Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th Anniversary Edition

by Paulo Freire

not only must an alternative political course be taken, but central to its agenda must also be the development of people’s critical awareness of how they are in the world and with the world

Currently, while more and more educators are embracing Freire, many of them, including some liberal and progressives, allow their critical discourse to be betrayed by a lack of coherence between their denouncement of oppressive conditions and their accommodation to dominant structures that created these oppressive structures in the first place,

education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filling, and storing the deposits.49 The “banking” model of education is largely at work in instrumental literacy programs for the poor, in the form of a competency-based, skills-banking approach to schooling, and even through higher education (the highest form of instrumental literacy for the rich), acquired in the form of professional specialization. However, despite their apparent differences, the two approaches share one common feature: they both prevent the development of critical thinking that enables one to “read the world” critically and to understand the reasons and linkages behind mere facts and behind what may appear seemingly obvious but remains ill understood.

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.