Reading “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”
With reflections on student encampments protesting against the war and discussing the failure of the Academy
I discovered “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” only a few years ago. One of my mentors mentioned it in passing as we were discussing some practices in higher education internationally and if they have roots in colonial and post-colonial thinking.
Since then, the book became my favorite place to revisit every time I struggle with understanding our educational physical and virtual systems and the inability to fulfil their mission, especially when it comes to social and global issues. When I read this book, I imagine myself sitting beside Paulo Freire as he takes me on a deep intellectual journey to deconstruct some of the deepest and most profound issues in education.
“Pedagogy of the oppressed” aims to establish a dialog around humanity, inequality, the interplay between economic and political forces, and education as a process of change. The book was written within a context of post-colonial Brazil struggling with industrialization and development with communities transforming from agrarian to industrial and urban societies while dealing with economic downturns, local and global political struggles and fighting for their human rights. However, when you read Freire’s book, you cannot help it but feel it was written for the times we live in today as we sit on the steps of yet another industrial revolution where the political debate centers around economic, local, and global wars, rise of inequality, and how education and work will transform in a post AI world. Freire presents a beautiful and everlasting dialog analyzing the dynamics of oppression, and how the oppressed often end up accepting or adopting oppressive educational practices despite their struggle for freedom. Freire’s writings were foundational towards the creation of a new field of critical pedagogy and impacted how we think of modern educational practices today. At this point, if you cannot help it wonder why you never heard of Freire before, you are in the right place. I encourage you to search and read more and find out. It might lead you to a journey of relearning and rediscovery.
Discussing Freire occupies volumes of texts and discussions, so I will not pretend that I am qualified to give it justice. Instead, I will focus on one idea that I find central to many issues related to driving change in education, and to understanding some of the events we witness today. The idea centers around the notion that true learning starts by liberation from the cycle of oppression. As an example, Freire discusses the dynamics of which this cycle manifests itself in the relationship between teacher and students. In what he calls “The Banking Model of education” the teacher tries to deposit information into the students’ minds, and with this act they dehumanize them by assuming their inability to form opinions and build knowledge around it. For Freire, education is an act of cognition, and builds on our understanding of what it means to be human and how we interact with the world around us. In the banking model, education transforms the world and everyone in it to a static, predictable, and ghostly construct, turning men and women into automatons and killing the true meaning of learning which is around creating and celebrating life.
Many find the book to be a hard read, and requires multiple readings and discussions. It delves, as it should, into deep philosophical questions around the nature of knowledge, language, cognition, meaning and being. However, it should not be looked at as a theoretical book as it is deeply based on human experience. Liberation is a practical idea that aims to unlock the potential of the human mind to fully participate in a meaningful learning experience that results in improving the immediate and tangible reality of a person, a community, and the human condition at large. Freire discusses how learning should be centered around “problem posing education” where teachers and learners continuously switch roles and engage into a generative process that results into creating knowledge. In such an example, the educational process succeeds in deconstructing the cycle of oppression and eliminate the roles of oppressed and oppressors as both are liberated by engaging in a true act of learning.
Freire makes a bold statement that only the oppressed can engage truly in the act of liberation and learning, both for themselves and for what causes their oppression. Those who might be considered part of the oppressive force often join in trying to address the challenges of the oppressed, and most often they carry with them existing prejudices and biases. After all, the oppressors are also oppressed, and they had to go through a similar static and oppressive educational process. This statement is not political, but a practical one. To solve a social problem at a large scale you need to start by empowering those who are struggling with these problems and build on the knowledge they own to create a meaningful and generative process that can lead to a scalable solution. You can only contribute to this solution if you transform your vision, knowledge, and accountability to be in unison with the population affected by the problem. Much of this thinking is echoed through many modern practices today such as human centered design and co-creation frameworks. Many of us can discuss these concepts at a micro level and within a limited context, but one ultimately faces a plethora of red-tape, censorship mechanisms, and impracticality arguments when attempting to scratch the surface around the grand implications of such an understanding.
Freire’s writings call for a critical deconstruction and careful examinations of the dynamics of oppression and argue that real cognitive based education needs to start by liberating and humanization of the human experience. I find it ironic how some of Freire’s ideas propagated across our educational studies and practices, ultimately re-enforcing the legitimization the adoption of an educational system built based on oppressive, colonial, post-colonial and racist philosophies and structures across the developing world without discussing why or how they came to be.
If you are like me and follow reporting of student led objective journalism and live feeds from the encampments and demonstrations happening around American college campuses today in solidarity with the human crisis in Gaza and against the war economy, you will understand the relevance of the arguments Freire lays out in his book. Over the past few days, I have witnessed some of the most beautiful examples of hope and learning amid these encampments. I saw students coming together under a liberating framework of trying to address the problem of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Palestinians, Israelis, Muslims, Christian, Jews, Atheist all came together, camping, reading, praying, dancing, and creating their list of questions and demands for universities in an attempt to learn and create a small contribution to a solution for this grand problem. In a world where universities and educators take accountability towards real education as part of its mission, a responsible leadership would do everything in its power to nurture and grow such activity as an example for a practical path towards creating a better future. Instead, leadership in many universities decided to call in police and special forces to restore order and teach the students a lesson in obedience. Several universities are committing to better standards and decided not to use force and let the students practice their freedom of expression. Yet most still fail to engage in integrating or growing such positive and generative efforts towards meaningful change apart from some grassroots and individual efforts by students and faculty.
These very same universities continue to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in the name of addressing social and global problems. A large proportion contribute to collecting wealth in the form of endowments and to establishing bureaucratic structures that reinforce legitimacy and allow to capture a larger share of the social development market. When the dust settles on this war, if it ever does, Think Tanks, Task Forces, International development initiatives and Research Programs will ultimately capture the lion share and will be tasked with shaping up the mainstream narrative around understanding what happened, or where to go forward, as it has been done for decades. Research and scholarship around the war in Gaza will most likely take place almost exclusively at American, European, and Israeli universities, while Gaza’s universities will be permanently reduced to rubble. No one will dare question the stark contradiction between the oppressive practices these universities are implementing against some of their own students today, and the fact that their courses and programs are and continue to be the gold standard used for leadership and teacher training all around the world. When you read Freire, you start to deeply understand why these universities will never be able to meaningfully contribute to solving any of these problems unless they start a serious process of deconstructing their mission, finances, structure of accountability and partnerships, and starting from a place of equality, love, empathy, humility, and liberation.
Many universities suffer from an ever increasing reliance on big and private donors. Universities are engaged in a race for more revenue and wealth while maintaining a minimal level of transparency or accountability for a majority of their activity. When engaging in global and international initiatives, checks and balances are often less enforced or less transparent. Even locally, universities often get away with the most outrageous examples of capital, knowledge and worker exploitation and are rarely discussed in public media or even in a professional scholarly settings.
Students demands for a greater transparency and accountability around war related funding, research, and teaching activities should only be the start. It is time for universities to be held more accountable towards the huge investment and trust given to them by a majority of the public around solving some of most pressing social and global problems.
Do your part to stand with our students right of a liberating education, and start by reading “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” with me.