Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed:" Chapter 1

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“Well guys, we’ve made it to the end of summer in one piece, except for a few campers who are lepers.” – Beth

            A statement in the first chapter of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed really stands out, “Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it.” This suggests that humanity is not lost solely through being oppressed, but rather through the entire process and philosophy of oppression. This is an interesting philosophy to take because then the new question becomes to ask who has been deprived of humanity, those who have had it stripped from them or those who have willingly given it up by becoming oppressors.

            If the goal, according to Freire, is to find a way to counteract oppression (typically through revolution) then that suggests that freedom is a human’s ultimate goal. Freire also makes an interesting point about the ability to gain freedom. It is suggested that every man would want to make each revolution his own private revolution to achieve freedom, but that the reality is that no one man can be free without first arousing the same feelings in other oppressed people and using their help. Furthermore, he elaborates that the individual freedom is the most important because any group, once liberated, can become even more oppressive than the group before it. This has been seen in many places around the world. Freire seems to be suggesting contradiction in the way that humanity seeks for its own independence because it so typically is an independence built in some way upon oppressed peoples.