The Pedagogy of the Oppressed
By Paulo Freire
Penguin, (revised ed.) 1996. $16.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Dave Riley
The thought and work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire have revived education as a subversive force. His pedagogical methods figure prominently in a multitude of adult education projects in the Third World. They are also used in the formative process of so-called basic Christian communities (BCs) — grassroots people's organisations whose activities range from enlightened Bible study to social action and community organising.
BCs were initiated by the Medellin Bishops' Conference of 1968, usually regarded as the official starting point of liberation theology because on that occasion the Latin American Church took a radical stance in solidarity with the poor and explicitly identified imperialism as the cause of widespread poverty in the Third World.
Freire, who has links with the progressive wing of the Catholic Church and has worked for the World Council of Churches in Geneva, started developing grassroots education workshops in the '60s. Through this engagement in the struggle to liberate oppressed workers and peasants he drew on the work of an eclectic blend of theorists — Jean Paul Sartre, Erich Fromm, Louis Althusser, Mao Zedong, Martin Luther King, Che Guevara, Herbert Marcuse, to cite a few — to develop his perspective on education.
Freire's pedagogy is specifically designed for the benefit of illiterate or semi-literate adults. It is radically opposed to more orthodox concepts of education, which cast the teacher in the role of an omniscient narrator and are designed to develop students into productive elements of capitalist society. He calls traditional teaching methods "the banking concept of education" in which "knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those they consider to know nothing".
"Education", he writes, "thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorise and repeat ... but true knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world and with each other."
Through education and the mass media, the poor are inculcated with the belief in a fixed, unchangeable world that they cannot hope to influence. To counteract the oppressive effects of such ideology, Freire calls for a new kind of teacher, one who believes in the innate wisdom and creativity of the people with whom he or she works.
All this may seem like any number of Hollywood movies about dedicated teachers and wayward students trapped in a blackboard jungle, but the difference is that Freire's approach calls for a series of techniques resting on a specific philosophy — you cannot have one without the other. The educator does not try to represent reality as a lecture, but as a problem approached through a dialogue which is as much words and action as it is action and reflection. He cites Vladimir Lenin's famous statement: "Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement" as confirmation of the "praxis" he advocates: "Animals do not consider the world; they are immersed in it. In contrast, human beings emerge from the world, objectify it, and in so doing can understand it and transform it with their labor."
Freire's enthusiasm for snippets of Lenin does not make him a Marxist. He prefers the humanist label and is keen to pepper his text with references to more fashionable contemporary theorists of the '60s who set a course that purported to be neither capitalist nor too reliant ("hung up" was the preferred term) on Marxism. But despite the route he pursues (via existentialism for instance), and the nomenclature he invents to carry him there, Pedagogy of the Oppressed approaches a Marxist position more closely than its author owns up to.
If this book is compared to Lenin's pamphlet What is to be Done, the similarity of method is striking. The major difference lies in Lenin's ability to transcend mere awareness by harnessing it to productive action. While Freire extrapolates the dialogue that exists in his scheme between "teacher" and "student" to that between "revolutionary leaders" and "the people", he doesn't suggest how this can be done. Basically, Freire sidesteps the challenge presented by the need for leadership by assuming that the oppressed are innately revolutionary — all they need do is perceive the reality which oppresses them.
This reliance on the masses' own volition to work out their way forward, while it may dovetail with Freire's pedagogy, fails to take into account the march of history. This, despite the best and noblest intentions of individuals to rework their awareness in the quest to comprehend the world, tends to treat such spontaneous discoveries rather unkindly.
Here two different approaches collide. Freire's "bottom up" method, resting on participatory democracy and shared discovery among equals, is limited to the circuit of knowledge within the environment and traditions of the oppressed community. Unless that focus is transcended and an explanation of a broader reality is imported from outside, then the oppressed — no matter how liberated they may feel — are still restrained by the totality of the society of which they are but a part.
While Freire may bemoan revolutionaries' penchant to be "top down" "depositors" of their ideas of enlightenment in the minds of the oppressed, he deals with the question of the actual nature of oppression — its social and economic structure — mainly as problems of culture and ideology alone.
The process and the techniques of his method can sometimes be more important than its content. This complacency and willingness to apply the methodology as a magic formula, good for all occasions, can easily be coopted. Since the '70s, conservative western development agencies have increasingly made use of Freire's methods in peasant communities to introduce technical skills crucial to the promotion of the "green revolution".
Even well-intentioned educationalists among his supporters can become dependent on the agency that funds the work, leading to the actions of the indigenous educator fusing with the approach of the funding agency, despite the wishes of the target population.
Freire's method of pedagogy is employed by thousands of communities worldwide. Since this book's original publication in 1970, many of its adherents have chosen to sever the practice from its intended revolutionary ends.
This revised edition presents us with an opportunity to rediscover the revolutionary dynamic of Freire's pedagogy. As he reminds us on the last page: "... just as the oppressor, in order to oppress, needs a theory of oppressive action, so the oppressed, in order to become free, also need a theory of action [but] only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders ... can this theory be built."