Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th Anniversary Edition

by Paulo Freire

As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their condition, they fatalistically “accept” their exploitation.

one must neither lose sig ht of this passivity nor overlook the moment of awakening.

to be is to have, almost always at the expense of those who have nothing. For the oppressed, at a certain point in their existential experience, to be is not to resemble the oppressor, but to be under him, to depend on him.

The peasant is a dependent. He can’t say what he wants. Before he discovers his dependence, he suffers.

He doesn’t let off steam with the boss because he thinks the boss is a superior being.

necrophilic behavior: the destruction of life—their own or that of their oppressed fellows.

It is only when the oppressed find the oppressor out and become involved in the organized struggle for their liberation that they begin to believe in themselves.

This discovery cannot be purely intellec-tual but must involve action; nor can it be limited to mere activism, but must include serious ref...

But to substitute monologue, slo-gans, and communiqués for dialogue is to attempt to liberate the oppressed with the instruments of domestication.

Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a burning building; it is to lead them into the populist pitfall and transform them into masses which can be manipulated.

reflection—true reflection—leads to action.

when the situation calls for action, that action will constitute an authentic praxis only if its consequences become the object of critical reflection.

Otherwise, action is pure activism.

To achieve this praxis, however, it is necessary to trust in the oppressed and in their ability to reason.

Superficial conversions to the cause of liberation carry this danger.

Those who work for liberation must not take advantage of the emotional dependence of the oppressed—dependence that is the fruit of the concrete situation of domination which surrounds them and which engendered their unauthentic view of the world.

while no one liberates himself by his own efforts alone, neither is he liberated by others.

Any attempt to treat people as semihumans only dehumanizes them.

the process of their liberation must not employ the methods...

The correct method lies in dialogue.

The revolutionary leaders must realize that their own conviction of the necessity for struggle (an indispensable dimension of revolu-tionary wisdom) was not given to them by anyone else—if it is authentic.

It is necessary, that is, unless one intends to carry out the transformation for the oppressed rather than with them. It is my belief that only the latter form of transformation is valid.

Many of these leaders, however (perhaps due to natural and understandable biases against pedagogy), have ended up using the “educational” methods employed by the oppressor.

They deny pedagogical action in the liberation process, but they use propaganda to convince.

It is essential for the oppressed to realize that when they accept the struggle for humanization they also accept, from that moment, their...

The oppressed, who have been shaped by the death-affirming climate of oppression, must find through their struggle the way to life-affirming humanization, which does not lie simply in having more to eat (although it does involve having more to eat and cannot fail to include this aspect).

In order to regain their humanity they must cease to be things and fight as men and women.

The struggle begins with men’s recognition that they have been destroyed.

The only effective instrument is a humanizing pedagogy in which the revolutionary leadership establishes a permanent relationship of dialogue with the oppressed.

it expresses the consciousness of the students themselves.

consciousness is in essence a ‘way to-wards’ something apart from itself, outside itself, which surrounds it and which it apprehends by means of its ideational capacity. Consciousness is thus by definition a method, in the most general sense of the word.

the presence of the op-pressed in the struggle for their liberation will be what it should be: not pseudo-participation, but committed involvement.

the teacher-student relationship

involves a nar-rating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.

Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.

The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of “capital” in the affirmation “the capital of Pará is Belém,” that is, what Belém means for Pará and what Pará means for Brazil.

Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content.

Education thus becomes an act of depositing,

Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes de-posits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.

the “banking”...

the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing,...

it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.

Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom th...

Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:

It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings.

The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world re-vealed nor to see it transformed.

Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.

Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”;1 for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to tha...