La dialéctica formativa. A propósito de la Pedagogía del oprimido de Paulo Freire

Abstract

In this article I want to expose, as a tribute, some of the most significant points of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, given that this work was published fifty years ago, and in the next year the centenary of the birth of its author will be celebrated. The idea that guides this presentation as a horizon is that the Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a classic work of Latin American philosophy, and therefore I attempt to show that its topics, and the way they are treated, are representative of the oppressive reality and require a situated positioning for their interpretation. In this sense, in the first place I present the work and its author. In the second place, I analyze some of Freire’s sources that have influenced this work and that are relevant from a philosophical point of view. In the third place, I offer a reconstruction of the main concepts (such as the dehumanization, the moments of liberation, the praxis, the relation between the intellectuals and the people or the oppressed, the dialogical and anti-dialogical action, etc.) of chapters I and IV of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed from a political and critical perspective. In the fourth place, I indicate some aspects of the political-pedagogical perspective of chapters II and III, such as the famous banking conception of education and, on the opposite side, the critical dialogue and problematizing conception. In the fifth place, I want to examine in detail what is, in my opinion, the most important subject of this work: the mechanisms of domination that strengthen oppression. These are the fear of freedom, the duality of the oppressed, who carry the oppressor in themselves, the fatalism, the irresistible attraction of the oppressed to become like the oppressor, and the self-depreciation of the oppressed, among others. Finally, I propose a retrospective view according to Freire’s Pedagogy of Hope.