Paulo Freire

The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a book about ideas, and the ideas presented are those of the author, Paulo Freire. Freire is an educator and a revolutionary. Although Freire states in the preface that he has never been involved in a revolution, he looks upon his role in education as revolutionary and he believes in the ideal of a revolution of the common people. He is interested in the problem of impoverished, oppressed people, and he believes that the problem is systemic, rooted in the struggle between an oppressive upper class bent on maintaining power and an oppressed lower class rendered impotent by oppression.

Freire's ideas are essentially Marxist, but they are also humanist and even democratic, in the sense of believing that all people are equal. Freire views human knowledge in a relativistic way. Instead of saying that the uneducated lack knowledge or are ignorant...