative wealth of material that challenged me to run the risk of making the affirmations contained in this work. From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in men and women, and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love. Here I would like to express my gratitude to Elza, my wife and "first reader," for the understanding and encouragement she has shown my work, which belongs to her as well I would also like to extend my thanks to a group of friends for their comments on my manuscript. At the risk of omitting some names, I must mention Joao da Veiga Coutinho, Richard Shaull, Jim Lamb, Myra and Jovelino Ramos, Paulo de Tarso, Almino Affonso, Plinio Sampaio, Ernani Maria Fiori, Marcela Gajardo, Jose Luis Fiori, and Joao Zacarioti. The responsibility for the affirmations made herein is, of course, mine alone. PAULO FREIRE PEDAGOGY of the OPPRESSED CHAPTER 1 W hile the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind's central problem, it now takes on the character of an inescapable l concern. Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality And as an individual perceives the extent of dehumanization, he or shertiayask if humanization is a viable possibility. Within history^ in concrete, objective contexts, both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a person as an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion. But while both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives, only the first is the people's vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation. It is 1. The current movements of rebellion, especially those of youth, while they necessarily reflect the peculiarities of their respective settings, manifest in their essence this preoccupation with people as beings in the world and with the world— preoccupation with what and how they are "being." As they place consumer civiliza­ tion in judgment, denounce bureaucracies of all types, demand the transformation of the universities (changing the rigid nature of the teacher-student relationship and placing that relationship within the context of reality), propose the transformation of reality itself so that universities can be renewed, attack old orders and established institutions in the attempt to affirm human beings as the Subjects of decision, all these movements reflect the style of our age, which is more anthropological than anthropocentric. 44-PAULO FREIRE thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost hu­ manity. Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. This distortion occurs within history; but it is not an histori­ cal vocation. Indeed, to admit of dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumaniza­ tion, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppres­ sors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed. Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both. This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the op­ pressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the op­ pressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to "soften" the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their "generosity," the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this "generosity," which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false gen­ erosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source. PEDAGOGY OF THE O P P R E S S E D • 45 True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands—whether of individ­ uals or entire peoples—need be extended less and less in supplica­ tion, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world. This lesson and this apprenticeship must come, however, from the oppressed themselves and from those who are truly solidary with them. As individuals or as peoples, by fighting for the restoration of their humanity they will be attempting the restoration of true generosity. Who are better prepared than the oppressed to under­ stand the terrible significance of an oppressive society? Who suffer the eflFects of oppression more than the oppressed? Who can better understand the necessity of liberation? They will not gain this libera­ tion by chance but through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to fight for it. And this fight, be­ cause of the purpose given it by the oppressed, will actually consti­ tute an act of love opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressors violence, lovelessness even when clothed in false generosity. But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to be­ come oppressors, or "sub-oppressors." The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of "adhesion" to the oppressor. Under these circum­ stances they cannot "consider" him sufficiently clearly to objectivize him—to discover him "outside" themselves. This does not necessar­ ily mean that the oppressed are unaware that they are downtrodden. But their perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression. At this level, their perception of themselves as opposites of the oppressor does not yet 46-PAULO FREIRE signify engagement in a struggle to overcome the contradiction;2 the one pole aspires not to liberation, but to identification with its opposite pole. In this situation the oppressed do not see the "new man" as the person to be born from the resolution of this contradiction, as oppression gives way to liberation. For them, the new man or woman themselves become oppressors. Their vision of the new man or woman is individualistic; because of their identification with the oppressor, they have no consciousness of themselves as persons or as members of an oppressed class. It is not to become free that they want agrarian reform, but in order to acquire land and thus become landowners—or, more precisely, bosses over other workers. It is a rare peasant who, once "promoted" to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself. This is because the context of the peasant's situation, that is, oppression, remains unchanged. In this example, the overseer, in order to make sure of his job, must be as tough as the owner—and more so. Thus is illustrated our previous assertion that during the initial stage of their struggle the oppressed find in the oppressor their model of "manhood." Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by establishing the process of liberation, must confront this phenomenon. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly participate in revolution intend—conditioned by the myths of the old order—to make it their private revolution. The shadow of their former oppressor is still cast over them. The "fear of freedom" which afflicts the oppressed,3 a fear which may equally well lead them to desire the role of oppressor or bind them to the role of oppressed, should be examined. One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is 2. As used throughout this book, the term "contradiction" denotes the dialectical conflict between opposing social forces.—Translator s note. 3. This fear of freedom is also to be found in the oppressors, though, obviously, in a different form. The oppressed are afraid to embrace freedom; the oppressors are afraid of losing the "freedom" to oppress. PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED -47 prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual's choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the pre­ servers consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the op­ pressor. The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. 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 com­ pletion. To surmount the situation of oppression, people must first criti­ cally recognize its causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity. But the struggle to be more fully human has already begun in the authentic struggle to transform the situation. Although the situation of oppression is a dehumanized and dehu­ manizing totality affecting both the oppressors and those whom they oppress, it is the latter who must, from their stifled humanity, wage for both the struggle for a fuller humanity; the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle. However, the oppressed, who have adapted to the structure of domination in which they are immersed, and have become resigned to it, are inhibited from waging the struggle for freedom so long as they feel incapable of running the risks it requires. Moreover, their struggle for freedom threatens not only the oppressor, but also their own oppressed comrades who are fearful of still greater repression. When they discover within themselves the yearning to be free, they perceive that this yearning can be transformed into reality only when the same yearning is aroused in their comrades. But while dominated by the fear of freedom they refuse to appeal to others, 48-PAULO FREIRE or to listen to the appeals of others, or even to the appeals of their own conscience. They prefer gregariousness to authentic comrade­ ship; they prefer the security of conformity with their state of unfreedom to the creative communion produced by freedom and even the very pursuit of freedom. The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet, although they desire authentic exis­ tence, they fear it. They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting them; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being silent, castrated in their power to create and re-create, in their power to transform the world. This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education must take into account. This book will present some aspects of what the writer has termed the pedagogy of the oppressed, a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity. This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade. The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be "hosts" of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are mani­ festations of dehumanization. PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED - 4 9 Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one. The man or woman who emerges is a new person, viable only as the oppressoroppressed contradiction is superseded by the humanization of all people. Or to put it another way, the solution of this contradiction is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom. This solution cannot be achieved in idealistic terms. In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. This perception is a necessary but not a sufficient condition foi* liberation; it must become the motivating force for liberating action. Nor does the discovery by the oppressed that they exist in dialectical relationship to the oppressor, as his antithesis— that without them the oppressor could not exist4—in itself constitute liberation. The oppressed can overcome the contradiction in which they are caught only when this perception enlists them in the strug­ gle to free themselves. The same is true with respect to the individual oppressor as a person. Discovering himself to be an oppressor may cause consider­ able anguish, but it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed. Rationalizing his guilt through paternalistic treatment of the oppressed, all the while holding them fast in a position of dependence, will not do. Solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is solidary; it is a radical posture. If what characterizes the oppressed is their subordination to the consciousness of the master, as Hegel affirms,5 true solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these "beings for another." The oppres- 4. See Hegel, op. cit.y pp. 236-237. 5. Analyzing the dialectical relationship between the consciousness of the master and the consciousness of the oppressed, Hegel states: "The one is independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Bondsman." Ibid., p. 234. 50-PAULO FREIRE sor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor—when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in its praxis. To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce. Since it is a concrete situation that the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is established, the resolution of this contradiction must be objectively verifiable. Hence, the radical requirement—both for the individual who discovers himself or herself to be an oppressor and for the oppressed—that the concrete situation which begets oppression must be transformed. To present this radical demand for the objective transformation of reality, to combat subjectivist immobility which would divert the recognition of oppression into patient waiting for oppression to disappear by itself, is not to dismiss the role of subjectivity in the struggle to change structures. On the contrary, one cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity. Neither can exist without the other, nor can they be dichotomized. The separation of objectivity from subjectivity, the denial of the latter when analyzing reality or acting upon it, is objectivism. On the other hand, the denial of objectivity in analysis or action, resulting in a subjectivism which leads to solipsistic positions, denies action itself by denying objective reality. Neither objectivism nor subjectivism, nor yet psychologism is propounded here, but rather subjectivity and objectivity in constant dialectical relationship. To deny the importance of subjectivity in the process of transforming the world and history is naive and simplistic. It is to admit the impossible: a world without people. This objectivistic position is as ingenuous as that of subjectivism, which postulates people without a world. World and human beings do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant interaction. Marx does not espouse PEDAGOGY OF THE O P P R E S S E D - 5 1 such a dichotomy, nor does any other critical, realistic thinker. What Marx criticized and scientifically destroyed was not subjectivity, but subjectivism and psychologism. Just as objective social reality exists not by chance, but as the product of human action, so it is not transformed by chance. If humankind produce social reality (which in the "inversion of the praxis" turns back upon them and conditions them), then transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for humanity. Reality which becomes oppressive results in the contradistinction of men as oppressors and oppressed. The latter, whose task it is to struggle for their liberation together with those who show true solidarity, must acquire a critical awareness of oppression through the praxis of this struggle. One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings consiousness.6 Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it. i Hay que hacer al opresion real todavia mas opresiva anadiendo a aquella la conciencia de la opresion haciendo la infamia todavia mas infamante, al pregonarla.7 Making "real oppression more oppressive still by adding to it the realization of oppression" corresponds to the dialectical relation between the subjective and the objective. Only in this interdepen­ dence is an authentic praxis possible, without which it is impossible 6. "Liberating action necessarily involves a moment of perception and volition. This action both precedes and follows that moment, to which it first acts as a prologue and which it subsequently serves to effect and continue within history. The action of domination, however, does not necessarily imply this dimension; for the structure of domination is maintained by its own mechanical and unconscious functionality." From an unpublished work by Jose Luiz Fiori, who has kindly granted permission to quote him. 7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, La Sagrada Familia y otros Escritos (Mexico, 1962), p. 6. Emphasis added. 52-PAULO FREIRE to resolve the oppressor-oppressed contradiction. To achieve this goal, the oppressed must confront reality critically, simultaneously objectifying and acting upon that reality. A mere perception of reality not followed by this critical intervention will not lead to a transformation of objective reality—precisely because it is not a true perception. This is the case of a purely subjectivist perception by someone who forsakes objective reality and creates a false substitute. A different type of false perception occurs when a change in objective reality would threaten the individual or class interests of the perceiver. In the first instance, there is no critical intervention in reality because that reality is fictitious; there is none in the second instance because intervention would contradict the class interests of the perceiver. In the latter case the tendency of the perceiver is to behave "neurotically." The fact exists; but both the fact and what may result from it may be prejudicial to the person. Thus it becomes necessary, not precisely to deny the fact, but to "see it differently." This rationalization as a defense mechanism coincides in the end with subjectivism. A fact which is not denied but whose truths are rationalized loses its objective base. It ceases to be concrete and becomes a myth created in defense of the class of the perceiver. Herein lies one of the reasons for the prohibitions and the difficulties (to be discussed at length in Chapter 4) designed to dissuade the people from critical intervention in reality. The oppressor knows full well that this intervention would not be to his interest. What is to his interest is for the people to continue in a state of submersion, impotent in the face of oppressive reality. Of relevance here is Lukacs warning to the revolutionary party: . . . il doit, pour employer les mots de Marx, expliquer aux masses leur propre action non seulement afin d'assurer la continuity des experiences revolutionnaires du proletariat, mais aussi d'activer consciemment le developpement ulterieur de ces experiences.8 In affirming this necessity, Lukacs is unquestionably posing the 8. Georg Lukacs, Lenine (Paris, 1965), p. 62. PEDAGOGY OF THE O P P R E S S E D - 5 3 problem of critical intervention. "To explain to the masses their own action" is to clarify and illuminate that action, both regarding its relationship to the objective facts by which it was prompted, and regarding its purposes. The more the people unveil this challenging reality which is to be the object of their transforming action, the more critically they enter that reality. In this way they are "con­ sciously activating the subsequent development of their experi­ ences." There would be no human action if there were no objective reality, no world to be the "not I" of the person and to challenge them; just as there would be no human action if humankind were not a "project," if he or she were not able to transcend himself or herself, if one, were not able to perceive reality and understand it in order to transform it. In dialectical thought, world and action are intimately interdepen­ dent. But action is human only when it is not merely an occupation but also a preoccupation, that is, when it is not dichotomized from reflection. Reflection, which is essential to action, is implicit in Luk£cs' requirement of "explaining to the masses their own action," just as it is implicit in the purpose he attributes to this explanation: that of "consciously activating the subsequent development of expe­ rience." For us, however, the requirement is seen not in terms of ex­ plaining to, but rather dialoguing with the people about their ac­ tions. In any event, no reality transforms itself,9 and the duty which Lukacs ascribes to the revolutionary party of "explaining to the masses their own action" coincides with our affirmation of the need for the critical intervention of the people in reality through the praxis. The pedagogy of the oppressed, which is the pedagogy of people engaged in the fight for their own liberation, has its roots here. And those who recognize, or begin to recognize, themselves 9. "The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and up­ bringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works (New York, 1968), p. 28. 54-PAULO FREIRE as oppressed must be among the developers of this pedagogy. No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption. The pedagogy of the oppressed, animated by authentic, humanist (not humanitarian) generosity, presents itself as a pedagogy of humankind. Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interests of the oppressors (an egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes of the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and embodies oppression. It is an instrument of dehumanization. This is why, as we affirmed earlier, the pedagogy of the oppressed cannot be developed or practiced by the oppressors. It would be a contradiction in terms if the oppressors not only defended but actually implemented a liberating education. But if the implementation of a liberating education requires political power and the oppressed have none, how then is it possible to carry out the pedagogy of the oppressed prior to the revolution? This is a question of the greatest importance, the reply to which is at least tentatively outlined in Chapter 4. One aspect of the reply is to be found in the distinction between systematic education, which can only be changed by political power, and educational projects, which should be carried out with the oppressed in the process of organizing them. The pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and libertarian pedagogy, has two distinct stages. In the first, the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in which the reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation. In both stages, it is always through action in depth that the culture of domination is culturally confronted.10 In the first stage this confrontation occurs through the 10. This appears to be the fundamental aspect of Mao's Cultural Revolution. PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED -55 change in the way the oppressed perceive the world of oppression; in the second stage, through the expulsion of the myths created and developed in the old order, which like specters haunt the new structure emerging from the revolutionary transformation. The pedagogy of the first stage must deal with the problem of the oppressed consciousness and the oppressor consciousness, the problem of men and women who oppress and men and women who suffer oppression. It must take into account their behavior, their view of the world, and their ethics. A particular problem is the duality of the oppressed: they are contradictory, divided beings, shaped by and existing in a concrete situation of oppression and violence. ^ Any situation in which "A" objectively exploits "B" or hinders his and her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence, even when sweetened by false generosity, because it interferes with the individ­ ual's ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human. With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as op­ pressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation. Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized. It is not the unloved who initiate disaf­ fection, but those who cannot love because they love only them­ selves. It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the "rejects of life." It is not the tyrannized who initiate despotism, but the tyrants. It is not the despised who initiate hatred, but those who despise. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate humankind, but those who denied that humanity (thus negating their own as well). Force is used not by those who 5 6 ' P A U L O FREIRE have become weak under the preponderance of the strong, but by the strong who have emasculated them. For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed (whom they obviously never call "the oppressed" but—depending on whether they are fellow countrymen or not—"those people" or "the blind and envious masses" or "savages" or "natives" or "subversives") who are disaffected, who are "violent," "barbaric," "wicked," or "ferocious" when they react to the violence of the oppressors. Yet it is—paradoxical though it may seem—precisely in the response of the oppressed to the violence of their oppressors that a gesture of love may be found. Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or neafly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human. As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. The latter, as an oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves. It is therefore essential that the oppressed wage the struggle to resolve the contradiction in which they are caught; and the contradiction will be resolved by the appearance of the new man: neither oppressor nor oppressed, but man in the process of liberation. If the goal of the oppressed is to becomS fully human, they will not achieve their goal by merely reversing the terms of the contradiction, by simply changing poles. This may seem simplistic; it is not. Resolution of the oppressoroppressed contradiction indeed implies the disappearance of the oppressors as a dominant class. However, the restraints imposed by the former oppressed on their oppressors, so that the latter cannot reassume their former position, do not constitute oppression. An act PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED - 5 7 is oppressive only when it prevents people from being more fully human. Accordingly, these necessary restraints do not in themselves signify that yesterdays oppressed have become today's oppressors. Acts which prevent the restoration of the oppressive regime cannot be compared with those which create and maintain it, cannot be compared with those by which a few men and women deny the majority their right to be human*, However, the moment the new regime hardens into a dominating "bureaucracy"11 the humanist dimension of the struggle is lost and it is no longer possible to speak of liberation. Hence our insistence that the authentic solution of the oppressor-oppressed contradiction does not lie in a mere reversal of position, in moving from one pole to the other. Nor does it lie in the replacement of the former oppressors with new ones who continue to subjugate the oppressed—all in the name of their liberation. But even when the contradiction is resolved authentically by a new situation established by the liberated laborers, the former oppressors do not feel liberated. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights—although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair. For the oppressors, "human beings" refers only to themselves; other people are "things." For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over against 11. This rigidity should not be identified with the restraints that must be im­ posed on the former oppressors so they cannot restore the oppress...
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Part I: Current Content Considered

Considering Philosophies of Education

I have reproduced a grid from an old text I used to use, adding two new columns on the end for reflective consideration. Take time to consider
each row, and complete the final two columns for each. What are the benefits and constraints, from your point of view, of each philosophy of
education as presented?
Part II: Apprenticeship of Observation Revisited
1. Look back at the grid, recalling your own k-12/collegiate educational experience. Can you identify teachers, professors, courses and
experiences that represent any of the philosophies – which ones? Make note of these, and explain how you feel they are representative of that
philosophical approach.
While I was in college, most of the teachers embraced essentialism as they used to have mastery for the subjects they were teaching. One
of them is a teacher who used to teach history. He used to know almost everything as far as historical events are concerned. However, when ir
came to how the knowledge should be applied in real life, he was poor in his explanation. He would not be able to explain to students how the
knowledge would help them in solving societal problems. In a nutshell, he wa good in theory but poor in practical applications.

2. Did you have a teacher that inspired you into the career of educator? Who was the teacher you appreciated most- the one where you felt like
learning was easy? Which philosophy are they situated within and can you see yourself within this philosophy too?
Personally, I believe experience is key as far as learning is concerned. Thus, I enjoy practical applications as compared to theoretical
knowledge. Thus, I enjoy most when being taught by a facilitator who embraces Progressivism. One of the teachers who inspired to become a
teacher is our physics teacher who used to base his teachings on experiences and projects as compared to book knowledge. He concentrated more
on outdoor classes as compared to just sitting in class and this used to make learning enjoyable.

Considering Educational Philosophies: Names:
Knowledge Worth
Ism
Educated Person
Knowing
Liberal arts
Well read

Perennialism

Pursuer of the arts
and sciences

Knowledge for its
own sake
The “great books”

Essentialism

Competent master
of basic skills and a
core of knowledge
for the better life

Preparation for life
and national
citizenship
Vocational standardsbased

Role of School in
Society

Schools transmit
cultural heritage and
values
Aim: A Just Society

Schools prepare for life,
career options, and
citizenship through
transmitting cultural
values
Aim: The Good Life

Good Teaching
HumanistTeachers inspire
discovery of knowledge
through critical
dialogue
Subject matter centered

Qualified professional
Teachers demonstrate
competencies and
subject matter mastery
Teacher directed

Modifier

Behaviorism

Manager and
controller of life
situations

Skillsand knowledge
base that modify
behaviors to control
lifesituations

Schools prepare for
living in society
Aim: Effective Living
and Citizenship

Teachers define desired
behavior and modify
environments for
learning
Scripted and
programmed teaching
Teacher directed

Benefits

Constraints

Most of the
knowledge in the
world I derived
from scientific
book hence the
educated people
have a wide
range of
education
The educated
person I at a
better place to
solve worldly
problem a
encountered
since he is
equipped with
the necessary
skill for solving
them
Teaches students
how to be law
abiding hence are
able to live
peacefully with
others

Reading without
application of
knowledge in
real life does not
help he student
or the society

Living a good life
through
acquiring
knowledge doe
not necessarily
create
satisfaction of life
like pursuing
one` interests
When teachers
modify the
environment,
students may not
be able to know
what happens in
reality.

Facilitator/Director

Fulfilled person

Romantic
Naturalism

Maximized
potentials gained
through
developmentally
appropriate
experiences

Experiences that
unfold natural
potential
Knowledge that leads
to discovery about life

Progressivism

Problem solver
Meaning maker

Teachers facilitate a
student centered
curriculum that
recognizes the
emergent learner
Student centered

Considering Educational Philosophies
Educated
Knowledge Worth
Ism
Person
Knowing

Critical thinker

Education improves
society by removing
barriers
Aim: Development of
Natural inclinations

Is based on
experience which
are essential for
any type of
development

Life
Experiences that
recognize change,
permit inquiry, and
lead to growth

Role of School in
Society

Schools transform
society
Aim: A Democratic
Society

Experiences hat
is not backed up
by prior
knowledge may
not give the
ultimate
problems solving
skills

Good Teaching

Benefits

Constraints

Facilitator

Problem solving is very
essential since life
problems will always be
there hence this
philosophy is important

It is not always easy
to create a
democratic society
through leaning a it
is a matter of the
choices made by
people within the
society

Using the world wide
experience as the basis
for teaching ensures the
students are able to
solve problems easily

It concentrate...


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