Pedagogy of the oppressed review and evaluation
Pedagogy of the Oppressed Paulo Freire
A review and evalution of the relevance of this work to contemporary education and youth work
Introduction
This seminal work was published in 1968 in Portuguese. The author, Paulo Freire, was an educationalist working in Brazil, though for political reasons, (he was imprisoned by a military junta in 1964) he spent time in other countries including a period in Geneva where he worked as an adviser on education for the World Council of Churches. This book itself was written while he was in Chile. After his return to Brazil in 1979 he became involved with a socialist political party and eventually came to hold an administrative position as Secretary of Education for São Paulo city.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed is Paulo Freire's most well-known work. In it he presents a theory of education in the context of the revolutionary struggle. While the revolutionary theory is Marxist the context is unmistakably South American. There is more than a hint of Liberation theology. The focus of the educational programmes he describes seem to be aimed primarily at rural peasants rather than the urban poor.

This review follows the structure of the book. The four chapters deal with; i) the revolutionary context, the oppressed and the oppressors, the historical vocation of the oppressed, ii) the method of education favoured by the oppressors, which Paulo Freire calls the banking concept of education, and which he counters with his theory of a problem-posing education, iii) a description of his theories in practice in educational programmes with the rural poor in various South American countries and iv) two opposing theories of cultural action, 'antidialogical' and 'dialogical', the former aiming to suppress critical apprehension of reality the latter favouring the discovery of reality through critical thought and free communication.

Freire's theoretical model is that of dialectical materialism, the idea that the human destiny is to be resolved in a struggle between the two economic classes of owners and labourers (people who sell their labour to capital). We don't accept the idea that this struggle is the only locus where man's destiny is to be resolved. So, in reading this book, our aim is to sift through it and see what remains of value after the dialectical materialism is stripped away. Our second aim is to ask how relevant that remaining theory is to contemporary Western schooling (and youth work).

The context for writing this paper came from a comment in The Dangerous Rise in Therapeutic Education by Ecclestone and Hayes (1) that "And nor do we adopt the safe form of verbal radicalism of liberals who cite the emancipatory rhetoric and beliefs of educators such as Paulo Freire without any recognition that the structural and material conditions that shaped it are starkly different from current conditions". We wanted to see how relevant indeed Freire's work is to our present conditions.