Paulo Freire

"(This book) meets the single criterion of a 'classic': it has outlived its own time and its author's. For any teacher who links education to social change, this is required reading. ....... " [from back cover]

30th Anniversary Edition

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Alma

The revolution loves and creates life; and in order to create life it may be obliged to prevent some men from circumscribing life.

Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking con­cept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. 

Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information.

Macy HB

The oppressed find in the oppressor their model of “manhood”

Rationalizing his guilt through paternalistic treaties of the oppressed all the while holding them fast in a position of dependence, will not do.

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

Any attempt to "soften the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their generosity" the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this "generosity" which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty,. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source. True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.

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. 

Fromm said of this consciousness that, without such possession, "it would lose contact with the world." The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time– everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal.

Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in "changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them"; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this end, the oppressors use the banking concept of education in conjunction with a paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of "welfare recipients.

They are treated as individual cases, as marginal persons who deviate from the general configuration of a "good, organized, and just" society.

Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause-the cause of liberation. And this commitment, because it is loving, is dialogical.

We simply cannot go to the laborers- urban or peasant'— in the banking style, to give them "knowledge" or to impose upon them the model of the "good man" contained in a program whose content we have ourselves organized. Many political and educational plans have failed because their authors designed them according to their own personal views of reality, never once taking into account (except as mere objects of their actions) the men-in-a-situation to whom their program was ostensibly directed.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed quotes

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