Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th Anniversary Edition

by Paulo Freire

If I do not love the world—if I do not love life—if I do not love people—I cannot enter into dialogue.

dialogue cannot exist without humility.

Dialogue, as the encounter of those addressed to the common t ask of learning and acting, is broken if the parties (or one of them) lack humility.

How can I dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own?

“the great unwashed”?

Men and women who lack humility (or have lost it) cannot come to the people, cannot be their partners in naming the world. Someone who cannot acknowledge himself to be as mortal as everyone else still has a long way to go before he can reach the point of encounter. At the point of encounter there are neither utter ignoramuses nor perfect sages; there are only people who are attempting, together, to learn more than they now know.

Dialogue further requires an intense faith in humankind,

Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue;

Without this faith in people, dialogue is a farce which inevitably degenerates into paternalistic manipulation.

Founding itself upon love, humility, and faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the dialoguers is the logical consequence.

trust is established by dialogue.

False love, false humility, and feeble faith in others cannot create trust. Trust is contingent on the evidence which one party provides the others of his true, concrete intentions; it cannot exist if that party’s words do not coincide with their actions.

To glorify democracy and to silence the people is a farce; to discourse on humanism and to negate people is a lie.

Nor yet can dialogue exist without hope.

Hopelessness is a form of silence, of denying the world and fleeing from it. The dehumanization resulting from an unjust order is not a cause for despair but for hope, leading to the incessant pursuit of the humanity denied by injustice.

As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait.

If the dialoguers expect nothing to come of their efforts, their encounter will be empty and sterile, bureaucratic and tedious.

true dialogue cannot exist unless the dialoguers engage in critical thinking

Critical thinking contrasts with naive thinking, which sees “historical time as a weight, a stratification of the acquisitions and experiences of the past,”

For the naive thinker, the important thing is accommodation to this normalized “today.” For the critic, the important thing is the continuing transformation of reality, in behalf of the continuing hu-manization of men.

Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is also capable of generating critical thinking. Without dialogue there is no communication, and without communication there can be no true education.

the dialogical character of education as the practice of freedom does not begin when the teacher-student meets with the students-teachers in a pedagogical situation, but rather when the former first asks herself or himself what she or he will dialogue with the latter about.

For the anti-dialogical banking educator,

For the dialogical,

Authentic education is not carried on by “A” for “B” or by “A” about “B,” but rather by “A” with “B,” mediated by the world—a world which impresses and challenges both parties, giving rise to views or opinions about it.

In its desire to create an ideal model of the “good man,” a naïvely con-ceived humanism often overlooks the concrete, existential, present situation of real people.

Authentic humanism, in Pierre Furter’s words, “consists in permitting the emergence of the awareness of our full humanity, as a condition and as an obligation, as a situation and as a project.”

Many political and educational plans have failed because their authors designed them according to their own personal views of reality, never once taking into account (except as mere objects of their actions) the men-in-a-situation to whom their program was ostensibly directed.

The oppressors are the ones who act upon the people to indoctrinate them and adjust them to a reality which must remain untouched.

in their desire to obtain the support of the people for revolutionary action, revolutionary leaders often fall for the banking line of planning program content from the top down.

They forget that their fundamental objective is to fight alongside the people for the recovery of the people’s stolen humanity, not to “win the people over” to their side. Such a phrase does not belong in the vocabulary of revolutionary leaders, but in that of the oppressor.

In their political activity, the dominant elites utilize the banking concept to encourage passivity in the oppressed, corresponding with the latter’s “submerged” state of consciousness, and take advantage of that passivity to “fill” that consciousness with slogans which create even more fear of freedom.

This practice is incompatible with a truly liberating course of action, which, by presenting the oppres-sors’ slogans as a problem, helps the oppressed to “eject” those slogans from within themselves.

This task implies that revolutionary leaders do not go to the people in order to bring them a message of “salvation,” but in order to come to know through dialogue with them both their objective situation and their awareness of that situation

cultural invasion,

It is not our role to speak to the people about our own view of the world, nor to attempt to impose that view on them, but rather to dialogue with the people about their view and ours.

Educational and political action which is not critically aware of this situation runs the risk either of “banking” or of preaching in the desert.

Often, educators and politicians speak and are not understood because their language is not attuned to the concrete situation of the people they address. Accordingly, their talk is just alienated and alienating rhetoric.

In order to communicate effectively, educator and politician must understand the structural conditions in which the thought and language of the people are dialectically framed.

the people’s “thematic universe”13 —the complex of their “generative themes”

The methodology of that investigation must likewise be dialogical, affording the opportunity both to discover generative themes and to stimulate people’s awareness in regard to these themes.

the object of the investigation is not persons (as if they were anatomical fragments), but rather the thought-language with which men and women refer to reality, the levels at which they perceive that reality, and their vi...

“generative...

“minimum thematic u...

it does appear possible to verify the reality of the generative theme—not only through one’s own existential experience, but also through critical reflection on the human-world relationship and on the relationships between people implicit in the former.

of the uncompleted beings, man is the only one to treat not only his actions but his very self as the object 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.

animals can neither set objectives nor infuse their transformation of nature with any significance beyond itself.

animals are ahistorical.

for the animal, the world does not constitute a “not-I” which could set him apart as an “I.”

Animals are not challenged by the configuration which confronts them; they are merely stimulated.