Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Conditioned by the experience of opressing others, any situations other than their former seems to them like oppression.

Formerly they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven.

Any restrictions on this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights - although they had no respect for the millions who suffered.

For the oppressors, “human beings” refers only to themselves; other people are “things”.

Certain opressors change sides and join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation.

They talk about the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change.

A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust.

This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students).

The teacher talks about reality as if were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable.

He expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students.

His task is to “fill” the students with the contents of his narration.

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

Education becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.

Students become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store.

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

The raison d’être of libertarian education lies in its drive towards reconciliation.

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

The interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the opressed, not the situation which oppresses them”.

The educator’s role is to regulate the way the world “enters into” the students. People “receive” the world as passive entities. The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better “fit” for the world.

Everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate thinking.

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.

The former attempts to maintain the submersion of counsciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.

Education as the practice of freedom- as opposed to education as the practice of domination- denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people.

Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming- as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality.

The unfinished character pf human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.

Problem-posing education is revolutionary futurity.

The pursuit of full humanity cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity.

No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.