Paulo Freire was an educational reformist from Brazil. Some had called his approach to education as radical. He had practical and theoretical ideas of education and believed in liberation through education. Much of his work had been based on involvement in teaching in the third world, which meant many that he taught had limited literacy skills. In 1959, he was exiled from Brazil because his method of education had threatened those in power. Friere wanted people to develop a theory of existence. This way, people are constantly reflecting and acting on transformation of their own perception and the world so that it becomes a more equitable place.
This transformation, according to Friere, is an essential and ongoing process that never ends and is always challenging. Friere, unlike Mezirow’s transformational theory, is much more concerned about a social transformation by revealing the reality of the oppressed. This happened by the awakening of their critical consciousness, where they “learn to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (p. 19, Friere). This awakening or kindling of one’s critical consciousness is the result of his educational process. Freire (1970) stated that:
“The more radical he is, the more fully he enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he can better transform it. He is not afraid to confront, to listen, and to see the world unveiled. He is not afraid to meet the people
In Chapter 1 of the book Freire lays the foundations for his pedagogy. He explains that liberation is a process by which not only the oppressed, but the oppressors as well, become more human. In an oppressive society the oppressed are viewed and treated as commodities rather than people. This process of dehumanization affects both the oppressor, whose own humanity is degraded by their degradation of others, and the oppressed, who internalize their treatment and view themselves as less-than-human. The only way for humanity to be liberated is if the oppressed, not the oppressors, are the core of the
“No political revolution is possible without a radical shift in one’s notion of the possible and the real.”
In Chapter four, Freire discussed "the oppressed", "oppressors" and "revolution" in depth. Oppressed people have different relationships with the oppressors and the revolutionaries. Freire believed that it was necessary to get the communion to achieve transformation. The oppressors
Free will isn’t always what it seems. The essays Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire and “Fences of Enclosure, Windows of Possibility,” by Naomi Klein show the idea of how the environment regulates revolutionary social change. The content of the two authors’ essays shows how the varying environment that the public exists in affects how they live. The two authors reveal how the environment people exist in controls how revolutionary social change can be created or suppressed. Revolutionary social change can be created and suppressed depending on if individuals are willing to overcome the limitations placed upon them by their environment.
Paulo Freire, one of the most influential radical educators of the world, believes that today’s education is substandard. In his essay “The Banking Concept of Education”, he discusses the classroom dynamic between students and teachers. He defines the "banking" concept as narration, with the teacher being the narrator and the students as “containers”, mechanically memorizing the information narrated by the teacher. Freire's main argument is that the "banking" concept as a whole is not helpful or beneficial to the students and needs to be removed from today’s education. What he proposes instead is the so-called “problem-posing” concept of education which focuses on the teacher posing questions and real life problems for students to discuss,
Some of the methods that Freire used for his argument was one being the oppressor. Freire (1992) says that “ Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both” (p.1). Meaning that he refers it as the oppressed group gains the power to oppressed their oppressors the group will realize how wrong they are and it 's when they start to weaken and come to peace. He also suggests that in order to gain that freedom they
"Man is at bottom a wild and terrible animal. We know him only as what we call civilization has tamed and trained him to be; hence we are alarmed by the occasional breaking out of his true nature. But whenever the locks and chains of law and order are cast off, and anarchy comes in, he shows himself for what he really is."
This newly emerging state of education as a form of training, rather than cultivation of the mind, scarily resembles the first model of education presented in Frieri’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Part of this trend (and evidence of a state of
Freire Speaks of education in schools as mindless and is only depositing phrases into student minds as if they were merely banks. This, he says, makes the people lack creativity even if the information in them is formally catalogued and available to be used at any time. The teacher, in his sense, needs to justify his or her existence by oppressing the students for their ignorance for what is knowledgable and what is not. The banking concept adheres to the wants of the teachers and make it so his or her pupils will not truly see the world and will not transform it. It makes the people easy to dominate and be fitted to a society that is controlling them. To break free from the oppression that the banking concept has force unto the people, the
Freire developed an approach to adult literacy education that involved not only reading the world, its circumstances and conditions, (Anna Pilar help here please) but also reading the world through the development of critical consciousness (Freire, 1973). Critical consciousness allows people to question the nature of their historical and social situation—reading their world—with the objective of acting as critical subjects in the creation of a fair and democratic society (Freire, 2002). Freire encourages people to be active participants in their lives. It is through his method that Freire challenges traditional methods of education that were inherently oppressive and dehumanizing where students were mere recipients of teacher’s knowledge (Freire, 2002, 2004). According to Freire (2002, 2004), there are injustices and inequities that exist in society and the world. These injustices and inequities make it necessary for people to analyze the issues and act upon them, to create a more just and equal
Freire states in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that only the oppressed can save themselves and the oppressors from oppression and that liberation must come within the oppressed. This liberation is the development of critical consciousness and the thinking process in the individual. This comes to a surprise for me because this novel was first published in 1968 that is close to 50 years of knowing a way to stop oppression in society or find a way for the oppressed to have more freedom. Freire states that freedom is achieved through conquest and pursued constantly and responsibly. To me, this means that those oppressed reach freedoms by reminding society of their presence without yelling because no one listens to anyone if there is yelling involved, they listen
Starting at a young age people are objects in a subjective narrative life. From school to everyday media, people are constantly exposed and absorbing anything society, the government, educators, and leaders say. In this technological age, educators should adapt a more problem-posing approach into our schools rather than depositing basic information and punishing the students when they fail to memorize. With society spewing out inconsistent, incomplete facts about selective topics, Friere’s problem-posing can help students develop a sense of consciousness and critically think for themselves. Being able to question, think, research and understand all the facts of a problem instead of accepting any information that comes their way can give a person a sense of liberating freedom from the government, media, society and all aspects of life that tries to create a sense of depositing. This is where educators come into
Freire states the concepts of education. 2. It talks about the information that teachers bring to their students. 3.It claims how students know, but do not store the information in their minds.
Only in the end of his essay does Freire focus more on his own system, and explain its privileges without resorting to the faults of the currents system, but even then he uses the latter tactic several times. The essay ends on a political note, calling the new revolutionaries to realize what the name they call themselves means, and to change the current ways not only on the outside, as they have done before, but also internally to make radical changes to their philosophy and their ideas about education. This concluding device stirs up some doubts as to the point of the whole essay. It might seem from the author’s concluding point that the underlying purpose of the essay was not to expand on the more beneficial ways of education, but to criticize the ways of political leaders in his, or some other country. Nevertheless, the rest of the essay shows little evidence of such a plot, and this point is at best marginal.
“I didn’t understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn’t dumb. It wasn’t lack of interest. My social condition didn’t allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge” ("A Brief Biography of Paulo Freire", 2017)