The revolutionary Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire based his critical pedagogy on his work with Brazilian peasants, with whom he sought to work through a process of critical thinking, dialogue and co-operation. His thoughts on helping people to identify and challenge the sources of their oppression in order to develop a sense of self were influenced by an array of thinkers from Hegel to Marx, who inform his pedagogic model.

Please download and read the set texts in advance of the reading group:

• Paulo Freire (1996/1968). Chapter 2. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, pp. 71-86.

• Sartre, Jean-Paul (2002/1939). Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans Joseph P. Fell. In The Phenomenology Reader, Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney ed. London: Routledge.

Chapter 1 forms the groundwork for Freire’s key concepts that he identifies as the roots of ‘oppression’, namely - dehumanization, fear of freedom and the restoration of humanity. He discusses the mutual process of liberation of the oppressor-oppressed dynamic, referencing Hegel’s text Lordship and Bondage and the origin of the concept of self-consciousness. (Although we will focus on Chapter 2 for this session, it is advised that you familiarise yourself with Chapter 1 if you haven’t already.)

Chapter 2 furthers the concept of identifying and challenging the sources of oppression within the ‘banking’ concept of education – where students are treated as depositories of knowledge from the teacher as depositor, negating education and knowledge as a process of inquiry. As in the Hegelian dialectic, the student-teacher relationship is that of ignorance-knowledge, which can only be overcome if one were to adopt a humanizing model of cooperation and problem-posing education.

Alongside this chapter, we will also read Jean-Paul Sartre’s Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology. Originally published in Nouvelle Revue Francaise LII, Jan 1939 (one year after Edmund Husserl’s death). Sartre rejects traditional epistemologies and models of consciousness in favour of Husserl’s intentional theory of consciousness, namely that consciousness is always consciousness of something.