Pedagogy of The Oppressed - Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire focused two concepts of in his book. However, these 2 concepts - Banking Concept & Dialogics mushroomed from his background and his internalizational beliefs.

Having grown up in the darkest corners of Brazil, he was very much deprived of many luxuries and thus it became on of the critical factors in constructing his state of mind and in his way of seeing education.

The Banking concepts looks at education in a very conventional traditional way where students were seen as objects of receiving and storing information. Teachers were deemed as purely depositing and dictating information which they deemed the students should know. Students were deprived from the inculcation of questioning, thinking and reflecting. Students were known to be in the oppressed state. Here he defined the teacher as the Oppressor and the students as the Oppressed. Take note that this is something Freire does not advocate.

In countering the Banking concept, he introduced Dialogics. This dialogics are actually dialogue between teacher and student which will encourage the student to listen, filter, reflect, question and discuss. This is what true dialogue is about. In this context, there is no clear distinction between a student and a teacher as both parties listen and learn from one another. In advocating true dialogics, a teacher has to instill love, trust, faith and humility in himself to bring out the true meaning of dialogics. This is the act of self consciouness, internalization and humility coming from the teacher. The aim of these dialogics, in this case of Freire, is to achieve liberation so that the Oppressed have the power and knowledge to speak up, express the views, dictate the way they live in, upgrade the social status and break free from oppression.

Many critics have said that Freire's ideas skewed too much on social class and liberation, which is very idealistic. Also to note that when the oppressed becomes knowledgeable and influenced, they will somehow be in a state of the Oppressor and advocate Oppression. So we see a continuous cycle that is inevitable.

In our local context, dialogics were very much applied through collaborative learning, problem-based, project based, TLLM ...

In short, Freire ended his context that "Education is Freedom"..

Personal reflection :
There are so many insights in Freire that I cant write here due to space constraints. And I am so flooded with reflections that I have to organize my thoughts on paper and make sense of everything that I read