Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”: a manifesto on education and social change
I am not, by my nature, a revolutionary. I grew up in a relatively conservative family, flanked by a deeply evangelical Christian extended family from which my mother had passively extracted herself, and a silently secular fathers’ side, in which all cultural traditions were sacred as long as they involved food. My family and parents did not teach me to question the status quo, but to work hard within it to survive. And while my schools visibly engaged in progressive causes (mostly the preservation of salmon, trees, and Native land and culture), these were not presented to us as demands for change, but opportunities for my peers and I to superficially depict nature on paper, poster board, and canvas.
And yet, over the past few years, I’ve found myself leading tiny revolutions. I’ve dramatically redesigned our undergraduate program’s admissions process to omit unjust measures like GPAs. I’ve tried to reduce bias in reviewing processes for academic conferences and journals through reviewer training. I’ve given keynotes that call for my academic community to start thinking more critically about CS education, centering social justice in our conception and teaching of computing. And on a daily basis, as a self-advocate, I correct names, fix pronouns, and resist the myriad of other cis-normative gender assumptions built into everyday social interactions and technical infrastructure that threaten to erode my sense of self-worth. My more passive, reluctant acceptance of the status quo is slowly being replaced by an urgent desire for change—and in my role as a senior member of my academic communities, leading that change.
But as I have quickly learned over the past several years, change is not easy, for both structural reasons and emotional ones. How can I achieve change in a way that is lasting, but also meaningful for the people I represent as a leader?
This brings me to Paulo Freire, Brazilian educator and author of the seminal text on critical pedagogy, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I first learned of his work in my recent collaborations with my colleagues in UW’s College of Education, who view Freire’s 1970 work, among others, as a foundational text in their teacher education programs. As soon as I learned of the importance of the book’s idea of critical consciousness, I added it to the top of my reading list. I finally got around to reading the English translation this past week, to celebrate the the book’s 50th anniversary.
Like many deeply theoretical texts, it was not an easy read. Much like my experience reading Papert’s Mindstorms, I found simple and powerful ideas firmly encased in impenetrable language. I was captivated by the scope and depth of ideas in the book, but also shaken by the deep irony of someone theorizing about inclusive learning in ways that felt so exclusionary. In fact, the book is such a deluge of novel language that its foreword even takes the time to defend its parseability, arguing that the truly oppressed have little problem understanding its ideas because it is speaking to their experiences, while those who are oppressors have no lived experience on which to comprehend the book’s radical ideas. As someone who is both oppressed and an oppressor, I found myself reflecting on both positions throughout, taking extensive notes to summarize what I was reading and translating it into a form that I could understand.
Below is what I understand to be the book’s core argument, and how its ideas attempt to explain my dual roles in society as oppressed and oppressor.
Society and power
Freire viewed society as a dynamic, ever-evolving system through which power is woven. That power, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, oppresses, creating social structures, institutions, ideas, and myths that sustain the wealth, way of life, and power of oppressors. This all comes at the expense of the oppressed.
Examples of Freire’s conception of oppression abound in my life. For example, I was born to a family with no wealth, and so my ability to attain wealth has been highly dependent on the public’s investment in my education, my family’s resourcefulness, and our own hard work (whereas those born to wealth often require none of these things to be wealthy). In a sense, this was by design, in that our country’s founders chose capitalism and individualism, and only later, to a less degree, public education. Simultaneously, for as long as I can remember, I was a trans person who internalized all of the gender essentialist shame implied by a world that didn’t discuss gender beyond a binary. This was in some ways unintentional; my family didn’t hate transpeople, but they never said they loved them. That led me to question my worth. Systems of intergenerational wealth and dominant essentialist notions of a gender binary are my oppressors.
Of course, now that I near 40 years of age, and I’ve attained status and power in academia, I am also myself an oppressor. I oversee what we call a “capacity constrained” major at the University of Washington I am responsible for deciding who receives opportunities to learn about information and who does not. These decisions are inherently unjust—everyone at the university deserves to learn what they want—but this ideal is eroded a lack of institutional will, including mine, to correct the financial, space, and time resources necessary to serve every student. This oppression—the inability for students to learn what they want—limits opportunities for our state’s youth. It’s only my personal experience with oppression that compels me to act more justly with my power.
The oppressors and the status quo
Freire argued that oppressors have little incentive to change this status quo, as most changes risk altering their wealth, their power, and their way of life. Their efforts at social change are therefore limited. He argued that in some cases, oppressors use explicit tactics to resist change:
Concepts such as unity, organization, and struggle are immediately labeled as dangerous. In fact, of course, these concepts are dangerous — to the oppressors — for their realization is necessary to actions of liberation. (p. 141)
As someone committed to justice, I sincerely want students to organize against me. And yet, as their oppressor, I find my values of justice in tension with my position. If students unite and organize, I will have to respond to their demands for change. If their demands are well-founded (and they are), the pressure to make change will be even greater. Either I resist their struggle, ignore their humanity, and abandon my values, or I join their struggle against our shared oppressors (my faculty, my Dean, our university, the state of Washington, and ultimately, the voters, who insist on electing representatives that keep our university too resource poor to serve everyone we admit). Therefore, despite knowing that I oppress, and despite not wanting to, students’ unity in struggle represents a threat to my personal workload, stress, and moral reasoning.
In a different way, my gender oppressors (the majority of humanity that insists on gender essentialism) have little incentive to change the status quo, and little awareness that there is one to be changed. To some, acknowledging my existence, and encoding it into law, threatens their conceptions of family, marriage, bathrooms, sports, and biology. When I join my LGTBQ+ folks in struggle, I face that resistance with the recognition that if we win equal rights, the oppressors will lose (albeit much less than we gain).
The disempowered oppressed
Of course, Freire knew that while the oppressed have great incentive to unite and make social change, they often do not. He argued that this was ultimately because they cannot perceive the structures that their oppressors have created and how these structures oppress, or do not perceive that they can change them:
As long as their ambiguity persists, the oppressed are reluctant to resist, and totally lack confidence in themselves. They have a diffuse, magical belief in the invulnerability and power of the oppressor. (p. 64)
As someone oppressed by gender essentialism, I’ve had many such beliefs. First, that my gender couldn’t possibly be right, and that the world couldn’t possibly be wrong. Next, that even if I might be right, I might also be wrong, and couldn’t risk the consequences of being wrong, which might be public shaming, rejection, verbal and physical assault, and even murder. And after I overcame those fears, I still lived with a “magical belief” that there was no way I could change the oppression of gender essentialism.
My students, oppressed by capacity constrained majors, are imprisoned by a similar belief of the university’s invulnerability. They complain on Reddit, they express frustration to me because they know I empathize, and their parents call me in anger. But all of these individuals act as individuals rather than united more powerful force, and are ultimately limited by a learned helplessness.
Critical consciousness
Freire argued that the only way to empower the oppressed is develop their critical consciousness, helping them see the dynamics of their situation and how power is woven through it:
In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. This perception is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for liberation; it must become the motivating force for liberating action.
Freire argued that this awareness of the “limiting situation”, and each individual’s critical judgement of that situation on their life, is key to both recognizing and accepting their own humanity, and to generating the immense motivation necessary for making change through collective action.
As someone oppressed, critical consciousness describes what I gained in my year in therapy prior to coming out as trans. As I shared my warped perceptions of reality (e.g., “I am a disgusting worthless creature”), my therapist questioned those perceptions by reflecting them back to me (e.g., “Are you really a disgusting? Worthless? A creature? Whose ideas are those?”). When I’d faced my “limiting situation” enough, I began to accept that I wasn’t any of those things. I was human, I was deserving of love and acceptance, and it was society’s limiting notions of gender that created my cage. The moment I could see my cage, and name the ideas that had created it, I was passionately motivated to liberate myself, and driven to help liberate others.
Dialogical action
Freire didn’t believe that such critical consciousness was easily developed. In fact, he strongly believed that most forms of education—a term he used broadly—did the exact opposite:
Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. (p. 78)
In my world, this adaption often comes in the form of coping strategies. We give our prospective majors tips and tricks to improve their likelihood of acceptance, as if acceptance is largely merit-based, as opposed to resource based. And Google kindly tells me, “No, you may not change your Gmail address to reflect your new name, that would be too hard for us to engineer. Why don’t you just create a new account and abandon 15 years of data, configuration, and corporate entanglement?”
Rejecting these oppressive pedagogies, Freire believed that the only way to critical consciousness of the oppressed was through dialogue about one’s limiting situation. This did not preclude teachers or teaching, but it did reposition teachers as facilitators rather than authorities, helping the oppressed to perceive the structures and powers that shape their lives:
A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education. Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators. In this way, the presence of the oppressed in the struggle for their liberation will be what it should be: not pseudo-participation, but committed involvement.
This describes exactly what my therapist did. She engaged me trusting dialog, not as an authority, but a listener and facilitator, helping me critically analyze my limiting situation. She did not determine the destination for our dialog, but rather reflected my ideas and created opportunities to name them and see them critically. It was through that process that I unveiled my reality to myself and to her, and began to recreate my understanding of my gender on my own terms, rather than those I was given by an gender oppressive society.
In a way, this critical pedagogy also describes what I try to do as an academic leader, although more superficially. For example, twice a year, I take to Reddit for an AMA, where many of the students who want to join our learning community lurk. I engage in dialog with them. They ask me questions, and rather than declaring authoritative answers, I question students’ assumptions, reflect their beliefs back to them, and share information about the dynamics of capacity constrained majors, reframing admissions as an unjust resource allocation process, rather than one of pure merit. Through this, many come to see that the “limiting situation” of our admissions is not one of mystical, unchangeable forces, but one that is determined by the decisions I and others have made to prioritize resources such as our own time. My aim in this facilitation is to help students develop a collective critical consciousness of the injustices of our system, and come to their own understanding and knowledge of that situation. Maybe some day, this will lead to unity, organization, and collective action, forcing us to change.
Reflections on revolution
In a curious way, Freire’s 50 year-old text is simultaneously a book about revolution, about education, and about educating revolutionaries. It is radical in its view of education as for revolution, but also in its view of learning as necessarily personal and reflective, and its view of teachers as facilitators. With such a broad scope, it is hard to reduce the book to a particular discourse, discipline, or idea.
I did take from it, however, a few practical questions for anyone interested (or scared) of change:
- As a teacher, are you an agent of the status quo or of change? Freire would probably argue that you can’t be both. This book helped me realize that I’ve been both in different contexts. In teaching design and software engineering, I’ve very much been a teacher of the status quo, equipping students for the world that they will enter, as it is. But in teaching foundations of information and user interfaces, I have very much been a teacher of revolution, equipping students to critically question the world that they will enter. What astounds me more is that I didn’t consciously make these choices—I inherited those choices from ideas and texts that I drew upon. I wonder now what new choices I will make, now that I can name what I have done.
- If you are an oppressor, how can you become a facilitator of change? While Freire’s book does not present a roadmap, it does provide clear guidance of where to start: dialog with those you oppress, not to tell them how things are, but to learn how things are, and develop a new joint conception of reality. This book made me realize how infrequently I dialog with the students I oppress, and how I’ve viewed dialog in such limiting, transactional ways. It also helped me see how important public dialog about my gender oppression is to reshaping public conceptions of gender.
- If you are oppressed, can you name your situation? What words do you have for your oppression, and what knowledge do you have of its mechanics? This book made me realize that much of my liberation as a trans person was finding the language necessary for having discourse about my situation, and finding the opportunities to have that discourse with trusted facilitators. If you have no context for that reflection, find one. If you do, invite others to it.
Should you read full book? One short blog post can’t fully capture the spirit, nuance, or historical of Freire’s arguments. So if you want more deeply investigate his positions, you should read his book. But if you’d rather go facilitate a revolution, I wouldn’t fault you :)
