Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) is Paulo Freire’s foundational work on critical education, written during exile from Brazil after the military coup. In it, Freire critiques what he calls the “banking model” of education, where students are treated as passive receptacles for knowledge deposited by teachers. Against this, he proposes a pedagogy of dialogue, mutual recognition, and collective inquiry, in which learning becomes a practice of freedom.
Freire frames education as inseparable from politics, arguing that teaching either domesticates or liberates. By emphasizing consciousness-raising (conscientização), he insists that the oppressed must be subjects in the making of their own histories, not objects in someone else’s narrative.
Images from Caroline Brown and Pesa Agora.
