Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)

Education, Philosophy, Liberty, Oppression, Independence, Liberation, Culture, Identity, Indigenous rights, Cultural property, Participatory democracy, Collective memory, Brazil, Cultural resistance

This book is about the vast numbers of illiterate peasants in Brazil's poorest areas. Speaking from and for the Third World he proposes a view of education as something positive and also hazardous, a means of liberating people and enabling them to participate in the historical process.

I encountered Freire's ideas of critical pedagogy in a curriculum theory course and excitedly picked this up hoping to gain more practical insight. I did not realize this work is almost exclusively theoretical, with only the third chapter providing limited descriptions of educational "decodification and recodification" sessions. These, to me, were the most enlightening passages, especially the quoted dialogues from "consciousness classes". Where theory is concerned, I did not find the book nearly as approachable as many other reviewers. I found the writing style to be repetitive and overly-reliant on specific philosophical terminology when simpler language would have sufficed. In fact, I think many of the reviews here do more justice to the ideas than Freire's own writing! One example - Freire spends 5 pages discussing the fact that humans differ from animals due the human ability to self-reflect. What I just summarized in about 10 words comes from p. 97 of the work - "...man is the only one to treat not only his actions but his very self as the objects of his reflection; this capacity distinguishes him from the animals, which are unable to separate themselves from their activity and thus are unable to reflect upon it".

It was also hard for me not to read Friere's admiring quoting of Lenin, Marx, Mao Tse Dong, Guevara, et al. without thinking of the dark shadow history has cast on many of these thinkers. The "re-education" efforts of China and many other Communist countries relied on much of the same theoretical framework as the first two chapters of this work.

While there are many positive ideas in the work as quoted by some other reviewers, I also found many troubling passages, such as:
"Proposing as a problem, to a European peasant, the fact that he or she is a person might strike them as strange. This is not true of Latin-American peasants, whose world usually ends at the boundaries of the latifundium, whose gestures to some extent simulate those of the animal and the trees, and who often consider themselves equal to the latter" (p 174).

Overall, I rate this book "probably good for you but not enjoyable". ( )

Whether you want to know how to be an effective teacher / professor or you want to know how to start a revolution, this is the book for you. This modern day "Robin Hood Manifesto" is profound in depth, with aims clear and concise. I'm certain a plethora of reviews, opinions, and college papers have been written about the book, so I'll keep mine to a minimum and let the book speak for itself:

“People confuse freedom with maintenance of the status quo. Threaten the status quo, and the status quo will determine that as a threat to freedom itself.”

“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 completion.”

“In their unrestrained eagerness to possess, the oppressors develop the conviction that it is possible for them to transform everything into objects of their purchasing power; hence their strictly materialistic concept of existence. Money is the measure of all things, and profit the primary goal. For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more—always more—even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have and to be the class of the ‘haves.’”

Just a few gems there. Read the book and find 180+ pages of them. ( )

I note that one reviewer had a difficult time reading this -- read a bit, went away for six months, came back and read a bit, then went away again . . . then labels the book disjointed, rather than his scatter-brained -- disjointed -- approach to it being the problem.

It is actually a straightforward text, so easily read and digested in much less than a week. It should also be mandatory reading for, especially, would-be teachers, but also such "scientists" as economists and sociologists. And by those who rail against "liberation theology" without having the least clue as to what it actually is.

It should be read, that is, by everyone who can read, without regard to preexisting ideological predisposition -- it actually is possible to see beyond such distorting lenses. And if during the reading you don't begin critically evaluating the education you "received," then you haven't suspended your ideological warp beforehand.

Yes: the FOX-ian paranoids will hate it, as instructed by FOX, and call it names, as they are given them by FOX. But there's nothing new about the ineducable rejecting anything that smacks of the risk of learning and knowing more than they already know, which is less and less as they reject more and more of fact and reality. But those who are thoughtful will find that this book is seminal, foundational, not only as a method of pedagogy but also as a clarifying method of criticially evaluating their context and situation, and reality.

In two words: must reading. ( )