Conscience, liberation and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of The Oppressed.

CSPL Membership Meeting | October 2020

Discussing conscience and liberation from Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of The Oppressed.

Paulo Freire was one of the most influential radical educators of our world. A native of Recife Brazil, he spent most of his early career working in poverty-stricken areas of his homeland, developing methods for teaching illiterate adults to read and write (and as he would say) to think critically, and, thereby, to take power over their own lives. 

Because he has created a classroom where teachers and students have equal power and equal dignity, his work has stood as a model for educators around the world. It led also to sixteen years of exile after the military coup in Brazil in 1964. During that time, he taught in Europe and in the United States and worked for the Allende government in Chile, training the teachers whose job it would be to bring modern agricultural methods to the peasants.

Freire worked with the adult education programs of UNESCO, The Chilean Institute of Agrarian Reform, and the Catholic University of São Paulo. He is the author of Education for Critical Consciousness, The Politics of Education, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation (with Antonio Faundez), Pedagogy of Indignation.

According to Freire, a teacher’s most crucial skill is his on her ability to assist students’ struggle to gain control over conditions of their lives, and this means helping them not only to know but “to know that they know.”