Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Penguin Education)

An essential book for those who wish to understand how education is strongly connected to social inequality and how it is used to dominate the oppressed masses. This book is interesting and relevant not only within the context of Brazilian inequality, but also in a wider context that involves every developing country and perhaps even developed ones.

Summary: the oppressors of the world keep down the oppressed by a bad type of teaching called "banking", the oppressed don't realise this so they don't do anything about it. The oppressors like it because they think they benefit from it, so they don't do anything about it either. Someone needs to make the oppressed realise their situation - then they can help themselves.

I've heard that at its time it was a really important book but the just the ironic unreadableness of it means I can't give it any more than 3 stars.
If you manage to finish it you will have learnt some gems of knowledge and maybe it may change your life a little but if you cut out all the padding and used smaller words this book could be reduced down to a really good leaflet!

Friere's classic book seeks to understand the way that the form in which education is offered can have a profound impact on the effect which that education has. His work comes out of the experience of running literacy classes for peasant people in Latin America. What he found was that traditional types of educational practice reproduced passivity and disinterest, and reinforced in those people's eyes the idea that they could never acquire an education. He sought to offer a different kind of education where the process of learning was linked with an understanding of the dynamics of power and oppression. For Friere education was about the process of "becoming fully human" and coming to a consciousness of the world around you. He found these methods to be extremely successful, as have many educators working with socially marginalised groups who have entered education. At a time when large numbers of "non-traditional" students are entering the 'new university' sector in the UK, this book, offers an important resource to teachers and students alike. Though it has been several years since it was first published, it deserves to come into its own yet again.

I admit that for most this hardly makes light bedtime reading, but it is worth persevering with. If you expect to pick it up, read it and instantaneously know everything there is to know about oppression then you are sadly mistaken, and as far as I understand the book at the moment, the author would not hope for that to be the case.

But this book is so so so worth persevering with. When the Freire's ideas are pondered over within the context of life, living and working with the oppressed, as a subject of oppression, maybe even as an oppressor, this book will be invaluable in the search for living out liberation.

Marxist dialectic - ugh! He's still a great man but I shall restrict myself to reading other peoples' books about him in future.