Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th Anniversary Edition

by Paulo Freire

Their ahistorical condition does not permit them to “take on” life. Because they do not “take it on,” they cannot construct it; and if they do not construct it, they cannot transform its configuration.

animals do not “animalize” their configuration in order to animalize themselves—nor do they “de-animalize” themselves. Even in the forest, they remain “beings-in-themselves,” as animal-like there as in the zoo.

the people

unlike animals, not only live but exist;14 and their existence is historical.

Animals live out their lives on an atemporal, flat, uniform “prop”; humans exist in a world which they are constantly re-creating and transforming.

for people, “here” signifies not merely a physical space, but also ...

Animals cannot surmount the limits imposed by the “here,” the “now,” or the “there.”

Humans, however, because they are aware of themselves and thus of the world—because they are conscious beings—exist in a dialectical relationship between the determination of limits and their own freedom.

the “limit-situations.”

“limit-acts”: those directed at negating and overcoming, rather than passively ac-cepting, the “given.”

Thus, it is not the limit-situations in and of themselves which create a climate of hopelessness, but rather how they are perceived by women and men at a given historical moment: whether they appear as fetters or as insurmountable barriers.

As reality is transformed and these situations are superseded, new ones will appear, which in turn will evoke new limit-acts.

The prop world of animals contains no limit-situations, due to its ahistorical character.

And the appropriate role for animals is not to relate to their prop (in that event, the prop would be a world), but to adapt to it.

“An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product.”16

Only products which result from the activity of a being but do not belong to its physical body

can give a dimension of meaning to the context, which thu...

The difference between animals

and humankind

is that only the latter are beings of the praxis. Only human beings are praxis—the praxis which, as the reflection and action which truly transform reality, is the source of knowledge and creation. Animal activity, which occurs without a praxis, is not creative; people’s transforming activity is.

It is as transforming and creative beings that humans, in their permanent relations with reality, produce not only material goods—tangible objects—but als...

people can tri-dimensionalize time into the past, the present, and the future, their history, in function of their own creations, develops as a constant process of transformation within which epochal units materialize.

An epoch is characterized by a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values, and challenges in dialectical interaction with their opposites, striving towards plenitude.

historical themes are never isolated, independent, disconnected, or static; they are always interacting dialectically with their opposites.

The complex of interacting themes of an epoch constitutes its “thematic universe.”

Confronted by this “universe of themes” in dialectical contradiction, persons take equally contradictory positions: some work to maintain...

establishing a climate of irrationality and sectarianism.

the human task: the permanent transformation of reality in favor of the liberation of people.

In sum, limit-situations imply the existence of persons who are directly or indirectly served by these situations, and of those who are negated and curbed by them.

Consequently, liberating actions upon an historical milieu must correspond not only to the generative themes but to the way in which these themes are perceived.

the investigation of meaningful thematics.

Generative themes can be located in concentric circles, moving from the gen...

I consider the fundamental theme of our epoch to be that of domination—which implies its opposite, the theme of liberation, as the objective to be achieved.

In order to achieve humanization, which presupposes the elimination of de-humanizing oppression, it is absolutely necessary to surmount the limit-situations in which people are reduced to things.

Within the smaller circles, we find themes and limit-situations characteristic of societies (on the same continent or on different continents) which through these themes and limit-situations share historical similarities.

coexistence of the non-contemporaneous.”

But the nonexistence of themes within the sub-units is absolutely impossible.

When people lack a critical understanding of their reality, apprehending it in fragments which they do not perceive as interacting constituent elements of the whole, they cannot truly know that reality.

To truly know it, they would have to reverse their starting point: they would need to have a total vision of the context in order subsequently to separate and isolate its constituent elements and by means of this analysis achieve a clearer perception of the whole.

effort to present significant dimensions of an individual’s contextual reality, the analysis of which will make it possible for him to recognize the interaction of the various components.

dimensions of total reality.

When carried out with a methodology of conscientização the investigation of the generative theme contained in the minimum thematic universe

thus introduces or begins to introduce women and men to a critical form of thinking about their world.

Its “decoding” requires moving from the abstract to the concrete;

his tendency is to “split” that coded situation.

“description of the situation,” and facilitates the discovery of the interaction among the parts of the disjoined whole.

In all the stages of decoding, people exteriorize their view of the world.

A group which does not concretely express a generative thematics

on the contrary, suggesting a very dramatic theme: the theme of silence.

The theme of silence suggests a structure of mut-ism in face of the overwhelming forc...