Critical Pedagogy

Development and Details

While Henry Giroux is generally credited with first using the term critical pedagogy, the work of Paulo Freire has had, inarguably, the greatest influence on this body of scholarship. Freire was a Brazilian educator best known for providing literacy education to peasants. His first, and most influential, book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in Portuguese in 1968, was written after a 15-year exile following his arrest for his work in education. This book was a response to the poor living conditions he found in the cities and countryside of his home country and challenged readers to consider the danger of oppressive elements in society and education. He focused specifically on the problem of what he called the banking model, a commonly used pedagogical model in which teachers make ‘deposits' of what they consider to be true knowledge into the minds of students, which are assumed to be empty or without valuable knowledge of their own. Freire argued that the problem with the banking model is that it indoctrinates students to accept what the powerful class accepts to be true or valuable. Instead, students should be taught to be critical thinkers so that they can fully participate in democracy and become their own liberators. This critical thinking and liberation can be achieved, in Freire's view, only through the process of conscientização (or ‘conscientization’ in English), which encourages students to become deeply, socially aware and empowered through acknowledging the social, economic and political realities that affect their lives. The end goal of conscientização is for students to realize that they have the power to change their own realities. Freire posited that conscientização can only be reached through dialogue, an educational strategy that requires humility and the exchange of ideas. The influence of his work on the work of the critical pedagogues who followed him cannot be overstated.

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