Vartika's Reviews > Pedagogy of the Oppressed

What danger can a book pose to authority? Enough to have been banned in apartheid South Africa, and to still be prohibited in several parts of the American continent including Tucson in the United States. Certainly enough to keep the far-right Bolsonaro government in Brazil railing to dismantle its author's legacy over 50 years after publication.

Perhaps the most important theoretical work written in the twentieth century, Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed finds a renewed relevance in our age of late capitalism, populist nationalism, and fake news. Recognising that the mental torpor of the oppressed towards subjugation is a conscious product of the economic, social, and political domination and paternalism to which they are subjected, Freire locates a radically different mode of education based on dialogue, cooperation and the development of critical consciousness as the path to liberation.

In a country like India, where society is structured on the remnants of British colonial education, it is especially easy to see how the models of education currently being followed across the globe; based on vertical teaching, rote-learning and standardisation—what Freire calls the Banking Concept of Education; are aimed at creating a rigidly conformist workforce that values stability above all else and internalises resisting any change that may favour it against the status quo. This can well be explained using this quote by Assata Shakur superimposed on a Peanuts comic:

Freire's answer to this problem is to question the 'giving' involved. Instead, he conceptualises a radically different model of learning where the 'teachers' and 'students' collaborate and commune with each other in investigating reality, approaching it not as lectures but in the form of problems to be solved.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is not just about education but also the revolution—after all, true education is always liberatory. Freire's ideas are therefore serve as both a critique of and guidelines for the Left. One of his most important ideas is that concerning domination: that true liberation would be the end of oppression rather than the replacement of one oppressor with another; that revolutionary praxis must be radically different and dialogical. Again, the essence of his idea can be explained using the following statement made by Audre Lorde in 1984:

"[T]he master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change."

In general, Freire's ideas oppose hierarchies; whether between leaders and people or between theory and praxis; towards a radical, possible, transformative change.

Of course, certain aspects of this book are quite dated if looked at through the lens of postmodernity: Freire seems to posit oppression largely as a binary between oppressors and the oppressed, for instance. The complexity of language Freire uses seems also to be an issue, although I'm unsure if that's the text in general or the English translation.

If you can bear with that, however (and you should), Pedagogy of the Oppressed is an absolutely essential, paradigm-shifting read. Its ideas may not be as novel to readers today given its wide influence on leftist thought and action since 1970—it is the third most-cited social-sciences publication of all time—but they remain as potent and revolutionary as ever.