”To the oppressed, and to those who suffer with them and fight at their side”  Paulo Freire (2000)

This is the dedication on the first page of this astounding book, ”Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire. For many of us who read his work, it sounds immediately familiar, like coming home and being understood, precisely, by a complete stranger. The way schools rob us of our time, our creativity and our becoming selves is a common experience. But Freire writes specifically for freedom, for and with the oppressed. And not only did he write, but he worked towards collective liberation all of his life. 

Coming from a middle-class family hit by the economic crisis of the 1920s, Freire realized from a very early age that it was his sudden precariousness that made him unable to learn. He promised that he will dedicate himself to the fight against hunger and poverty. His way to do it was the crafting of this complex pedagogy, later called critical pedagogy. Henry Giroux (2020) wrote that:

Critical pedagogy takes as one of its central projects an attempt to be discerning and attentive to those places and practices in which social agency has been denied… (It) is about more than a struggle over assigned meanings, official knowledge, and established modes of authority: it is also about encouraging students to take risks, act on their sense of social responsibility, and engage the world as an object of both critical analysis and hopeful transformation.

Freire’s programs were not simply teaching literacy, although they certainly did that as well. In one application of his theories in 1962, 300 sugarcane harvesters learned to read and write in just 45 days. His legacy is both huge and undervalued, often hidden from university lectures because of its strong political message. As he wrote, “[f]or the truly humanist educator and the authentic revolutionary, the object of action is the reality to be transformed by them together with other people—not other men and women themselves.”

Of the man himself, it was said that “He fully understood that not dealing with the hard questions was an excuse to let the voices of the powerful work through you” (Apple, 2013).  He could engage for hours in dialogue over ideas. Indeed, that is one of the main methods of this pedagogy: dialogue.

[Image Description: Portrait of Paulo Freire drawn with white and red lines on a black background. Freire is depicted with a big white beard, a hopeful look behind glasses, and a red shirt. Behind him, three hands drawn in yellow, stand up in protest, one of them holding a pencil, another, holding sugarcane.]

What is so different about pedagogy of the oppressed? For one, this mode of learning stands firmly against what Freire called “banking education”. This you might easily recognize:

In banking education, students are seen as some sort of empty storages to which the teacher must deliver information. Neatly packaged, already ordered, the student’s responsibility is to memorize it, by storing it in the right place of their mind, and taking it out diligently when asked about it. 

This mode of learning relies strongly on memorizing information, and is frequently encountered in schools across the globe. 

In banking education, Freire (2000) writes: 

(a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught; (b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; (c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about; (d) the teacher talks and the students listen—meekly; (e) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined; (f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; (g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher; (h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it; (i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students; (j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

[Image Description: A hand drawn in white lines on a black background holds a square shape in which a child is trying to fit. Next to it there are a floating triangle and a circle shape, drawn in red, also with children in them, struggling to fit within the confines.]

Many critiques have been levelled at critical pedagogy, including a watering down of its political potential. Our purpose here is only to engage in those that work for furthering liberation, not for its diminishment. Thus we must pay attention to the humanistic and anthropocentric discourses within the pedagogy of the oppressed. Indeed, for Freire, the liberation of humans is done in opposition to their so-called background - nature and other animals. For him, the purpose of liberation is, of course, to empower humans (alone) into acting as subjects.

An even stronger critique of his writings comes from ecojustice pedagogy, whose proponents claim that Freiere’s model is in line with the thinking that led to these oppressive systems, born out of the Industrial Revolution. More precisely, C.A. Bowers (2005) argued that Freire engages in:

a human-centered view of human/nature relationships, thinking of change as linear and inherently progressive in nature, representing critical inquiry and thus the autonomous individual as the only legitimate source of agency and moral authority, and most important of all, assuming that the view of reality based on these assumptions should replace the “realities” constituted by other cultural epistemologies. 

When we focus on his treatment of other animals, we see that Freire makes broad unsubstantiated claims about them so as to underline the uniqueness of human agency and power. His work relies on an anthropological difference that has been much criticized in the last few years for its prejudices and its human supremacist tendencies. For Freire, “an act is oppressive only when it prevents people from being more fully human” (Freire, as cited in Corman, 2020). Moreover, in his speciesist understanding, “capacities for dialogue and communication are defined exclusively as human capabilities” (Corman, 2020) and thus human liberation is understood as a process of transcending the condition of so-called animality and of being seen as an object. In this vein, some argue critical pedagogy is to be abandoned (C.A. Bowers, 2005). Others claim much of it is to be transformed (Corman, 2011; Kress & Lake, 2020; Markides, 2020). Indeed, it is within critical pedagogy a potential to be self-critical and work towards liberation, always, despite some of its not so critical premises.

 [Image Description: The three human children previously drawn in red and yellows are sitting and playing, each with a nonhuman animal. One is sitting and playing music with a chicken, one is playing a sort of jumping game with a rat, and one is playing with a ferret.]

Written by M. Martelli 

Writing suggestions by Aron Nor 

Recorded by M. Martelli & Aron Nor 

Illustrations made by Mina Mimosa 

Directed & Edited by Aron Nor