Education as the Practice of Freedom

- Paulo Friere

According to him, “the normal role of a human being in and with the world is not a passive one.”
This is due to the fact that humans are not limited only to their biological sphere, but “participate in
the creative dimension” as well. Thus humans can intervene in reality in order to change it. “As men
relate to the world by responding to the challenges of the environment, they begin to dynamize, to
master, and to humanize reality. They add to it something of their own making…” Thus the human
person is a ‘subject’ with the critical capacity to make choices and transform reality. To the extent
one loses the ability to make choices and is subjected to the choice of others, or makes decisions
that are not his own but resulting from some external prescriptions, that person becomes an ‘object’,
and is dehumanized! And “…is crushed, diminished, converted into a spectator, maneuvered by
myths which powerful social forces have created.”1

“The integrated person as Subject. In contrast, the adaptive person is person as Object, adaptation
represents at most a weal form of self-defense. If man is incapable of changing reality he adjusts
himself instead. Adaptation is behavior characteristic of the animal sphere; exhibited by man it is
symptomatic of his dehumanization.2

A ‘massified’ society is one in which the people, after entering the historical process, have been
manipulated by the elite into an unthinking manageable agglomeration. This process is termed
‘massification.’ It stands in contrast to conscientization, which is the process of achieving a critical
consciousness.3

“In alienated societies, men oscillate between ingenuous optimism and hopelessness. Incapable of
autonomous projects, they seek to transplant from other cultures solutions to their problems. But
since these borrowed solutions are neither generated by a critical analysis of the context itself, nor
adequately adapted to the context, they prove inoperative and unfruitful. Finally the older
generations give in to disheartenment and feelings of inferiority. But at some point of time in the
historical process of these societies, new facts occur which provoke the first attempts at self-
awareness, whereupon a new cultural climate begins to form. Some previously alienated intellectual
groups begin to integrate themselves with their cultural reality… Bit by bit, these groups begin to
see themselves and their society from their own perspective; they become aware of their own
potentialities. This is the point at which hopelessness begins to be replaced by hope. Thus, nascent
hope coincides with an increasingly critical perception of the concrete conditions of reality. Society
now reveals itself as something unfinished, not as something inexorably given; it has become a
challenge rather than a hopeless limitation. This new, critical optimism requires a strong sense of
social responsibility and of engagement in the task of transforming society; it cannot mean simply
letting things run on… During the phase of closed society, the people are submerged I reality. As
that society breaks open, they emerge. No longer mere spectators, they uncross their arms, renounce
expectancy, and demand intervention. No longer satisfied to watch, they want to participate. (pp.12-
13)

1
Cf. Paulo Freire, Education: The Practice of Freedom, English translation by Myra Bergman Ramos. Great Britian:
Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1976. pp2-6.
2
Paulo Freire, Education: The Practice of Freedom, English translation by Myra Bergman Ramos. Great Britian:
Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1976. p4.
3
Translator’s note in Paulo Freire, Education: The Practice of Freedom, English translation by Myra Bergman Ramos.
Great Britian: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1976. p8.
This participation disturbs the privileged elite, who band together in self-defense… the new cultural
climate is usually labeled a crisis; they (the elite) create social assistance institutions and armies of
social workers; and… they repel the participation of the people. The elite defend a sui generis
democracy in which the people are ‘unwell’ and require ‘medicine’ – whereas their ‘ailment’ is the
wish to speak up and participate. Each time the people try to express themselves freely and to act, it
is a sign that they continue to be ill and thus need more medicine. In this strange interpretation of
democracy, health is synonymous with popular silence and inaction… As the dominant social class,
they must preserve at all costs the social ‘order’ in which they are dominant. They cannot permit
any basic changes which would affect their control over decision-making. So from their point of
view, every effort to supercede such an order means to subvert it criminally. (pp.13-14)

Conscientization represents the development of the awakening of critical awareness. It will not
appear as a natural byproduct of even major economic changes, but must grow out of a critical
educational effort based on favorable historical conditions. (p19)

The special contribution of the educator to the birth of a new society would have to be a critical
education which would help to form critical attitudes, for the naïve consciousness with which the
people had emerged into the historical process had left them an easy prey to irrationality. Only an
education facilitating the passage form naïve to critical transitivity, increasing men’s ability to
perceive the challenges of their time, could prepare the people to resist the emotional power of
transition. (p32)

An analysis of highly technological societies usually reveals the “domestication” of man’s critical
faculties by a situation in which he is massified and has only the illusion of choice. Excluded from
the sphere of decisions being made by fewer and fewer people, man is maneuvered by the mass
media to the point where he believes nothing he has not heard on the radio, seen on television, or
read in newspapers. He comes to accept mythical explanations of his reality. Like a man who has
lost his address, he is “uprooted”. Our new education would have to offer man the means to resist
the “uprooting” tendencies of our industrial civilization, which accompany its capacity to improve
living standards.(p34)

The traditional form of education “has not been to exchange ideas, but to dictate them; not to debate
or discuss themes, but to give lectures; not to work with the student, but to work on him, imposing
an order to which he has to accommodate. (p38)

Ignorance is not restricted to illiteracy, but includes the masses’ lack of experience at participating
and intervening in the historical process. (p41)

Paulo friere’s new education: “instead of a teacher we had a coordinator; instead of lectures,
dialogue; instead of pupils, group participants; instead of alienating syllabi, contact programmes
that were ‘broken down’ and ‘codified’ into learning units. (p42)

“a major problem in setting up the program is instructing the teams of coordinators. Teaching the
purely technical aspect of the procedure is not difficult; the difficulty lies rather in the creation of a
new attitude – that of dialogue, so absent in our own upbringing and education. The coordinators
must be converted to dialogue in order to carry out education rather than domestication. Dialogue is
an I-Thou relationship, and thus necessarily a relationship between two subjects. Each time the
Thou is changed into an object, an ‘it’, dialogue is subverted and education is changed into
deformation. (p52)
“As an active educational method helps a person to become consciously aware of his context and
his condition as a human being as Subject, it will become an instrument of choice. At that point he
will become politicized. When an ex-illiterate of Angicos, speaking before President Joao Goulart
and the presidential staff, declared that he was no longer part of the mass, but one of the people, he
had done more than utter a mere phrase; he had made a conscious option. He had chosen decisional
participation, which belongs to the people, and had renounced the emotional resignation of the
masses. He had become political.” (p56)

“As men through discussion begin to perceive the deceit in a cigarette advertisement featuring a
beautiful, smiling woman in a bikini (i.e., the fact that she, her smile, her beauty, and her bikini
have nothing to do with the cigarette), they begin to discover the difference between education and
propaganda. At the same time, they are preparing themselves to discuss and perceive the same
deceit in ideological and political propaganda; they are arming themselves to ‘dissociate ideas’.”
(p58)
 EXTENSION OR COMMUNICATION
- Paulo Friere

“Whatever its content – commercial, ideological, or technical, propaganda is always used for
‘domestication’.” (p95)

Domestication = to ‘domesticate’ an animal is to tame it and thereby render it harmless as a

household pet. Used metaphorically, ‘domestication’ is the process whereby groups in power seek
to channel or neutralize the politically hostile forces unleashed by the consciousness oppressed
people have of being exploited by those groups. (footnote)

A common objection to the dialogical process is that “dialogue is not viable. This is because t
results are slow, uncertain and long drawn-out.” “It’s slowness,” say others, “in spite of the results it
may produce, is at odds with the urgent need of the country to stimulate production.” “Thus”, they
affirm emphatically, “this time wasting cannot be justified. In choosing between dialogue and anti-
dialogue, we accept the later as it is more rapid.”…
These questions reveal the false conception that “knowledge is the result of the act of depositing
contents into ‘empty consciousness’.”…
These affirmations express an unjustified lack of faith in the people, an underestimation of their
power of reflection of their ability to take on the true role of seekers of knowledge…
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that all those who make such affirmations have already
tried dialogical experiments with the peasants. Let us also suppose that these experiments were
carried out according tot he principles which lie behind true dialogue. That the group dynamic
sought was not attempted by manipulative techniques and that despite everything dialogue was
difficult, and participation nearly or entirely non-existent. Even in that event should one conclude
that dialogue is not viable and accept that such a strategy is a waste of time? Have we asked,
investigated, and sought to know the reasons why the peasants remain silent and apathetic in the
face of our attempts at dialogue with them? Where else can one seek these reasons but in the
historical, sociological, and cultural conditions which condition them?”…
With no experience of dialogue, with no experience o f participation, the oppressed are often unsure
of themselves. They have consistently been denied their right to have their say, having historically
only the duty to listen and obey…
It will not be with anti-dialogue that the silence of the peasants will be broken, but with a dialogue
in which this very silence and its causes are presented as a problem.”
… Time spent on dialogue should not be considered wasted time. It (dialogue) presents problems
and criticizes, and in criticizing, gives human beings their place within their own reality as true
transforming Subjects of reality… Any delay caused by dialogue – in reality a fictitious delay –
means time saved in firmness, in self-confidence, and in confidence in others, which anti-dialogue
cannot offer.
… Often “there is no time to lose. There is syllabus to be completed.” Once again in the name of
time which is not to be wasted, time is wasted. Young people are alienated by the kind of copybook
thought that is almost entirely verbally narrated… to be passively received and then memorized for
repetition later.
(cf. pp114-123)

“To reject problem posing dialogue at any level is to maintain an unjustifiable pessimism towards
human beings and to life. It is to lapse back into the practice of depositing false knowledge which
anaesthetizes the critical spirit, contributes to the ‘domesticating’ of human beings, and makes
cultural invasion possible.” (p125)

“The ‘technical aid’ conception of education ‘anaesthetizes’ the educatees and leaves them a-critical
and naïve in the face of the world. But the (conscientization) conception of education… challenges
them to think rather than to memorize. The former is rigid, dogmatic and authoritarian. The latter is
mobile and critical… In the first conception education is an instrument of domination. In the second
it is a constant search for liberation. (p150)

This (conscientization) process of education consists of presenting to the students’ ‘codifications’

which are the representations of existential situations. The students decode these in the dialogical
process of learning.
“The codification’ represents an existential situation, a situation ‘lived’ by the peasants… The de-
coding, as an act of knowing allows them to ‘enter into’ their own prior perceptions of their
reality… and progressing toward a new understanding. Through this process, the peasants
progressively recognize that it is they who transform the world…
The first moment in the de-coding process seems to be that in which the educatees begin to describe
the elements of the codification, which make up the whole for them. But in fact there is a moment in
time which precedes this. It is the moment when the consciousness directed towards the codification
apprehends it as a whole. In general, it is in a person’s silence that this occurs. ‘Entering-into’ takes
place in the moment when the consciousness establishes relations with the object of its
intentionality. The descriptive stage is a second moment in the process, when the totality
undergoing the ‘entering-into’ process is split. The splitting does not end the action of apprehending
the codification as a whole. It is a movement in which the Subject as it were glimpses reality from
within. In a third moment in time in time, the Subject in conjunction with others returns to the
previous state of ‘entering-into’ in which to take in the coded situation as a whole. The Subject
prepares itself in this way to see the situation as a structure in which the various elements are found
in a closely-knit relationship. As the critical perception is heightened, and as it becomes impossible
to accept ‘focalist’ explanations of reality, the fourth moment in the de-coding process takes place.
In the fourth moment, the Subject achieves the critical analysis of what is represented by the
codification, and as its content expresses his or her own reality, the criticism is of this.
All the steps mentioned here, which are not so rigidly separated as their description implies, form
part of the conscientization process, which results in men and women being able to achieve their
critical insertion in reality.
(cf. pp159-161)