Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Pedagogy of the Oppressed written by educator Paulo Freire, proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society. It was first published in Portuguese in 1968, and was translated by Myra Ramos into English and published in 1970.[1] The book is considered one of the foundational texts of critical pedagogy. Dedicated to what is called "the oppressed" and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between what he calls "the colonizer" and "the colonized". In the book Freire calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model" because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggy bank. However, he argues for pedagogy to treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge. According to Donaldo Macedo, a former colleague of Freire and University of Massachusetts Amherst professor, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a revolutionary text, and people in totalitarian states risk punishment reading it;[2] Arizona's former Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, objected to its use in classrooms.[3] The book has sold over 750,000 copies worldwide.