Pedagogy of the Oppressed |
“In one of our culture circles in Chile, the group was discussing (based on codifications) the anthropological concept of culture. In the midst of the discussion, a peasant who, by banking standards, was completely ignorant said, “Now I see that without man there is no world.” When the educator responded, “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that all the men on earth were to die, but the earth remained, together with trees, birds, and animals. Rivers, seas, the stars… wouldn’t all this be a world?” “Oh no,” the peasant replied emphatically, “There would be no one to say, ‘This is a world’” (Freire, 1970).
If one excerpt from the Pedagogy of the Oppressed were to encapsulate the whole idea of this book, my immediate choice would be this dialogue. And this selection highlights two understandings. How a peasant, who is conceived as illiterate by the dominant pedagogical structure and deprived of their agency to participate in the discursive spheres, can feel at home in an alternative one. Secondly, this implies the dependence of the world’s existence on the presence of humans.
This affirms that human beings and the world exist, in conjunction, as subjects and objects. Accordingly, it is men who name the world, and with the capacity of naming comes the capacity of transforming it.
But the dominant social structure has, per Paulo Freire, been imposed onto humans, the notion that the world is a static, immobile reality, and that humans have to adjust to this “space” rather than transforming the space to make it more humane. This dominant social structure is corroborated by the banking model of education, which deprives the learner of their agency to think critically and pushes them to view the world one-dimensionally, rather than as a scope that, upon adjustments, can offer a better view than the existing one. From the emphasis added on pedagogy, one must not infer that the book is a monocausal explanation of oppression, but takes into account multiple causes and links them to pedagogy.
Humanization has been historically, from an axiological point of view, humankind’s inescapable concern. This pursuit makes ontologically possible dehumanization. But with both of them as historical possibilities, only the former remains to be humankind’s vocation, a vocation consistently snubbed by the latter. But the more the former is negated by the latter, the stronger the affirmation for the former becomes. The harsher dehumanization becomes, the more there is a proportional increase in demand for a saner world to dwell in. It is as if we are conducting a controlled experiment; the distortion of an independent variable (dehumanization) affects the dependent one (humanization).
From the presence of dehumanization flows the thought that there would be oppressors who would distort the historical vocation and the oppressed who would fall victim to the exploitative structure. In this context, the oppressor, to avoid uprisings, erects structures that veil the underlying exploitative mechanism. These structures are implicit and packaged benignly. This includes but is not limited to “softening of power” or paternalistic treatment of the subservient. But this paternalistic treatment doesn’t necessarily mean that the oppressor, by “easing” himself, has achieved humanization. Rather, it maintains the existing exploitative structure.
Have you ever observed in your locality an individual who would criticize bureaucracy for its exploitative nature in post-colonial countries and yet strive to be a part of it? This is a recurrent phenomenon. An oppressed person criticizing a structure of........