Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed

Research in the vein of critical inquiry cannot escape the influence of Paulo Freire (1921-97), whose best known work is Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972a).

Freire was a Brazilian educationalist who launched literacy programs among the peasant peoples of north-east Brazil in and around Recife in the early 1960s. He was a member of the Movement of Popular Culture in Recife and spent a lot of time in the slums, engaged in dialogue with the poor. So, while he received his doctorate from the University of Recife in 1959 and became its professor of the history and philosophy of education, he was no armchair academic but spelled out in his own life and practice what he was later to articulate in his writings: that reflection without action is empty ‘verbalism’.

Freire’s very effective approach to teaching literacy became so well known that in 1963 Brazil’s Ministry of Education agreed to a large- scale literacy campaign employing his approach. Training courses for coordinators started up throughout the country and it was estimated that within a year there would be 20 000 groups in operation. This would enable some two million people at a time to pursue the three-months course that was envisaged. Clearly, within a few years such a campaign would make significant inroads into Brazil’s illiteracy problem.

The campaign, however, was not to last for a few years. In April 1964 the Brazilian government was toppled by a military coup. Freire was jailed for 75 days and declared expelled from the University of Recife. He was released but forced into exile. He went first to Chile, where he set up his literacy program once again. However, with the assassination of Allende and the inauguration of Pinochet’s repressive regime in that country, Freire found himself once more in exile. Out of the country at the time of the assassination, he was declared persona non grata. He began teaching at Harvard University, later becoming a special consultant to the Office of Education of the World Council of Churches in Geneva.

What is it about Freire’s way of teaching people to read and write that proves such a threat to the powers-that-be? In seeking an answer to this question, we might take note of his starting point. Freire does not begin by teaching his peasant groups the alphabet or showing them how to spell words chosen for them to learn. Instead, he spends time with the communities, learning himself the words that are meaningful to the people, words that evoke responses in them. These he calls ‘generative words’ and it is these words that he portrays in visual form and invites the people to discuss as a community. He suggests that they dissect these words and put them together in different forms. He wants them to feel that they have power over their words and can exercise power over them. This is no mere pedagogical technique. It intimately reflects Freire’s philosophy of existence, as we shall see.

Freire’s method proved highly successful not only in developing literacy skills but in arousing critical awareness among the peasants and workers. Understandably, it met with constant criticism and attack from the upper and middle classes in Brazil. These enjoyed a monopoly of power and privilege, both because illiterate people were not eligible to vote and because lack of social and political awareness made it easy to manipulate those of the lower classes who did vote. These beneficiaries of the status quo were the people who supported the 1964 military coup and it is not surprising that they found Freire-style literacy programs threatening.

The word most associated with Freire is ‘conscientisation’. According to Freire, the word first came to be used at the Institute of Brazilian Studies in the late 1950s. While Freire did not originate the word, it was he who popularised it and bestowed upon it the rich content it possesses today. Etymologically, the word is straightforward enough. To conscientise is to render conscious. Conscientisation is an awakening of, or increase in, consciousness. When describing the process of conscientisation, Freire also uses terms like ‘critical consciousness’, ‘critical perception’, or ‘critical thinking’. In one key passage (Freire 1972a, pp. 65-5) he defines critical thinking as ‘thinking which discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and men’. Critical thinking, he adds, ‘perceives reality as process and transformation, rather than as a static entity’. It is ‘thinking which does not separate itself from action’ (pp. 64-5).

In these words we discern the philosophical underpinnings of Freire’s pedagogy. Freire is known primarily as a Marxist. He certainly draws upon Marxist thought, and, of course, upon the revolutionary and liberationist literature of Latin America. Yet he can also be said to stand in the tradition of existential phenomenology and we find him citing such thinkers as Husserl, Buber, Ortega y Gasset, Marcel and Sartre. In the words just cited, Freire links conscientisation to the relationship between humans and their world, to the essentially historical character of human being, and to ‘praxis’ as a form of reflection that stems from, and remains indissolubly wedded to, active human intervention in reality. In short, he brings together his notion of conscientisation and his understanding oif what it means to be human.

1. FREIRE AND HUMAN BEING

As Freire has said, there is indivisible solidarity between humans and their world. No dichotomy can be made between the two. ‘Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without men, but men in their relations with the world’ (Freire 1972a, p. 54). A favourite phrase of Freire’s puts it this way: we are not only ‘in’ the world, but also ‘with’ the world, that is, essentially related to it (1972b, p. 51).

In this view of things the world is our world in a very radical sense. We are rooted in this world, and in us humans the world has come to consciousness. Because of this, the world is now subject not merely to natural evolution but to an historical evolution in which human beings have a guiding hand. Our task is to exercise in the world the creative responsibility that is our characteristic as persons.

As conscious beings, humans are endowed with creative imagination. This means that they find themselves confronted not by brute factuality, sheer material circumstance, but by what can only be described as a human situation. This is a situation that holds creative possibilities, for humans are able to see it not only in terms of what it is but also in terms of what it can be. They can do something about their situation and, precisely as human beings, they are called to do something about it. This, and only this, is the kind of freedom human beings enjoy. It is a situated freedom, an embodied freedom—not the freedom to realise absolute, abstract ideals as such, but the freedom to address themselves to their situation, seize upon its growing points, and out of the worse to create the better.

The ‘point of departure of the movement’, Freire tells us, lies in human beings themselves. Since humans do not exist apart from the world, the movement must begin with the relationship they have with their world. This means the ‘here and now’—the situation within which they are submerged. They must emerge from that situation, reflect upon it, and intervene in it. They are able to do this only if they perceive their state not as the outcome of inexorable fate, not as something unalterable, but merely as limiting and therefore challenging (Freire 1972a, p. 57).

This is a never-ending enterprise. As we continue to modify our environment through our human activity, that is, as we continue to fashion ‘culture’, ever new challenges and ever new tasks arise for us. It is the story of this ongoing interplay between us and our world that constitutes human history and characterises us as essentially historical beings. Animals have no ‘historical sense’ and merely adapt to the world, but human beings have ‘an historical and a value dimension’ and a ‘sense of “project”’ (Freire 1972b, p. 21).

Although there is ‘indivisible solidarity’ between human beings and their world, they are not in the world as one object alongside other objects. As a thinking and free being (or, to use Freire’s frequent expression, as a ‘Subject’), the human being is in the world in a unique way. Because of this unique human presence, it is, in fact, never a merely material universe but always a human world (Freire 1972a, p. 55) and what humans do in it never has physical consequences only. In constandy transforming their environment, women and men are shaping the very conditions for their existence and their life. They are changing themselves, therefore. The call of human beings to creative initiative extends to their own being, so that human freedom comes ultimately to mean a self-creating.

This self-creating too is a never-ending historical project. ‘Historical’, yes. As the famous phrase of Ortega y Gasset puts it, human beings have no nature; what they have is history (1964, p. 41). Freire expresses the same thought. Human beings must be seen ‘as beings in the process of becoming—as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality’ (Freire 1972a, pp. 56-7). They are beings who move forward and look ahead. For such beings immobility represents a fatal threat. There is ‘no history for men; there is only history of men, made by men and (as Marx pointed out) in turn making them’ (1972a, p. 101).

Accordingly, to ask who human beings are or what it means to be human is to ask what human beings have made of themselves.

2. Praxis and dialogue

The solidarity between human beings and their world bridges the classical objective/subjective dichotomy. Freire’s epistemology rejects both ‘mechanistic objectivism’ (wherein consciousness is considered to be merely a copy of objective reality) and ‘solipsism’ (which reduces the world to a capricious creation of consciousness) (Freire 1972b, p. .53). On the contrary, we must recognise the unity between subjectivity and objectivity in the act of knowing. Reality is never simply the Objective datum’ but is also people’s perception of it (1972b, p. 31).

Sadler expresses this same viewpoint:

The classical distinction between subject and object, between consciousness and thing, between interpretation of the mind and objective facts has broken down . . . Experience is completely a mixture of subjective and objective, of fact and interpretation, of consciousness and thing. (1969, pp. 14-16)

To denote the fact that the dynamic structure of consciousness is inseparable from the objects that inform it, in other words, that ‘authentic thought-language’ is generated in and out of a dialectical relationship between human beings and their concrete historical and cultural reality (Freire 1972b, p. 13), Freire uses the word employed by Brentano, Husserl and the phenomenologists generally—intentionality. The intentionality of consciousness means that consciousness is never a mere reflection of material reality but is a reflection upon material reality (1972b, p. 53). Consciousness is already an active intervention into reality. Critical reflection is already action (Freire 1972a, p. 99).

Authentic action and reflection are indissolubly united, therefore. This is Freire’s understanding of praxis. It is ‘reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it’ (Freire 1972a, p. 28). True praxis can never be merely cerebral. It must involve action. Nor can it be limited to mere activism. It must include serious reflection (1972a, pp. 40-1). Freire regards reflection without action as sheer verbalism, ‘armchair revolution’, whereas action without reflection is ‘pure activism’, that is, action for action’s sake (1972a, p. 41).

Action and reflection must go together even in the temporal sense. Freire insists (1972a, p. 99) that praxis cannot be divided into a prior stage of reflection and a subsequent stage of action. Action and reflection take place at the same time. When they do—when action and reflection are united—they become creative. They ‘constantly and mutually illuminate each other’ (Freire 1976, p. 149).

It is praxis that leads to conscientisation. ‘Conscientisation’, writes Freire (1976, p. 146), ‘cannot be arrived at by a psychological, idealist subjectivist road, nor through objectivism’. Praxis is the only route

(Freire 1972b, p. 78).

The action referred to is what Freire refers to as critical self-insertion into the reality of one’s own situation. As he never tires of pointing out, human beings are called to be re-creators, not mere spectators, of the world (1972a, p. 49). They are meant to be Subjects and not merely objects of their history. For them, the world is to be seen not as some kind of static reality but as a reality in process. They are called to transform it—and thereby to transform themselves. Hence we find Freire speaking of ‘the unfinished character of men and the transformational character of reality’ (1972a, pp. 56-7).

It is this kind of action—human beings engaged in intervention in the world as transformers of that world—that results in the development of critical consciousness (Freire 1972a, p. 47). This critical consciousness, in its turn, leads to further action (1972a, p. 81). In and through such action, people cease to see their situation ‘as a dense, enveloping reality or a tormenting blind alley’. Instead, it emerges as ‘an historical reality susceptible of transformation’. (1972a, p. 58).

Yet, if humans are to take charge as Subjects and not mere objects of their own history, what direction are they to give to that history? If they must intervene in the reality of their own situation, seeing that situation as capable of transformation, to what end are they to intervene? What kind of transformation are they to effect? Freire’s answer is summed up in the word ‘humanisation’. When people confront their situation, they discover in it the obstacles to their humanisation and a call to struggle against them (Freire 1972a, p. 90).

The historic task of human beings, and their central problem as well, is to become more fully human. No one escapes this ‘ontological and historical vocation’ of becoming more fully human (Freire 1972a, p. 58). Freire sees dehumanisation as both a possibility and an historical reality. Unlike other animals, which cannot be de-animalised, humans can be dehumanised. They can fail to become fully human. They can become less human (Freire 1972b, p. 55). Such dehumanisation is the characteristic of exploitation, oppression and all other forms of injustice, marking both those whose humanity is stolen and those who have stolen it. It is the result of an unjust order that engenders in the oppressors a violence that in turn dehumanises the oppressed. So emerges ‘the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed’, namely, to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well (1972a, pp. 20-1).

In confronting us with this task of conscientisation—of moving towards humanisation through praxis—Freire is not addressing us as individuals. Conscientisation does not take place in abstract beings but in real people and in actual social structures. For Freire, this is proof enough that it cannot remain on the level of the individual (1976, pp. 146-7). The pursuit of full humanity, he tells us (1972a, p. 58), cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism. It can only take place in fellowship and solidarity.

Action/reflection in fellowship and solidarity is precisely what Freire means by dialogue. Without dialogue, there can be no conscientisation. Conscientisation is a ‘joint project’. It takes place in human beings among other human beings. These are human beings united by their action and their reflection upon that action and upon the world (Freire 1972b, p. 75).

Nor, without dialogue, can there be liberation. As Freire puts it (1972a, p. 103), ‘we can legitimately say that in the process of oppression someone oppresses someone else; we cannot say that in the process of revolution someone liberates someone else, nor yet that someone liberates himself, but rather that men in communion liberate each other’.

For its part, true dialogue cannot exist without critical thinking. This is a two-way street, however, for only dialogue is capable of generating critical thinking (Freire 1972a, pp. 64-5). For this reason, Freire’s adult literacy programs are, as he believes all education ought to be, programs of vital dialogue from start to finish—’dialogical par excellence’ (1972a, p. 81). In dialogical education, learners and educators are regarded ‘as equally knowing subjects’ (Freire 1972b, p. 31). The educator is the students’ partner as they engage together in critical thinking and a quest for mutual humanisation (Freire 1972a, p. 49).

Over against this kind of education stands what Freire calls the ‘banking’ concept of education. In banking education the teacher resembles someone putting money into a bank, the students being regarded as empty receptacles into which the teacher deposits knowledge. The method is monological, not dialogical. This, of course, has been a common approach to education and it serves the interests of the status quo and those who are its beneficiaries, for it results in acceptance and adaptation rather than any move towards change (Freire 1972a, p. 47).

Freire contrasts this with a pedagogy of the oppressed in which the teacher/students dichotomy vanishes. The teacher is no longer merely the one who teaches, for the teacher is also taught in dialogue with the students. And the students, while being taught, also teach. In this way, teacher and students become joindy responsible for a process in which all of them grow (Freire 1972a, p. 53).

While banking education is a mechanistic theory that reduces the practice of education to a complex of techniques, Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed—dialogical education—is radically different. He describes it as ‘cultural action for freedom’ (1972b, p. 13). If this sounds revolutionary, it is because it is revolutionary. Freire sees cultural action for freedom and cultural revolution as but two moments in the one revolutionary process. The difference is simply that, while cultural action for freedom takes place in opposition to the dominating power, cultural revolution takes place in harmony with the revolutionary regime. Authentic revolution, that is, political change that is no mere coup d’etat or the development of ‘sclerotic bureaucracy’ (Freire 1972b, p. 82), can be effected only through conscientisation. Consequently, it can be effected only through dialogue, the sine qua non of conscientisation.

And this dialogue out of which revolution is bom must persist. It must become ‘a permanent process of self-scrutiny’ (Freire 1972b, p. 83).

3. The culture of silence

In all this Freire is led by a concern for ‘the oppressed’. These are the masses upon whom, within culturally alienated societies, a regime of oppression is imposed by the power elites. Freire speaks ‘as a man of the Third World’ (1972b, pp. 16-17). Yet, when he left Latin America and went to the United States in 1967, he discovered that the ‘Third World’ is not a geographical concept but essentially socio-political in character. The blacks and other minorities in the USA, he learned, constitute the Third World within North American society, just as the elites in Latin America play the role of the First World vis-a-vis the workers and the peasant communities. So it is for oppressed peoples everywhere that Freire seeks conscientisation and liberation.

Conscientisation does not come easy, however. For the oppressed to become critically aware of their tme situation, intervene in its reality and thus take charge of their destiny, is peculiarly difficult because they belong to ‘the culture of silence’. Freire uses this term because, in their condition of oppression, the masses are ‘mute’. They have no voice. They are excluded from any active role in the transformation of their society and are therefore ‘prohibited from being’ (Freire 1972b, p. 30). Not only do they not have a voice, but, worse still, they are unaware that they do not have a voice—in other words, that they cannot exercise their right to participate consciously in the socio-historical transformation of their society (Freire 1972b, p. 30).

In the culture of silence, the dominated have introjected the cultural myths of the dominators. The oppressed internalise the image of the oppressor and adopt the oppressor’s guidelines. As Freire points out many times, the oppressor comes to be ‘housed’ within the oppressed and they seek to be like the oppressor. Freire points to oppressed people who want agrarian reform, not to become free, but to become ‘bosses over other workers’ (Freire 1972a, p. 23). Among the myths that they internalise is the myth of their own natural inferiority (1972b, p. 30). They come to see themselves as the oppressor sees them, and needs to see them, and needs to have them see themselves—as incompetent, lazy, prodigal, and so on.

In this way, the very situation of exploitation and oppression begets lack of awareness, apathy, fatalism, absence of self-respect—even a fear of freedom. ‘Functionally, oppression is domesticating.’ This is the culture of silence. The oppressed are submerged in their situation and, as long as they remain so submerged, they cannot be active Subjects intervening in reality; they cannot become engaged in the struggle for their own liberation (Freire 1972a, pp. 27-8). They need help to emerge and engage in that struggle.

How to help in this process of emergence? Unsurprisingly, Freire totally rejects the donor-recipient approach that finds solutions for the people instead of with the people and imposes these solutions upon them. This approach will not do. It must be remembered at all times that the oppressed ‘are fighting not merely for freedom from hunger, but, to quote Fromm’s The Heart of Man, for “. . . freedom to create and to construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine’” (Freire 1972a, p. 43).

The only valid approach, Freire believes, is the way of dialogue. Whether we are speaking of education as cultural action for freedom or of the further phase of cultural revolution, the oppressed cannot be liberated without their reflective participation in the act of liberation (Freire 1972a, p. 41). This must be ‘not pseudo-participation, but committed involvement’ (1972a, p. 44).

To foster participation of this kind, there must be trust in the oppressed and their ability to reason (Freire 1972a, p. 41). True enough, in a situation of alienation people may be impaired in their use of that power. Those promoting dialogue among them may therefore need to be critical. Their faith in the people will not be naive. Nevertheless, a basic belief in the oppressed’s power ‘to make and remake, to create and re­create’ remains indispensable. Without such faith, ‘dialogue is a farce which inevitably degenerates into paternalistic manipulation’ (Freire 1972a, pp. 63-4).

Given this faith in human beings, Freire looks to a methodology that is ‘dialogical, problem-posing and conscientising’ (1976, p. 157). In ‘problem-posing’ we strike another key word in Freire’s thought. He wants to place the oppressed in a consciously critical confrontation with their problems (1976, p. 16). This is Freire’s ‘problematisation’, a pedagogical process that presents the concrete, existential situation of those involved in the dialogue as a set of problems. The problems are considered challenges to intervene in the reality of their situation and transform it. This problem-posing approach requires them to emerge from their situation and reflect upon it. They have a ‘focalised’ view of their own reality that the culture of silence has imposed upon them and they must move from this to a view that sees their reality as a totality— with all its causes and consequences. This is critical thinking.

Critical thinking sounds the death knell to the popular myths that have hitherto shackled the people’s consciousness. Problematisation is at the same time a ‘demythicisation’. Hence we find Freire pointing up ‘the oft-emphasised necessity of posing as problems the myths fed to the people by the oppressors’ (1972a, p. 132).

With this demythicisation comes a new view of reality and a founded hope for freedom. It makes possible a conscientised people. These are people who encounter one another in the common search to be more human. They are people emerging from their situation to reflect upon it and cast aside the culture of silence that has held their consciousness submerged. They are people whose critical awareness melds reflection and action and enables them to transform their lives in a new-found spirit of hope and courage.

4. Drawing on freire

A number of questions remain.

In Freire, for instance, we find litde of, say, Alinsky’s preoccupation with community organisation (Alinsky 1972). Yet, when people become critically aware and take action to humanise their situation, their social and political organisation and the creation of necessary institutions assume central importance. Freire is very aware of this, at least by the time he comes to write Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but seems to offer little help in this connection beyond demanding that social and political organisation be dialogical and not authoritarian, so as to preserve authentic freedom at all times.

Another question touches the relevance of Freire’s thought to our kind of society. Applying Freire’s approach to a society like ours requires that we first identify the forms—often very subde forms—that oppression takes in a society like ours. Freire’s later works, especially Pedagogy of the City (1993), are of more help in addressing such questions.

In these later works as in the earliest, Paulo Freire speaks with authority and passion. As we ponder the spirit of critical inquiry brought by researchers to methodologies such as action research and critical ethnography, his is not an easy voice to ignore.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.