- Length
- 192 pagesRamos, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Continuum, 30th anniversary edition 2000
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
A book about literacy teaching that turned into one of the most cited works in the humanities. Freire argued that the ordinary classroom teaches people to receive the world rather than act on it, and that no one can be liberated by someone else.
- Date
- 1968
- Author
- Paulo Freire
- Region
- Brazil and Chile
- Language
- Portuguese
- 1970 English, Myra Bergman Ramos The standard English version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Dialectical — Advance through contradiction and its resolution
- Transmission
- Suppressed — Held back, banned or circulated privately before print
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 16 years
Banned in its author's own country for six years after it was written, and now among the most cited books in the social sciences.
What the book says
A book about teaching that is really about what oppression does to the capacity to think, by a man who had taught illiterate cane-cutters to read in forty hours and been imprisoned for it. Freire's central target is what he calls the banking model of education: the teacher deposits information into students conceived as empty containers, the students receive and file it, and the arrangement teaches something beyond its content - that knowledge comes from elsewhere, that one's own experience is not a source of it, and that the world is a fixed thing to be described rather than a situation to be acted on. Against this he sets problem-posing education, in which teacher and students investigate the world together and both are changed. The philosophical core is his account of the oppressed. They do not simply suffer their situation; they have internalised the oppressor's image of them, so that liberation cannot be handed down - a revolution conducted for the people rather than with them installs a new set of depositors. What is needed is conscientização, the process by which people come to read their situation as made and therefore alterable.
What it argues
That education is never neutral and always either domesticates or liberates. The banking model is not merely ineffective; it is effective at something - producing people who accept that reality is given and that their part is to fit into it. Problem-posing education reverses the relation: the material is drawn from the learners' own situation, the teacher learns while teaching, and literacy is acquired by naming the world one is in. Freire's account of praxis holds the two halves together: reflection without action is verbalism, action without reflection is activism, and neither transforms anything. The most demanding claim concerns the oppressor within. Because the oppressed have absorbed a picture of themselves as incapable, liberation cannot be delivered - and a revolutionary leadership that treats the people as objects to be organised has reproduced the banking model in politics.
What it answered
Fanon on internalised oppression, and the education system Freire had worked in. His literacy campaigns in north-east Brazil had taught adults to read using words drawn from their own lives - and had done it fast enough to alarm a government in which literacy was a condition of the vote. He was arrested after the 1964 coup, held for seventy days, and expelled. The book is written from that.
How it argues
By dialectical exposition drawing on Marx, Hegel, Fanon, Memmi and Christian existentialism, with the practical experience mostly implied rather than described. This is what surprises readers who come to it expecting a manual: there are few classroom examples and a great deal of philosophy. The vocabulary is dense and the terms are frequently used before they are defined, which has not prevented the book reaching a readership far beyond anything its style would predict.
The moment
Exile in Santiago, in the years between the Brazilian coup of 1964 and the Chilean one of 1973. Freire had run literacy programmes for the Brazilian government, was jailed as a subversive, and worked afterwards for the Chilean agrarian reform, then at Harvard and for the World Council of Churches in Geneva. He returned to Brazil in 1980 and became education secretary for São Paulo. The book could not be published in Portuguese in Brazil until 1974 and circulated there in smuggled Spanish copies.
How it travelled
Further than almost any book here. Critical pedagogy as a field descends from it; it is a set text in teacher training across the world; and it has been taken up in community organising, adult literacy, public health, theatre and social work. It is among the three or four most cited books in the social sciences. It has also been repeatedly banned or restricted - by military governments in Latin America in the 1970s and, more recently, in curriculum disputes in the United States - which is an unusual continuity for a book about teaching adults to read.
The strongest objection
That the teacher's role is more directive than the theory admits. Freire insists that liberation cannot be handed down and that the educator must not deposit anything - and yet the educator selects the generative words, designs the sequence, and knows in advance what conscientização looks like when it arrives. If the learners' own reading of their situation turns out to be conservative, the method has no way to accept that outcome, which suggests the destination was fixed before the dialogue began. Critics from several directions have pressed this, and it is sharper than the familiar complaint about the prose. Freire's later work concedes some of it, and his acknowledgement that the original's language assumed a male subject is a separate correction he made himself.
Why read it
The second chapter, on banking education, which is the part everyone means and is genuinely clarifying about what a classroom teaches beyond its syllabus. The first and third are harder and more philosophical. It is short, and it is worth knowing before reading it that it is a work of political philosophy rather than a set of techniques.
- First printed
- 1968
- First in English
- 1970
- Digitised
- No
Freire revised his own position in later work, particularly on the gendered language of the original, which he acknowledged and corrected in Pedagogy of Hope (1992).
Myra Bergman Ramos' English of 1970 is the standard and is in copyright, as is the Portuguese.
Where it stands
Live and enormously used, more outside philosophy than within it. The banking metaphor, conscientização and the insistence that no one liberates anyone else are working concepts in education and development.
On quoting this book
In copyright in Portuguese and English. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the method can be transplanted from Brazilian literacy campaigns to schools in wealthy countries, where it is now mostly used, is argued by educationalists. Whether the theory is compatible with any content that must simply be taught is a fair question its defenders answer variously. Whether Freire's Christian and Marxist sources sit together coherently is disputed. And the book's political reception - claimed and attacked as a manual for indoctrination by people on both sides - has drifted a long way from what it says.