Overview
Critical pedagogy grew out of the ideas of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Teaching peasants and workers to read in north-eastern Brazil in the early 1960s, Freire argued that learning the word must also mean learning to "read the world". Exiled after the 1964 military coup, he wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed in Chile, and its 1970 English edition made him known worldwide. His central claim is that education is never neutral: it either helps maintain oppression or helps people free themselves from it.
Banking versus problem-posing education
- Banking education: the teacher knows and the students do not; the teacher "deposits" knowledge into students, who receive, memorize and repeat. Freire argued this turns learners into passive containers and teaches them to accept reality as given, which preserves oppressive structures.
- Problem-posing education: teacher and students learn together (teacher-student and student-teachers) by investigating problems drawn from learners' own lives, so that the world appears as something that can be changed rather than fixed.
Dialogue, conscientization and praxis
- Dialogue: horizontal communication grounded in love, humility, faith, hope and critical thinking. Education without dialogue, Freire said, treats learners as objects.
- Conscientization (conscientização): developing critical awareness of social and political contradictions and acting against oppression. He distinguished magical, naive and critical consciousness.
- Generative words and themes: literacy circles used words charged with meaning in learners' lives, such as "brick" or "wage", and discussed the reality behind them while learning the letters.
- Praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it. Reflection without action becomes empty verbalism; action without reflection becomes mere activism.
Development of critical pedagogy
In North America Freire's ideas were taken up by Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, Peter McLaren and bell hooks. Giroux argued that reproduction theories of schooling ignore student resistance and agency, and proposed a theory of resistance. Critical pedagogy is often read alongside Illich's deschooling critique, and its emphasis on adult learners' experience shaped lifelong learning and adult education.
Uses and criticisms
- Uses: discussion-based teaching that starts from students' experience, media literacy, citizenship education, community literacy and participatory education in social work and public health. It shares ground with constructivist learning theory, which holds that learners build knowledge themselves.
- Criticisms: the oppressor/oppressed binary can be too simple, and a teacher who defines the "correct" consciousness may simply replace one form of indoctrination with another. Feminist scholars criticized the early work's neglect of gender, and others note that it offers few concrete classroom methods.
References
- Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York: Herder and Herder.
- Freire, P. (1973). Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Seabury Press.
- Giroux, H. A. (1983). Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey.
- Shor, I., & Freire, P. (1987). A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey.