Paulo Freire - Pedagogy of the Oppressed

OTHER BOOKS BY PAULO FREIRE FROM BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC

Education for Critical Consciousness

Pedagogy of the City

Pedagogy of Hope:
Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Pedagogy of the Heart

Bloo msbury Academic

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First published in 2000 by the Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
Reprinted 2011, 2012

Reprinted by Bloomsbury Academic 2012, 2013, 2014

Paulo Freire 1970, 1993

Introduction Donaldo Macedo 2000

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: PB: 978-0-8264-1276-8

e-PDF: 978-1-5013-0531-3

e-PUB: 978-1-5013-0532-0

To the oppressed, and to those who suffer with them and fight at their side

Contents

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.

The banking concept of education as an instrument of oppressionits presuppositionsa critique; the problem-posing concept of education as an instrument for liberationits presuppositions; the banking concept and the teacher-student contradiction; the problem-posing concept and the supersedence of the teacher-student contradiction; education: a mutual process, world-mediated; people as uncompleted beings, conscious of their incompletion, and their attempt to be more fully human.

Dialogicsthe 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.

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.

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. Freires books have since taken on a considerable relevance for educators in our own technologically advanced society, which to our detriment acts to program the individualespecially the disadvantagedto a rigid conformity. A new underclass has been created, and it is everyones 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 modifiedand the volume has been newly typesetto 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.

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 Freirea 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.

Paulo Freires 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 meand all of those who experience subordination through an imposed assimilation policya 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.