Paulo Freire's Theory Of Oppression

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Chapter 2 of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed” unfolds a lot like a reel of film: one idea, one observation, flowing seamlessly, one thought to the next, straightforward and natural in its progression. It begins in such a way that it appears to be simply another indictment of education, only if that is as far as you manage to read into it, then you are barely scratching the surface. Paulo Freire’s piece starts life as a rather straightforward critique of education and then quickly expands into a larger understanding of education’s role in the nature of oppression. To better understand the fundamental origin of oppression, Freire spotlights the ideological roots of education, and the way in which society approaches and chooses to educate. …show more content…

Therefore, what he is arguing is that we must use the concept of education as a tool. “Education as the practice of freedom,” (Freire 7) is how he terms it. Banking education promotes egocentrism, which then reinforces overall notions of oppression among humanity. This value hierarchy that gets established forces humanity to view the world through a filter, rendering it static, flat, almost two-dimensional. that is the fundamental danger of that type of education, according to Freire. But problem-posing education, well it has the ability to alter fundamentally the nature of humanity, and only for the good. “In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (Freire 8). That adherence to the idea of transformation is the ultimate grace of education. It allows humanity to see into the future, and adequately plan for that future, because that concept of education understands that all things are constantly in motion. Or as Freire puts it: “[problem-posing education] affirms women and men as who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, for whom immobility represents a fatal threat for whom looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future” (Freire 9). He states that humans put themselves on the path to ruin when they suddenly perceive themselves as being separate from the world in which they live, as if it is one thing and they are another, simply interacting. A progressive mode of education, he argues, allows humans to

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