Critical Consciousness – Spirit of Paulo Friere

By Paddy McColm

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) is a key foundational text in the field of critical pedagogy – the synthesis of educational philosophy and critical theory. The main theme of the work comes from the identification of a dichotomous relationship between educators and students that is based on class structure and the perpetuation of capitalist ideology. Although other representations of this dichotomy are offered throughout the work, the primary theme holds to the scenario that the educators are the purveyors of ruling-class ideology – that of the Oppressor – while the students are in receipt of this knowledge and are at the same time bound by its paradigmatic implications – they are the Oppressed class. Freire wrote as an adult educator in Brazil whose projects had been adopted by the government there but then abruptly abandoned after a military coup in 1964 which saw him imprisoned as…