Essays on Pedagogy of The Oppressed

1968

Paulo Freire

Pedagogy

Portuguese

1970, by Paulo Freire

Critical pedagogy

Dedicated to the oppressed and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. In the book, Freire calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model of education" because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggy bank. He argues that pedagogy should instead treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.

The book is considered one of the foundational texts of critical pedagogy, and proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society.

Due to the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état, where a military dictatorship was put in place with the support of the United States, Paulo Freire was exiled from his home country, an exile that lasted 16 years. After a brief stay in Bolivia, he moved to Chile in November 1964 and stayed until April 1969 when he accepted a temporary position at Harvard University. His four-and-a-half year stay in Chile impacted him intellectually, pedagogically, and ideologically, making his theory and analysis in Pedagogy of the Oppressed possible

Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has been widely adopted in America's teacher-training programs. A 2003 study by David Steiner and Susan Rozen determined that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was frequently assigned at top education schools.
As of 2000, the book had sold over 750,000 copies worldwide. It is the third most cited book in the social sciences.

“Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people - they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.”
“Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.”
“The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.”