Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th Anniversary Edition

by Paulo Freire

The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society, which must therefore adjust these “incompetent and lazy” folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be “integrated,” “incorporated” into the healthy society that they have “forsaken.”

the oppressed are not “marginals,” are not people living “outside” society.

The solution is not to “integrate” them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become “beings for themselves.”

The “humanism” of the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons—the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human.

these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate reality.

If men and women are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation.

But the humanist, revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibility to materialize.

efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the que...

To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to ex-change the role of depositor, prescriber, domesticator, for the role of student among students would be to undermine the power of oppression and serve the cause of liberation.

Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator.

he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty “mind” passively open to the reception of deposits o...

the educator’s role is to regulate the way the world “enters into” the students.

The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better “fit” for the world.

this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.

The theory and practice of banking education serve this end quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements,3 the methods for evaluating “knowledge,” the distance be-tween the teacher and the taught, the criteria for promotion: everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate thinking.

Solidarity requires true communica-tion, and the concept by which such an educator is guided fears and proscribes communication.

Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication.

Because banking education begins with a false understanding of men and women as objects, it cannot promote the development of what Fromm calls “biophily,” but instead produces its opposite: “necrophily.”

the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical.

The necrophilous person can relate to an object—a flower or a person—only if he possesses it; hence a threat to his possession is a threat to himself; if he loses possession he loses contact with the world. . . . He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life.

Oppression—overwhelming control—is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life.

The banking concept of education,

is also necro...

it transforms students into recei...

When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find themselves unable to use their faculties, people suffer.

By this symbolic participation in another person’s life, [men have] the illusion of acting, when in reality [they] only submit to and become a part of those who act.

The dominant elites consider the remedy to be more domination and repression, carried out in the name of freedom, order, and social peace (that is, the peace of the elites). Thus they can condemn—logically, from their point of view—“the violence of a strike by workers and [can] call upon the state in the same breath to use violence in putting down the strike.”

Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.

Its objective is to call the attention of true humanists to the fact that they cannot use banking educational methods in the pursuit of liberation, for they would only negate that very pursuit.

The revolutionary society which practices banking education is either misguided or mistrusting of people.

Authentic liberation—the process of humanization—is not another deposit to be made in men. Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.

“Problem-posing” education, re-sponding to the essence of consciousness—intentionality—rejects communiqués and embodies communication.

It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian “split”

—consciousness as consciousness of c...

the practice of problem-posing education entails at the outset that the teacher-student contradiction to be resolved.

problem-posing education,

can fulfill its function as the practice of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction.

The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach.

in order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it.

People teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are “owned” by the teacher.

The banking ...

two stages in the action of t...

During the first, he cognizes a cognizable object while he prepares his lessons in his study or his laboratory; during the second, he expo...

The students are not called upon to know, but to memorize the contents na...

Hence in the name of the “preservation of culture and knowledge” we have a system which achieves neither true knowledge nor true culture.

the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students.

The role of the problem-posing educator is to create; together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos.

Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality.

Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge.

Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed.