Essays on Pedagogy of The Oppressed

Few educational thinkers have been more widely influential than Paulo Freire. His classic text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has been studied by numerous Left intellectuals, political activists, radical educationists and liberation theologians for almost four decades. Freire’s ideas and theories have been applied by academics, school teachers, adult literacy coordinators, church leaders, counselors, psychologists, social workers, health professionals, language learning specialists, and prison rehabilitation workers, among others. In addition, Freire has inspired (directly or indirectly) thousands of books, articles, interviews,…

Paulo Freire said that education can be construed as an exercise of domination if it manipulates the naivete and innocence of the students. This kind of pedagogy tends to use authority heavily so that the students would learn to accept such authority without challenging it. They become subservient to the interests of the authorities who have the power over the educational system. Freire’s (49) idea is that education can be used, and has been used by oppressors to enforce their…

The essay, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, discusses how we can be humanized. According to Paulo Freire, oppression dehumanizes both the oppressed and the oppressor. This is because due to oppression, the oppressed is reduced to being a thing, deprived of its rights and freedom. It comes to a point that even the oppressed believe that they are not worth anything. The oppressors are also dehumanized because in the process of subduing the oppressed, they treat the oppressed as things to…

Education, the process of taking in and applying information, is an important part of life that directly impacts an individual’s judgement and reasoning of both themselves and society. A person’s educational experience has the ability to influence their life despite their intelligence level or home life situation. In Paulo Freire’s book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, two major learning styles, the “banking” concepts and the “problem-posing” methods of education, and their effects on students are discussed. My personal early education…