Paulo Freire: Pedagogue

Throughout history, many men and women have made important contributions to the world of education. Amongst these is the Brazilian scholar Paulo Freire, whose influences on the world have been both broad and deep. A true believer in Marxist theory, his central ideas regarding education revolve around the concept that the experience and learning process of education are more important than the "facts" or concepts that are being taught. Consequently, traditional teaching methods (known as "Banking") train students to be passive, unthinking, and subservient to their superiors; instead, teachers should "free" their students by employing "problem-posing" techniques, where teachers not only present concepts for students to analyse, but actually become "students" themselves ("Oppressed").

Paulo Freire's radical theories are best understood in the context of his upbringing amongst the Brazilian poor. Although his family was not a member of the absolute lowest classes, they were forced to live in a poor laborers' community due to the impact of the Great Depression. He realized that many "of his day-to-day companions...ate less [than him] and some...hardly ever ate", causing him to realize that "'...a lot of things in the world were not going well'" (Lownd). These experiences would prove to be amongst the most influential of his life, as he obtained a unique familiarity with their lives and status, and how this status affected their education. As an adult, his work at SESI further demonstrated the gaps between the education that the schools offered and the real needs of the working-class people (Bentley). These experiences with the impoverished peoples of Brazil led him to the Socialist doctrine of Carl Marx and his contemporaries.

His educational theories are much more than a rehashing of Marxist ideology, however, but instead adapted its concepts of oppression and humanism to fit with his education-oriented goals. He saw education (specifically, literacy) not merely as a means of transferring information as if one were filling a box, but instead as a means of liberation and revolution, that instruction should teach students how to think, not what to think, and give them the power to call into question the facts of everyday life (Gibson). In Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he suggests that the common people are constantly oppressed and forced to become submissive, and that in turn, they will oppress others in a similar fashion. Traditional education is one of the first vehicles for this cycle of oppression and submission, and therefore Freire insists that educators must stimulate students to think through acceptance and equality; that a teacher "is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach...authority must be on the side of freedom". According to Freire, it is critical that this student-teacher equality exist in order for a student to develop his or her ability to think individually.

In contrast to Freire's ideal educational system, traditional education focuses primarily on what he deems a "Banking system" of education, wherein students are treated like receptacles for information. Instead of being stimulated and encouraged to create novel thought, "students are to receive, memorize, and repeat" (Williams). Essentially, students are treated as if they are without knowledge or worthwhile thought, and therefore must accept whatever the teacher tells them as pure truth. It is Freire's assertion that this banking process not only destroys any creative ability the student may possess, but oftentimes involves misleading the students that are supposedly being taught. All of these characteristics make the banking method extremely appealing to oppressors, as it fits well with their agenda to ensure that students (and, by extension, common people) are satisfied with the world that the elite provide, and the simplest way for them to accomplish this is by "changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation that oppresses them". To Freire, however, this exact cycle must be broken through the liberating process of equalization between student and teacher.

Liberating a student is more complex than simply imparting upon them a sense of individuality, but rather, a teacher much also ensure that students are taught in a manner that emphasizes the ability to reason and solve problems, which gives a student Freire's "critical consciousness". This occurs through a process Freire calls conscientization. It is this consciousness that "allows people to question the nature of their historical and social situation -- to read their world" (Bentley). The methods that must be utilized to obtain these goals are known collectively as "problem posing education", in which an educator introduces escalating problems regarding his or her student's own world, and a collaborative effort between the instructor and pupil ensues in dialogic form (Freire). Through their dialogue, where student and teacher not only relate but communicate as equals, both "increase the scope of their perception [and] begin to direct their observations toward previously inconspicuous phenomena" (Freire). The end result of this type of education is not only enhanced knowledge, but also the ability to critically examine the world in which they live. As Bentley states, "Freire's pedagogy of education involves not only reading