Paulo Freire's 'Pedagogy Of The Oppressed'

Paulo Freire called for praxis in the education system. He taught the poor in Brazil to teach him how to teach them. He did that with spectacular results that the military dictatorship made him stop. Learning is something that is constantly remade in action.

Paulo Freire is an author who poses questions and arguments that challenge everything that his readers think and know. “The Banking Concept of Education” from Pedagogy of the Oppressed poses the question about the education system and how teachers are narrators and students are recorders. In his essay he discusses how the students – who he refers to as containers – receive their information from teachers. However, the teachers never communicate with their subordinates. The idea of “banking” suggests that students are only receiving, memorizing and receiving facts from the “depositor” which made the students “depositories.” The main ideas drawn from this article are related to education, knowledge and communication.

Freire begins Chapter 2 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed by stating his interpretation of the educational system between teacher and student, focusing primarily on the “banking” system, which is exceptionally biased due to oppressive teachers who direct their own misguided inquiries upon their oppressed students. Freire continues on by maintaining “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those

In his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian educator, philosopher, and author, Paulo Freire, informs us, the readers, of the difference between an oppressive education system and a libertarian system. Freire first published this book in Portuguese in 1968, just four years after his imprisonment and exile on the charge of spreading revolutionist teachings. He uses verbose language to further emphasize the importance of learning and a passionate tone to show his anguish at the loss of knowledge and education. In his lament for the awakening of his people, Freire’s effective use of the rhetorical situation persuades his audience to reject their country’s current oppressive system and to fight their oppressors who refuse them the right of free thought.

Isidore was able to separate the abusive way he was taught from the joy of learning. He didn't avoid learning after what his brother did but embraced education and worked out any problems he had. Isidore moved past his past and became known as, “The best teacher is Spain.”.

In Paulo Freire’s “Banking Concept of Education”, he explains his view of the educational system, and the faults within it. Freire describes the educational system as being “banking education”, which he explains to be the wrong method, and proposes a new method of “problem-posing” education which he believes to be more effective and just.

During my first semester at Touro College, I took a course on the History and Philosophy of Education and Special Education. Throughout this course, I was introduced to many philosophers and their theories, which helped me to develop a personal educational philosophy that I will implement into my own future classrooms. In our very first class session, we examined the word ‘education’. Education derives from two Latin roots, educare: to bring up, to train, to teach, and educere: to lead forth, to draw forth, to guide. In the world of education today, a child’s success in school is primarily dependant on his or her ability to pass standardized tests; this embodies the concept of educare. Knowledge is passed down from the teacher to the

Education is an important necessity in every human being’s life. For some, school is just a dreadful constitution that people must sit in for 8 hours a day, eagerly waiting to get a diploma and move on in their next stage in life, however, for others it is life-saving and both Richard Rodriguez and Sherman Alexie can say this is their case. Education has made a great influence on both Alexie and Rodriguez’s life. Although both authors faced alienation due to their ethnic background, Alexie continuously keeps in touch with his Indian roots and family while Rodriguez has lost any contact that he has attained with his family and Mexican origins.

As well, an educated Indian man. The authors tone is identified as mocking. The way he views society

Things appear different after five hundred years, yet it does not take much examination to realize that everything is the same. We focus on the minute changes, but these major themes of power, history, and the struggle for the control of knowledge are eternal and transcend the everyday. De las Casas wrote to a king to try to prevent a tragedy that he could not. Today the Latin America people face similar fates to their ancestors five hundred years prior. While the outcome is not as bloody, the loss is just as grave. Western knowledge seeks to destroy the last remaining semblances of the vast groupings that make up the term “Latin American culture.” It is not an active action in appearance, but the passive grouping into the West’s categories of race and culture has subtle motives of destruction. People are no longer ruled by kings, they guide themselves under the burdensome weight of Western knowledge and ideas. The existence of options, choices beyond growth and development, establish awareness that there is a way out of this evil. Latin American people were not born in the West, but are continually defined and judged by the system. Under such forces, it appears that the only two choices are to assimilate or bear the burden of being considered inferior. Decolonial thinking provides new pathways that lead to a new age for Latin America, providing the people recognize these pathways and are willing to take the steps to follow

In “Machuca”, we realize the extremities of differences between the different classes in the Chilean society, rooted mainly due to the lack of satisfaction of the two classes in the Socialist Unidad Popular Government. “The key to this interpretation is found in another important scene that takes place midway through the movie. There is a meeting at the school so that the parents of the students may have an opportunity to discuss the experiment of mixing children of different social classes. The discussion is mainly between liberals and conservatives – all of them middle or upper middle class – those who are in favour and those who are against the ‘experiment’. The parents of the poor students are standing at the back of the room (a chapel) and listen without taking part in the discussion, until the moment when Pedro’s mother dares to speak out. For a moment we can hear the subaltern’s voice, whose story is the history of primitive accumulation and of the worker’s continuous separation from the means of production, the history of pure and naked exploitation” (Martín-Cabrera & Voionmaa, 2007). She speaks about how the condition of the poorer sections of the

In a world of social, political, and economical inequality exists different levels of human beings in a hierarchy, where their level of importance is sometimes determined, not by their character, merits, or education but the race they are born into. In the case “Bodega Dreams” by Ernesto Quinonez, race plays a critical role in the social-economic development of the Latino students and a Latino teacher who is different than all his peers. The author,

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.

He saw education (specifically, literacy) not merely as a means of transferring information as if one were filling a box, but instead as a means of liberation and revolution, that instruction should teach students how to think, not what to think, and give them the power to call into question the facts of everyday life (Gibson). In Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he suggests that the common people are constantly oppressed and forced to become submissive, and that in turn, they will oppress others in a similar fashion. Traditional education is one of the first vehicles for this cycle of oppression and submission, and therefore Freire insists that educators must stimulate students to think through acceptance and equality; that a teacher "is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach…authority must be on the side of freedom". According to Freire, it is critical that this student-teacher equality exist in order for a student to develop his or her ability to think individually.

John Dewey once said “Education is not preparation for life; Education is life itself." Meaning that learning is an active process that should occur to enhance one 's living and understanding thereof. When one only views education as a temporary thing they miss the big picture , and fail to grasp the what life truly is. Paulo Freire believes in having the opportunity to discover for oneself all that the world has to offer with the slight guidance from a teacher. He also says that “Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by recoiling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.” Freire introduces the idea that we can and should all learn from each other, that no one person is ever higher in the world of education. We all have a unique perspective and take on things, and teachers should allow us to discover and interpret for ourselves.