Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Oppression of the lower and middle classes by the wealthy upper class is the fundamental theme in Freire’s book. In an oppressive society, the dominant elite economically exploit the lower social class, profiting from their labor while confining them to a permanent state of poverty. The conditions of oppression alienate the subjugated group from the product of their labor, from their own culture, and from themselves, leaving them dependent and passive. Freire holds that oppression is an act of violence originating from an unjust social order that suppresses the self-affirmation and volition of the oppressed. At the same time, it is an impermanent and changing historical phenomenon, capable of being overcome by human intervention.

Oppression is an unnatural social condition that contradicts our essential humanity. Our vocation as human beings is to become more fully human, and this requires the exercise of freedom in creating our identity as subjects and in the labor we perform in and upon the world. By denying this opportunity to the oppressed, the social structure of oppression dehumanizes them as well as their oppressors. Oppression operates systematically throughout society, inducing false consciousness in the oppressed and their oppressors, which serves to sustain the dominance of the latter group. Oppression also tends to replicate itself in a cycle of violence and exploitation; when the oppressed ascend to the role of owner and oversee other laborers, they adopt the violent mistreatment they have learned previously from their oppressor.

The hierarchical division of society into a dominant elite possessing economic and political power and a subjugated class of laborers and peasants is a form of antagonistic class struggle. Oppression is the means by which the elite wage class warfare upon the dispossessed to preserve their dominance in the societal structure. This dominance is achieved through a strategy of conquest incorporating a variety of tactics: objectifyingthe oppressed, which robs them of autonomy and humanity; dividing them, to more easily enable their exploitation; manipulation through psychological coercion and social pressure, such as promoting myths that portray the state of the oppressed as natural and immutable; and cultural invasion, which imposes the cultural attitudes, values, and behaviors of the oppressor on the oppressed while denying the authenticity of the latter’s culture. The banking method of education, which Freire critiques in Chapter 2, incorporates many of these tactics in a concerted effort to deny the oppressed their own voice and to adapt them to an authoritarian society ruled by their betters. Freire concisely sums up the logic of the oppressor’s anti-dialogical action to sustain oppression: cultural invasion serves to manipulate the oppressed, which enables their conquest in order to dominate them.

As previously noted, Freire holds that dehumanization is a distortion of our vocation to be more fully human, and thus oppression dehumanizes both the oppressed and their oppressor. Human nature demands that the oppressed seek to restore their humanity; to do so, they must surmount the fear of freedom and culture of silence that inhibits them from engaging in the revolutionary struggle to overcome their subjugation. Freire contends that the “great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed” is to liberate both themselves and their oppressors, and this can only be achieved through their engagement in class struggle, grounded in a pedagogy of liberation. As an unnatural form of social organization that contradicts our essential humanity, oppression is the great historical “limit-situation” that challenges men and women to transform the world in the interest of human freedom. This revolutionary action constitutes overcoming both the concrete, historical conditions of oppression and the social dichotomy that divides humankind into oppressor and oppressed. Freire uses the metaphor of childbirth to describe human liberation; it is a painful process, and the new men and women who result from it do so only as the contradiction between oppressor and oppressed is finally resolved, leading to liberation for all.

Freire’s political, sociological, and pedagogical thought derives from Marxist sources, as well as the existentialism of Sartre and de Beauvoir, the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the psychoanalytical philosophy of Erich Fromm, and the postcolonial critiques of Frantz Fanon and others. His theory of oppression as a socioeconomic, psychological, cultural and historical phenomenon is synthetic, drawing upon the theories of these thinkers as well as on his experience among the illiterate peasants and urban poor in Latin America. While his analysis of oppression takes particular account of the conditions affecting dispossessed peoples in the third world, such as their political, social, and economic isolation, their high degree of illiteracy, their culture of silence and submersion in nature, it has influenced those analyzing the experience of other marginalized groups in developed nations, including women, racial minorities, members of the LGBTQ community, and migrant workers.