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Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the most widely known of educator Paulo Freire's works. It proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society.
Dedicated to what is called "the oppressed," Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between what he calls "the colonizer" and "the colonized." From his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, the book remains popular among educators all over the world and is one of the foundations of critical pedagogy.
In the book he calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model" because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggybank. However, he argues instead a pedagogy of the oppressed would treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.
According to Donaldo Macedo, a former colleague of Freire and University of Massachusettsprofessor, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a revolutionary text, and people in totalitarian states risk punishment reading it. The book has sold over 750 000 copies worldwide.
Summary
Translated into several languages, most editions of Pedagogy of the Oppressed contain at least one introduction/foreword, a preface, and four chapters.
The first chapter explores how oppression has been justified and how it is overcome through a mutual process between the "oppressor" and the "oppressed". Examining how the balance of power between the colonizer and the colonized remains relatively stable, Freire admits that the powerless in society can be frightened of freedom. He writes, "Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion." (47) According to Freire, freedom will be the result of praxis--informed action—when a balance between theory and practice is achieved.
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