Paulo Freire - Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Audiobook)

Tanto Audio, a division of Recorded Books, presents Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 50th Anniversary Edition by Paulo Freire, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, introduction by Donald Maceda, afterward by Ira Shaw, narrated by Dennis Kleinman.

Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition: University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. A day after New York City came up with a thousand-dollar bagel, a local restaurateur unveiled a twenty-seven-thousand-dollar chocolate sundae, setting a Guinness World Record for the most expensive dessert. Reuters Business News, November 7, 2007.

It is indeed an honor to write the introduction to Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book that is unquestionably a classic. As it has throughout this last half century become increasingly more relevant, as the 21st century ushers the world into a very dark new age. Leading intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Zygmunt Bauman, Hiroji Arundhati Roy, Amy Goodman, Thomas Piketty, among others, have wisely and incessantly alerted people around the world of the dire consequences that is denial of climate change, obscene economic inequality, potential nuclear catastrophe, of the far-right power homogeny that, if left unchecked, may potentially result in the end of humanity as we know it. That's not only must an alternative political course be taken, but central to its agenda must also be the development of people's critical awareness of how they are in the world and with the world. A posture which Freire insisted upon and which informed his brilliant and insightful ideals in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

That is to say, Freire's major goal in Pedagogy of the Oppressed was not to propose an innovative methodology which would be antithetical to his critique of formulaic models of education, but to launch the development of an emancipatory pedagogical process that invites and challenges students through critical literacies to learn how to negotiate the world in which they find themselves in a thoughtful and critically reflective manner, so as to expose and engage the tensions and contradictions inherent in the ongoing relations between the oppressor and the oppressed. Thus, the central goal of Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed is to awaken in the oppressed the knowledge, creativity, and constant critical reflective capacities necessary to unveil, demystify, and understand the power relations responsible for their oppressed marginalization and through this recognition begin a project of liberation through praxis, which invariably requires consistent, never-ending critical reflection and action.

Currently, while more and more educators are embracing Freire, many of them, including some liberal and progressives, allow their critical discourse to be betrayed by a lack of coherence between their denouncement of oppressive conditions and their accommodation to dominant structures that created these oppressive structures in the first place. A point to which I will return later.

Approximately a month or so before Paulo Freire's untimely death on May 2, 1997, he and I were walking on New York's Fifth Avenue discussing the obvious contradictions of New York City's opulence that makes it possible for people to flaunt their wealth, for instance, paying twenty-seven thousand dollars for a chocolate sundae in luxurious restaurants amid thousands and thousands of homeless people, including families with children who sleep in cars, under bridges, and in overcrowded shelters. The unpacking of these contradictions was to be the major goal of a course that Freire and I contracted to co-teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in fall 1997. We'd agreed that we would invite students into a critical dialogue about bodies of knowledges not usually emphasized in the academy, such as ethics, the substantivity of democracy beyond the four-year of carnivalesque voting cycle, as we've recently witnessed with Donald Trump's successful campaign for the presidency, and a rigorous study of ideology and its role of reading the word and the world.

During our walk along Fifth Avenue, Freire would frequently ask me if we could stop so he could more emphatically make his points and share his concerns regarding the destructive and oppressive forces of neoliberalism in developed and developing countries. Frequently, we would lean against the wall of imposing buildings to avoid the usual frantic torrent of hurried people who, in a dizzying way, wanted to forge ahead of the other pedestrians. Those perhaps who, on occasion, may have slowed down a bit to satisfy their consumerist curiosity at the unending and seductive store window displays of fashion and the latest technological gadgets, a hallmark of an obsessively consumerist society, a society where money is the measure of all things and profit the primary goal for the oppressors. What is worthwhile is to have more, always more, even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them to be is to have. Page 58.

In retrospect, I now realize that Freire's frequent requests to stop had more to do with the fatigue he was experiencing due to his heart condition, an ailment which he kept very much to himself and about which he seldom complained. While Freire always remained true to his view of history as possibility and maintained an unflinching hope that a less discriminatory, more just, less dehumanizing, and more humane world is possible, he was always critical of the libertarian propaganda that merely implants in the oppressed a belief in freedom, thus thinking to win their trust. Accordingly, Freire believed that the correct method lies in dialogue, a process that unveils the conviction of the oppressed that they must fight for their liberation, which is not a gift bestowed by the revolutionary leadership but the result of their own conscientism.

During this long and engaging walk, Freire shared with me, semi-joking, that the ruling class will never send us to Copacabana for a vacation. If we want to go to Copacabana, we have to fight for it. In this last long walk in dialogue with Freire, he would often reveal his frustration that at times bordered on just ire, as he would often say, relative to the accommodation of some turncoat progressives to the neoliberal theology. Such was the case of his friend, the former president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who, like Freire, had been exiled to Chile by Brazil's brutal neo-Nazi military dictatorship that killed and tortured thousands of Brazilians. In fact, Brazil's experimentation with neoliberalism under the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso exacerbated already cruel conditions and sentenced millions of Brazilians to hunger, human misery, and despair, which in turn contributed to the widening of the economic and educational inequality gap while unleashing more systemic government corruption.

Sadly, most socialist governments in the Western world of that time betrayed their commitment to social justice, equality, and equity by veering toward a neoliberal market-crazed ideology, which not only crushed the hope of people who aspired for a better world but also brought down the governments by enabling obscene corruption, as was the case in Portugal, Spain, and Greece. In the latter country, the Socialist Party, led by Prime Minister George Papandreou, allowed corruption to reach epidemic proportions to the point where, for example, the PASOK party could buy votes by offering free airfare tickets to Greek citizens living in the United States who are willing to fly to Greece for the promise of voting for the Socialists. Such acts smack of the tactics that Western democracies routinely criticize as the fraudulent election rigging they say plague those countries pejoratively termed third-world banana republics. To a degree, socialist governments in multiple continents fell from power due to obscene scandals of corruption, which in general gave rise to center-right and far-right governments. Greece is an exception where the radical left Syriza party won the election that have now been elected by dissatisfied and disenfranchised voters, voters who became the victims of the austerity measures imposed by neoliberal policies.

Freire also did not hesitate to demonstrate his just ire by denouncing the critical posture of many facade liberals and some so-called critical educators who often find refuge in the academy by hiding their addiction to obscene consumerism while at the same time attacking in their written critical discourses the market theology of neoliberalism. Too often, these facade liberals and so-called critical educators' tastes and ways of being in the world and with the world remain, according to Freire, wedded to the very neoliberal market solutions that they denounce at the level of written critical discourse. In their day-to-day practices, these facade liberals and so-called critical educators often betray the action required by praxis by fossilizing their purported political project into an obscure discursive criticality that begs to move beyond the always postponed arrival of action, that is, action designed to transform the current perniciousness of the neoliberal godification of the market into new democratic structures that lead to equity, equality, and authentic democratic practices.

In other words, many facade liberals and so-called critical educators boast of their leftist credentials by wearing their proclaimed Marxism on their sleeve, usually only expressed in written discourse or in the safety of the academy, and sometimes feel the urge to further boast that, for example, their radicalism is beyond Marx's proposals to the degree that they are authentically more Maoist in their political orientation, a posture they believe to be even more radical. As a consequence, leftist labels in the academy become an appropriated, exoticized political and cultural currency where to be a Marxist in residence in the Ivory Tower bestows status but is little more than a chic brand. In reality, the epitome of consumerism sustained by transactions occurring in a merely symbolic register of names and labels that are otherwise vacuous in substance. In essence, the academic branding of Marxists by some critical educators turns ethical and political action into a spectacle and leftist viewpoints into de facto commodities. As commodities, these self-escribed radical positions and labels are emptied out of their progressive content to the extent that they are decoupled from principled action, a decoupling that remains fundamental in the reproduction of the market theology of neoliberalism, where collective social engagement based on critical thinking is discouraged and zealous, cutthroat competition is rewarded.

The insidious process of decoupling critical discourse and action legitimizes not walking the talk. It affords the proclaimed Marxists in residence the opportunity, for instance, to claim to be anti-racist while turning anti-racism into a lifeless cliché that does not provide pedagogical spaces to critique white supremacist ideologies. In this process, their progressive stances are often co-opted, mobilized only to the degree that they denounce racism at the level of written critical discourse, all the while reaping privileges from the cemented institutional racism which they willfully refuse to acknowledge and engage in action to dismantle. Hence, these Marxists in residence also ignore the political and systemic impact of racism that was amply witnessed in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and which became more frightening with each calculated pronouncement by Donald Trump used to ignite white rage against people rather than against the state for conditions caused in large part by the neoliberal policies that the enraged white working class ironically embrace.

The election of Trump as president has, in essence, unveiled the lie behind the post-race slogan which proclaimed that racism is over, a slogan that took shape with the election of Barack Obama, the first black president. Furthermore, the very failure to acknowledge the ravages of racism while enlarging ghettos, normalizing the school-to-prison pipeline made up mostly of blacks and Latinos, and expanding human misery as a byproduct of racism constitutes in itself a racist act. It is racism when these proclaimed Marxists and Maoists in residence proselytize against racism as an abstract idea and resist the intellectual and societal pressure to translate this abstract idea at the level of written critical discourse into action that would racially democratize society and its institutions. How racially democratic are, for example, the universities when most departments remain practically all white, lest for token professors of color and a minuscule number of non-white students? For instance, does race play a role in the almost non-existence of African Americans in Classics departments, both at the faculty and student levels, or is it the case that African Americans are genetically wired to have no vocation toward the study of Classics and are consequently averse to classical studies?

More pernicious yet is when these self-proclaimed leftists in residence engage in the social construction of not seeing the ingrained racism in their statements and in their behavior. For example, take the case of a proclamation made by a liberal white professor working in an urban university that prides itself for its diversity: "We just want these black kids to learn how to learn." Such a remark not only points to a rigidly ethnocentric notion of the act of knowing, as insightfully argued by Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but it also shows that individuals making such statements remain shackled by white supremacist ideology that has incultated them in myths and beliefs that children from certain races and cultures are innately incapable of learning until they receive the recipes taught to the poor and the oppressed by educators who often carry in their leather Gucci bags or briefcases these pre-packaged lesson plans to teach, for example, African Americans what they cannot already know because they have never even had the capacity to acquire knowledge until then. The very survival of the cruel conditions in which these non-white children have been condemned to live demonstrates that they know very well how to learn in order to stay alive in circumstances of savage inequalities, as pointedly described by Jonathan Kozol in several of his books. Would the daughters and sons of these Marxists in residence educators survive the ravages of such entrenched social inequalities and remain unscathed while excelling in the required high-stakes testing? Probably not. Hence, the very survival from the most horrendous forms of racism, segregation, gender, and class discrimination not only points to a high level of intelligence of children who are ghettoized but would add credence to Howard Gardner's notion of multiple intelligences beyond the Western-centric notions of intelligence.

The just ire that Freire demonstrated in his last dialogue with me when he denounced some critical educators who inhabit silk underwear was in turn channeled by him as a creative force toward the end of his life, both in his writings, as exemplified by his last book, Pedagogy of Freedom, and in his many later dialogues and lectures throughout the world. Freire correctly opposed the pseudo-critical educator whose political project of social justice is betrayed by intellectual incoherence and a crass careerism fueled by what Freire often called the ethics of the market under neoliberalism. In other words, the intellectual incoherence of many critical educators ultimately defines and confines their political project into mere neoliberal crass careerism.

However, it is important to point out that Freire's critique with the crass careerist does not mean that he was against the pursuit of a career. There is a marked difference between having a career that is not instrumentalist and which is situated within a political project that strives for a world that, as Freire would often say, is more round, less unjust, and more democratic, and a careerist whose political project is his or her own individual advancement, marked by sophistry and obscene greed, which almost always sacrifice equity, equality, and authentic democracy. That is to say, the careerist's political project is ultimately his or her career, and to save his or her career, the crass careerist will fail to initiate or will abandon dialogue, reflection, and communication and will fall into using slogans, communiques, monologues, and instructions. Superficial conversions to the cause of liberation carry this danger. The danger lies, for example, in the disarticulation of writing about hunger within the confines and safety of the academy and the actual experience of hunger, or in making the sloganized proclamation "I'm a Maoist" while refusing to degutify and allowing oneself to remain shackled to bourgeois values that undergird much of the neoliberal project and which deem the appropriation and accumulation of things as more important than the expansion of humanity.

As Freire insightfully argued in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, "The liberation of the oppressed is a liberation of women and men, not things." Accordingly, while no one liberates herself or himself by her or his own efforts alone, neither is she or he liberated by others. Liberation, a human phenomenon, cannot be achieved by semi-humans. In any attempts to treat people as semi-humans, as in the case of white supremacy and patriarchy, only dehumanizes them. A semi-human whose only concern is things and not people can never, nor is he or she willing to, offer a form of literacy that leads to liberation and emancipation. Quite to the contrary, a semi-human who pursues the process of othering human beings so as to devalue and typecast them has already lost his or her humanity to the extent that he or she cannot see humanity in others.

Accordingly, for Freire, literacy was not a means to prepare students for the world of subordinated labor or careers, but a preparation for a self-managed life. And self-management could only occur when people have fulfilled three goals of education: self-reflection, that is, realizing the famous poetic phrase "know thyself," which is an understanding of the world in which they live in its economic, political, and equally important, its psychological dimensions. Specifically, critical pedagogy helps the learner become aware of the forces that have hitherto ruled their lives and especially shaped their consciousness. The third goal is to help set the conditions for producing a new life, a new set of arrangements where power has been, at least in tendency, transferred to those who literally make the social world by transforming nature and themselves.

Because Freire was often criticized for not critically addressing issues of race relations in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, one of his major goals in the course that we were going to co-teach at Harvard Graduate College of Education in 1997 was to expand our dialogue titled "A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and Race," which has been published by Harvard Educational Review. In this dialogue, Freire, in a self-critique, explained why class oppression preoccupied him more than race relations when he wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Given the historical context that shaped oppression in Brazil, an oppression experienced by Freire and his family who lost their middle-class status and had to move from the city and live in the poor, lower-class area named Morro de Saudade, Freire's denunciation of oppression did not constitute a mere intellectual exercise that we often find among many facade liberals and pseudo-critical educators. His intellectual brilliance and courage in denouncing the structures of oppression were rooted in a very real and material experience.

As he recounts his childhood and adolescent years living in poverty in Morro de Saudade, the experience of hunger as a child of a formerly middle-class family that had lost its economic base enabled Freire to, on the one hand, identify and develop solidarity with the children from the poor outskirts of town and, on the other hand, to realize that in spite of the hunger that gave us solidarity, in spite of the bond that united us in our search for ways to survive, our playtime, as far as the poor children were concerned, ranked us as people from another world who happened to fall accidentally into their world. It is the realization of such class borders that led invariably to Freire's radical rejection and enunciation of a class-based society. Although some strands of postmodernism would dismiss Freire's detailed class analysis in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it is an enormous mistake, if not academic dishonesty, to pretend that we now live in a classless world. Although Freire understood very well that material oppression and the affective investments the oppressed groups make to the logic of domination cannot be grasped in all of their complexity within a singular logic of class struggle, he consistently argued that a thorough understanding of oppression must always take a detour through some form of class analysis.

At the same time, a postmodern posture that over-celebrates identity politics not only leads to essentialism but also contains within it seeds of oppression. Take, for example, the progressive Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren's claim to be American Indian, even though she's many generations removed from American Indian ancestry and grew up as white and was totally removed from the oppressive life of reservations. Senator Warren's opportunistic use of the race card to make herself more attractive as a candidate for a professorial position at Harvard Law School and Harvard University's use of her employment as proof of its commitment to diversity only demonstrates how dominant institutions rely on tokenism to reinforce their exclusionary policies that do not welcome the presence of non-white groups in their institutions other than as token representatives. In reality, the opportunistic use of racial or gender cards defangs the very spirit of the Civil Rights Act. It also provides segregationists and those beholden by patriarchy and white supremacy with ammunition to dismiss and criticize the anti-discriminatory laws that discourage exclusion on the base of race or gender.

Until Freire's death, he courageously denounced the neoliberal position that promotes the false notion of the end of history and the end of class, in contrast to the idea that society has reached the endpoint of its evolution, thus emptying history of its meaning. Freire always viewed historical awareness as an ongoing condition for human betterment, opening up the possibility of a better future. When recognizing that history is time filled with possibility and not inexorably determined, that the future is problematic and not already decided fatalistically, in light manner, Freire continued to reject any false claim to the end of class struggle. Where is he continually revised his earlier class analysis, he never abandoned or devalued class as an important theoretical category in our search for a better comprehension of conditions of oppression.

In the long dialogue we had during his last visit to New York, in fact, the last time we worked together, he restated this view that although one cannot reduce everything to class, class remains an important factor in our understanding of multiple forms of oppression. While post-structuralists may want to proclaim the end of class analysis, they still have to account for the horrendous human conditions that led, as Freire recounted, a family in Northeast Brazil to scavenge for food in a landfill and take pieces of an amputated human breast with which they prepared their Sunday lunch.

Even though I experienced the great good fortune of working with Paulo for 16 uninterrupted years, first translating many of his books into English and later collaborating with him on other book projects, I have read and re-read Pedagogy of the Oppressed so many times. With each re-reading of this book, I gain new insights in my understanding of our current world, a world that is plagued by manufactured wars, expanding human misery, and obscene greed. Without falling into false modesty, I've always felt I understood Freire's leading ideas, the subtleties, and the nuances that characterize Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but I did not fully capture the layered complexity of Freire's philosophy until I visited Morro de Saudade, an impoverished community on the outskirts of Recife in Northeast Brazil.

As mentioned earlier, Freire and his family had moved there after the great economic crash of the 1930s that unceremoniously yanked the middle-class rug from under Freire's family. No longer able to afford housing in Recife as the economic situation worsened, Freire's family moved to a modest house in Morro de Saudade, where Paulo, his siblings, his parents, and other close family members took refuge. I immediately began to see new dimensions in the horizon of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As I entered the modest house, its dark, small rooms without an indoor bathroom and with non-existing ceilings, I began to put into perspective the traumas that must have overwhelmed Freire as he came face to face with a new form of schooling called life, life created and sustained by a cruel system that uncaringly relegated millions and millions of Brazilians to half-citizenship and sub-humanity.

I also took a short walk along a shrinking river where Freire and his friends used to take baths alongside the neighborhood women who would religiously wash clothes on a daily basis. The sun was the only towel available to Freire to dry his skin. Freire learned quickly that a psychological class wall enveloped his new reality as he began to get acquainted with his new friends and neighbors. Their humanity enabled him to empathize with his aunt Natácia's preoccupation with keeping their poverty hidden and to understand why the family would not let go of Lourdes's German piano or his father's neckties, even when his father was doing manual chores in the workshop. But Freire soon learned that his family's clinging to middle-class markers and mores did little to alleviate their pain, the pain almost always treated with disrespectful language. As his mother, who had been denied groceries on credit since the family was never able to pay, would leave the shop to look for another one where new offenses were almost always added to these already suffered.

In an effort to protect his mother from such daily blows to her dignity, Freire would often wander into the backyards of neighbors to steal chickens that would frequently be that day's only family meal, since by then all of the town's merchants had refused to grant his family credit. To protect his family's middle-class sensitivities, Freire would euphemize his backyard thefts as incursions into a neighbor's yard. Freire's mother was a Christian Catholic who no doubt viewed such incursions as violations of her moral principles, but she must have realized that her alternatives were either to reproach him for a day severely and make him return the still warm chicken to their neighbors, or to prepare the fowl as a special dinner. Her common sense prevailed. Still silent, she took that chicken, walked across the patio, entered the kitchen, and lost herself in doing a job she had not done in a long time. Freire's mother knew that stealing a neighbor's chicken was morally wrong and constituted a crime, but she also knew that there wasn't an a priori crime committed by society. The manufacturing of hunger, as Freire recounted, the problem of hunger created by social inequality, was real and concrete hunger that had no specific date of departure. On the contrary, our hunger was the type that arrives unannounced and unauthorized, making itself at home without end in sight, a hunger that, if it was not softened, as ours was, would take over our bodies, molding them into angular shapes. Legs, arms, and fingers become skinny, eye sockets become deeper, making the eyes almost disappear. Many of our classmates experienced this hunger, and today it continues to afflict millions of Brazilians who die of its violence every year. It is against this form of violence that Freire angrily and compassionately wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In fact, I honestly believe Pedagogy of the Oppressed would not have been written without Freire's class dislocation and the experience of hunger.

The reading and re-reading of Freire's insights after I visited his humble home in Morro de Saudade, both his denunciation of dehumanizing conditions and his announcement that change is difficult but possible, unleashed in me a complex of emotions wrought with a reconfirmation of a tremendous loss in his death, a loss infused with anguish, doubt, expectation, and sadness at the same time. With each new publication of Freire's unpublished work and publications about his theories regarding the liberation of women and men, we can celebrate in joy Freire's return, as he over and over again energizes and challenges us to imagine a world that is less cruel, more just, and more democratic.

However, as Freire so energetically insisted in his writings, the announcement of a more just and humane world must always be preceded by the denunciation of the dominant forces that generate, inform, and shape discrimination, human misery, and dehumanization. Hence, the denunciation of oppressive societal forces cannot be done through mere instructional methodologies that anesthetize and domesticate the mind through banal information transmission that Freire termed as "banking education." Yet Freire's condemnation of mere methods continues to be misappropriated and distorted. There is deep irony in some of academics' efforts to interrogate whether Freire's methods work and to apologetically provide examples of Freirean schools that do work, as Howard Gardner did in a panel discussion on Freire with Noam Chomsky and Bruno de La Chise, which took place at Harvard in May 2013 as part of an Ask With Forum, thus vulgarizing Freire's intellectual contributions and his major theories.

To reduce Freire's leading theoretical and philosophical ideas to a method in such an overt manner is to demonstrate that Gardner's touted theory of multiple intelligences is susceptible to narrow-mindedness, particularly when Freire's theories are dismissed as irrelevant, a dismissal clearly shaped and controlled by ideology. Therefore, the demand posed by Gardner to Noam Chomsky, Bruno de La Chise, and the forum's audience to provide concrete examples which demonstrate that Freire's method itself works, hides more than it elucidates. The real question regarding Freire's ideas and theories in Pedagogy of the Oppressed is whether it is correct to view Freire's literacy proposals as mere instructional methods. As Noam Chomsky responded to Gardner during the forum, according to Chomsky, Freire used literacy as a means to consciousness-raising. Simply put, Chomsky was urging educators in general, and critical educators in particular, to move beyond the fetishization of methods that so paralyze thinking, innovation, and creativity among North American educators, a phenomenon insightfully analyzed by Lilia I. Bartolomé in her classic article "Beyond the Methods Fetish: Towards a Humanizing Pedagogy," published by the Harvard Educational Review.

Consequently, Freire has to be viewed and understood beyond his literacy and structural methods by critically apprehending his notion of conscientization, a concept that is often misunderstood even by critical educators who claim to be Freirean and conveniently dismissed by educators whose interest is to appropriate Freire's dialogical method, disarticulated from Freire's major theoretical goal, thus reducing him to a mere instructional methodologist.

In addition to the methods fetish of many educators, one of the challenges of defining Freire's original concept conscientização lies in the difficulty of pronouncing a Portuguese word. Portuguese speakers also experience very difficulty pronouncing it, and also in the fact that most definitions of this insightful concept rarely do justice to what Freire had in mind. Freire always insisted that before we even attempt to define conscientização, we need to adhere to the essence of this concept and ask: "What definition, against what, for whom, and against whom?" If we begin to answer these questions, we soon realize that even for many followers of Freire's thinking, conscientização presents a certain difficulty beyond the hurdles of its correct pronunciation. Being a term that Freire, at least initially, refused to have translated into English by simply stating, "I refuse. Why not accept this term? I do not have to accept stress, but I have. Why do you not accept conscientização?" Freire eventually agreed to have his term translated into the approximate English translation, conscientization.

For Freire, the demystification of conscientization would necessarily have to include the reclaiming of the oppressed's own words as a process of coming to voice, which he viewed as the fundamental theme of the Third World, implying a difficult but not impossible task for its people, which is the conquest of its right to voice, of the right to pronounce its word. It is this right that the oppressed need to reclaim in order to speak their word, the right to be themselves, to assume direction of their destiny. It is this right that the dominant forces go to great lengths to suffocate, seeking to sequester the words of the oppressed, words that unveil the mechanism of oppression and are distorted or repressed.

As always suggests, in a society that revels in bouts of historical and social amnesia, in which it is much easier for the language of politics and community to be stolen and deployed like a weapon so as to empty words such as democracy, freedom, justice, and the social state of any viable meaning, the sequestration of language by dominant forces of oppression and even by liberal educators who proselytize about empowering minorities and giving them voice when they themselves represent the majority is evident in the overuse and abuse of euphemisms in academic discourses and mainstream media. Euphemism is a form of language that not only mystifies and distorts reality; it is also a much-used technique by dominant forces, the media, political pundits, the educated class, to distract attention from the real issues that ail society, such as the obscene widening of the income gap between the rich and the poor, the pernicious shrinking of the middle class, and the generalized alienation of the dispossessed.

The suppression or distortion of language is the tactic that, according to Arundhati Roy, also appears as usurping words and deploying them like weapons, using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant. Has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of czars and the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalize their detractors, deprive them of a language to voice their critique. When the technique of sequestration fails to work, the dominant forces engage in more Draconian measures, as was evident when a Tucson public schools official in Arizona banned Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed from classrooms because, according to a superintendent of the Arizona Department of Education, "we should not be teaching kids that they are oppressed." In other words, conscientization as a process to acquire the necessary critical thinking tools so that students, instead of internalizing their oppression, understand how institutions of power work to deny them equality of treatment, access, and justice, is not a goal of Tucson public schools, where courses that deal with issues such as race relations, ethics, and ideology are banned, and teachers are encouraged to promote the pedagogy of big lies through which students, in this case, lower-class Mexican-American students, can be more easily domesticated.

The almost total lack of public outcry in the United States regarding the censorship of books and the heisting of language that names reality in order to contest oppression may prove to be the Keystone of our undoing. I'm amazed to witness academics engage in euphemisms as they aggressively object to any discourse that both fractures the dominant language and lays bare the veiled reality in order to name it. It is still more amazing to witness educators who claim to be Freirean fail to see the obvious impossibility of the oppressed apprehending, through the process of conscientization, a deepened consciousness of their situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation, while these liberal educators remain complicit in the erasure of language, an act that empties out, for example, the meaning of the term "oppressed." Many of these liberals eagerly embrace euphemisms such as "disadvantaged," "disenfranchised," "economically marginal," "minority," and "at risk," among others, to refer to the oppressed. But in doing so, obfuscate the true historical conditions that explain the here and now, which constitutes the situation within which the oppressed are submerged, from which they emerge, and in which they intervene to denounce and confront their oppressors in the pursuit of full humanity.

The sequestration of language denies people the possibility to understand the dialectical relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. If you haven't oppressed, you must have an oppressor. Thus, language is not only a site of contestation; it is also an indispensable tool for a critical, reflexive demystification process that is central to conscientization, a process which Freire refuses to vulgarize and reduce to mere methods to be consumed by the so-called First World progressive educators who, in many instances, remain chained to the mystification of methods and techniques, and indeed a reduction of conscientization to certain methods and techniques used in Latin America for adult literacy. Hence, Freire's major goal, as I'd mentioned earlier, was not to develop a literacy methodology to be used universally with oppressed people of the world. His main goal was to use literacy and the subsequent methods he developed for particular groups of adult learners to lead people to conscientization. In other words, no matter where we come from, all of us are involved in a permanent process of conscientization as thinking beings in a dialectical relation with an objective reality upon which we act. What varies in time and space are the contents, methods, and objectives of conscientization. When human beings become aware and make themselves capable of revealing their act of reality, knowing it, and understanding what they know.

Another critical misunderstanding of conscientization is to view the concept as a kind of tropical exoticism, a typically Third World entity. People speak of conscientization as an inviable goal for complex societies, as though the Third World nations were not complex in their own way. This false dichotomy between the so-called First World and Third World represents yet another sequestration of language designed to lead to a form of mystification, a distraction that functions as a reproductive mechanism designed to create a center or a core of romanticized Eurocentric values while relegating other cultural expressions to the margins.

The current attacks on Islam and on Muslims in general are a case in point where Western media, political pundits, and academics often totalize religio-cultural extremists and generalize the extremism to all Muslims, framing them all as potential terrorists. At the same time, we conveniently ignore extremists of the West like evangelist Pat Robertson, who camouflages his bigotry and his constant attacks on women. Take, for example, Robertson's statement that "the feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women; it's about a socialist anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians." If one substituted Robertson with a Taliban cleric and switched the words socialist and capitalism, the Western political class, the media, and other non-Muslim religious leaders would have a field day attacking the primitive nature of Islam and its radicalism, while ignoring the diversity within the Muslim world that consists of billions of people from different cultures, classes, and ethnicities.

Hence, institutional mechanisms in the West and in much of the world function by and large to contain and maintain the so-called primitive Third World cultures that are often silenced by the incessant speech of the dominant culture so as to make these silent sections of cultures invisible or at least outside the parameters of public discussion or debate. Engaging Freire's conscientization process could help reveal the West's pension for engaging in the construction of invisibility to keep the submerged cultures invisible and also to hide the West's own extremism, which is no less terroristic than Muslim extremism. How else would we characterize the American savagery in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam that often extended to the utmost depravity: gratuitous torture, killing for target practice, slaughter of children and babies, slaughter that pro-life advocate Pat Robertson and his ilk conveniently refuse to address in ethical and political terms?

Our inability or unwillingness to engage a conscientization process is why we can easily accept Pat Robertson's blatant lies about feminism, even as we embrace the false dichotomy encoded in the distinction between First World and Third World contexts, an ideological distinction that primarily functions to reproduce the Western narrative of Third World savage and primitive cultures, which in turn call for the West to exercise its moral responsibility to slaughter children and babies in order to save them from themselves, a slaughter justified by an American Military Superior in the Marines as "tough, they grow up to be VC Viet Cong." Too many Americans also remain silent when drones and smart bombs kill women and children indiscriminately in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while the United States presents itself as an advocate for women's rights and freedoms.

Western media, political pundits, and most academics also remain silent with respect to the West's extremism, as revealed in the classic former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's response of 1996 to the reported 500,000 Iraqi children casualties of the sanctions of mass destruction: "It was worth it." Social construction of not seeing with respect to the United States foreign policy is not all that different from the phenomenon of some academics and researchers who are busily writing grant proposals to study and promote, for example, literacy in Haiti while ignoring the tens of thousands of Haitians in the United States who are struggling and dropping out of the public schools that often surround their universities.

The devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the subsequent cholera epidemic that was brought by the United Nations troops has put Haiti on the radar of Western countries whose response has exemplified a kind of paternalism turned into charitable racism, which, according to Albert Memmi, is a consubstantial part of colonialism. White academics and researchers go to Haiti to collect data and anthropologize the suffering Haitians who are the subjects of their study, returning to their U.S. campuses to tell exotic stories to their students and colleagues, publish their research studies, and obtain tenure, while tens of thousands of Haitians remain in Haiti, sentenced to slum conditions and making cookies out of mud to trick their stomachs that they are full and therefore not hungry. Further, these anthropological tourists that go to Haiti to study Haitians and collect data often discriminate against Haitian students who take their classes in the United States.

I remember asking a white American professor who often went to Haiti as part of research projects sponsored by federal grants in the 1980s why he did not devote some of his time working with the thousands of Haitians who surrounded his university. His response was honest, if not pathetic: "The funding agencies do not find Haitians in the U.S. sexy enough." Had this liberal First World academic engaged in an honest and rigorous conscientization process, he would probably not have remained so comfortable making a career off the trials of millions of Haitians who remained chained to inhumanity, savage inequality, and human misery. Had he been able to make a linkage between his career risk goals and the reproduction of oppression in Haiti, largely supported by U.S. foreign policy, he would probably have detected the pathology of his honest answer. This researcher might have developed a deeper comprehension of Haitians and understood that their current life conditions had been shaped in large part by American interventionist policies through invasions of Haiti, its occupation, and the perpetual support for right-wing dictators who work largely against the interests of the vast majority of Haitians.

By engaging in a form of honest reflection and self-interrogation, the white American researcher would possibly have realized that his political project is first and foremost the advancement of his career. Had this First World academic made these linkages, he would likely have denounced the almost sainthood status bestowed upon former President Clinton and former President Bush Sr. for their humanitarian work in Haiti after the deadly earthquake. This white American educator might have come to see that both former presidents were partly responsible, through their foreign policies, for the sea of human misery that predated the earthquake. What the earthquake did was both exacerbate the sub-human conditions to which tens of thousands of Haitians were relegated and make them public, in the same manner that Hurricane Katrina exposed the structural racism and dehumanization of African Americans in New Orleans.

Notwithstanding the horror of the Haitian earthquake, the First World liberal educator would probably refuse to pay $1,320 a night per room in a luxury five-star Royal Hotel overlooking the shanty towns' shacks and tents, and which was constructed with $7.5 million from the World Bank's International Finance Corporation and $2 million from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, while this obscene display of First World opulence, if not decadence, marked the humanitarian generosity of First World countries. Over one million Haitians displaced by the earthquake remain homeless and continue to exist in sub-human conditions, living in shacks and tents without plumbing or running water, without electricity, and without much to feed themselves and their families.

Had the First World educator engaged in the process of conscientization, he would possibly be able to detect the false piety demonstrated by former presidents Bush and Clinton as they were greeted by thousands of Haitians in Port-au-Prince. Former President Bush's condescending disdain for Haitian people became quite evident on YouTube all over the world when he tried to wipe his hand after shaking it with a Haitian man in the crowd. On former President Clinton's shirt, the conscientization process might have lifted the veil of privilege that the "Blands" enjoy in Haiti. These are the white or outsiders, foreigners who fall in love with the exotic narrative of Haiti that they create to fulfill their colonial desires and meet their own needs, a narrative that has, in many respects, little to do with the reality that Haitians experience on a daily basis as they try to survive.

In many ways, these First World "Blands," regardless of their political orientation, fail to understand how their brand of intervention is nothing like Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is animated by authentic humanist, not humanitarian, generosity. That presents itself as pedagogy of humankind. Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interests of the oppressors, and egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism, and makes the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism itself, maintains and embodies oppression. It is an instrument of dehumanization. Humanitarianism, as the embodiment of dehumanization, is best exemplified by the Red Cross, a charitable organization which collected over $400 million to alleviate the suffering of tens of thousands of Haitians displaced and made homeless by the earthquake and has as its signature the building of a luxury hotel costing millions of dollars, while over 1 million Haitians remain homeless.

While lavish hotels can provide stress relief for the army of NGOs and other humanitarian help as they celebrate happy hour with other "Bland" friends and co-workers who command First World salaries, tens of thousands of Haitians continue to struggle to put a roof over their heads and scavenge enough to eat so they can reclaim their ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human. While foreign workers maintain the material conditions to access five-star restaurants and health care services, including psychological therapy, most Haitians displaced by the 2010 earthquake yearn to know what it means to be fully human.

Take, for example, Amy Valencia's characterization of Mac McClelland, a human rights reporter for Mother Jones, who acquired PTSD like it was a cold virus by watching a recently raped Haitian woman collapse at the chance of citing her attacker. Thus traumatized, McClelland published an account of the home therapy she elected, arranging for a friend to rape her with the maximum verisimilitude similar to their relationship would allow. While McClelland's choice of therapy for the exposure to violence in her humanitarian work in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti smacks of narcissism on steroids, in varying degrees, it also represents the embedded egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism of the oppressor's humanitarian interventions packaged as charitable gifts, which in turn encapsulate the self-centered benevolence of the First World Order.

These charitable interventions have not only been for the most part huge failures, as in the case of Haiti, but First World humanitarians fail to understand that liberation comes only through a process of resolution of tensions and contradictions in the relation between the oppressor and the oppressed. Hence, if the goal of the oppressed is to become fully human, they do not achieve their goal by merely reversing the terms of the contradiction, by changing poles. By the same token, the oppressor cannot expect to liberate the oppressed by reversing the pole so as to experience directly the violence of oppression. This is the continuation of the oppressor's need to appropriate even the oppressed suffering, as McClelland's case seems to indicate. McClelland's choice of therapy is tantamount to the phenomenon of many.

Liberal educators who feel that they need to make a public statement regarding their divestment from the dominating bureaucracy from which they've always reaped benefits by moving their families into the ghettos temporarily until their own kids have to go to school, according to Freire. Liberation is never about the democratization of violence, human misery, and obscene poverty. Liberation that resolves the contradictions between the oppressor and the oppressed can only do so by the appearance of the new man and woman, neither oppressor nor oppressed, but man and woman in the process of liberation.

The inability to resolve the contradictions between the oppressor and the oppressed, to make linkages, and to become aware of the obvious, as Freddie would say, is directly related to what Freire identified in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed as the failings of a prevalent banking model of education. A process through which education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues, communicates, and makes deposits, while the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the banking concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filling, and storing the deposits.

The banking model of education is largely at work in instrumental literacy programs for the poor, in the form of a competency-based skills banking approach to schooling, and even through higher education, the highest form of instrumental literacy for the rich, acquired in the form of professional specialization. However, despite their apparent differences, the two approaches share one common feature: they both prevent the development of critical thinking that enables one to read the world critically and to understand the reasons and linkages behind what may appear seemingly obvious but remains ill understood.

Literacy for the poor, through the banking concept of education, is by large characterized by mindless, meaningless drills and exercises given in preparation for multiple-choice exams and writing gobbledygook in imitation of the psychobabble that surrounds them. This banking and instrumental approach to education sets the stage for the anesthetization of the mind, as Pope John Asbury eloquently captures in "What is Poetry in School": "All the thoughts got combed out. What was left was like a field." The educational comb for those teachers who have uncritically accepted the banking model of education is embodied in practice sheets and workbooks, in mindless computer drills and practices that mark and control the pace of routinization.

This drill-and-practice assembly line, numbing the student's capacity for thought, leaves the ground prepared for the teacher's instruction, where the narration, with the teacher as narrator, leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into containers, into receptacles to be filled by the teacher. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are. The students are then measured by high-stakes tests that reflect an often militaristic, controlled transaction of the teacher's narration and the student's memorization of the mechanically narrated content.

Hence, the dominant effects of this mechanistic banking education inevitably create educational structures that favor rote learning and necessarily reduce the priorities of education to the pragmatic requirements of capital, anesthetizing students' critical abilities in order to domesticate social order for its self-preservation. At the other end of the spectrum, the domestication of the social order is achieved by an equally mechanistic approach to education for the rich via the hyper-specialization that, on the one hand, deposits high-level skills and, on the other, discourages the linkages of different bodies of knowledge in the name of pure and specialized science that produces a specialist subject who, according to the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, "knows very well his own tiny corner of the universe, but is radically ignorant of all the rest."

In fact, this inability to make linkages between different bodies of knowledge often produces a level of arrogance, exemplified by a math professor in a major university when she stated that she "has the right of not knowing." This statement was made in reference to the news coverage of the Iraq War when, perhaps because she was feeling uncomfortable with her colleagues' open opposition to the war, she abruptly proclaimed, "I have a right not to know the news." While she has the right to choose not to know, as an academic and citizen in a democratic society, she has the responsibility of knowing what her leaders are doing and might better choose to know when human rights are being threatened, for example, by policies full of barbarism, policies that enable horrors like the drone-guided bombing of targets that invariably include the carnage of innocent civilians, women, and children, which policymakers consider an unfortunate part of war or simply collateral damage.

The authoritarian insensitivity and total disrespect for human life was again on display when the Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte instructed the Navy and Coast Guard that "if they are kidnappers and they are trying to escape, bomb them all." They say, "Hostage? Sorry, collateral damage." The social organization of knowledge via rigidly defined disciplinary boundaries further contributes to the formation of the specialist class that is engineers, doctors, professors, and so on, with each profession subdivided into more constricted areas of focus. This sort of specialist is only acquainted with one science, and even of that, one knows only the small corner in which he is an active investigator. He even proclaims it as a virtue that he takes no cognizance of what lies outside the narrow territory specially cultivated by himself and gives the name "dilettantism" to any curiosity for the general scheme of knowledge.

This dilettantism is discouraged through the mythical need to discover absolute objective truth within one's narrow specialization and, in the process, it domesticates a form of specialized knowledge that not only produces a rupture with philosophies of social and cultural relations that foreground a plurality of culturally embedded perspectives and knowledges but also hides behind an ideology that creates and sustains false dichotomies rigidly delineated by disciplinary boundaries. This ideology also informs the view that hard science, objectivity, and scientific rigor must be disarticulated from the messy data of soft science and from the social and political practices that generate these categories in the first place.

In addition, this banking model of education produces a fragmentation of knowledge that invariably diminishes the student's critical awareness in favor of accepting reality as a given and, as a consequence, undermines the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. The dire result is that occupiers of the most privileged class, with the greatest wealth and opportunity, thus renounce their ontological vocation as agents of history who might not only transform their world but also reflect on that transformation.

According to Freire, the capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students' creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interest of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor see it transformed. The banking model of education is also often used as a safe haven for most conservative and many liberal educators who conceal their materialist and consumerist conception of education in what Freire calls a "digestive concept of knowledge," so common in current educational practice. A practice that considers students to be undernourished and, as a result, leads the teacher to feel compelled to give students an unrealistic list of readings that are never really covered or discussed in class under the pretext that the student's consciousness is specialized and must be filled in order to know.

I'm reminded of a professor who gave his students a syllabus containing a reading list totaling 80 pages, knowing all too well that it is impossible to rigorously discuss all of these readings in a one-semester course. A pedagogy that certainly celebrates quantity over quality. The same professor required students to write a 40-page paper. Why not 25, 35, or 38 pages? That he hardly read, much less provided extensive and insightful comments. In a student's corrected 54-page paper, the professor provided short comments that did not go beyond two to five words, such as "excellent job," "high vs. low culture," "great," or "pedagogical forces." In short, an entire 54-page paper received a total of 43 words in comments.

This nutritionist approach to education follows the same conception that led Jean-Paul Sartre, when criticizing the notion that "to know is to eat," to exclaim, "O philosophy, elementer!" A process where words are transformed into mere deposits of vocabulary that teaches vocabulary, the bread of the spirit, which the students ought to eat and digest. The teacher's knowledge, that is, definition lists without the apprehension of the object of knowledge; methods as a toolkit divorced from awareness of how their use inscribes certain ideologies, particularly now as applied to new technologies; formulaic texts masquerading as theory that belittles practice; and ample glossaries. Incessantly fed information as unthinking receptacles, students are later asked to vomit it back in the mandated exams and tests designed, on one hand, to confirm the teacher's superior knowledge bank account and, on the other, to feed his or her narcissistic needs—a motive inherent in most humanitarian, not humanist, approaches to education.

In the end, the nutritionist banking approach to education, even when offered under the guise of progressive education, has as its major goal the fattening of the student's brain through the deposits of the teacher's knowledge. And thus, under the pedagogical model, students absorb understandings not born of their own creative efforts as learners. This kind of education, concerned with the reproduction of facts rather than apprehending the object of knowledge in order to produce new knowledge, invariably results in the paralysis of the learner's epistemological curiosity and creativity due to the overload of the teacher's imposed knowledge, which, in fact, is almost completely alienating and alienated, having so little, if anything, to do with a student's socio-cultural reality.

In essence, in *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*, Freire offers us an ideological roadmap for revolutionary transformations based on praxis, where there is no dichotomy by which this practice could be divided into a "price" stage of reflection and a subsequent stage of action. Reflection and action occur simultaneously. Simply put, Freire challenges all of us to develop critical, reflective tools that will keep us from forgetting "dangerous memories" which are marked by Draconian economic inequality, cruel violence, and dehumanization. A dehumanization that needs to be denounced. This condemnation of human suffering must happen so that we can protect the intellectual coherence needed in order to help others comprehend the critical difference between studying hunger as anthropological tourists and experiencing it; between deploring violence and surviving it; and between the false benevolence of "giving voice" and being institutionally forced into voicelessness.

Thus, the pseudo-critical educators who proclaim the need to give people of color or women a voice fail to realize that voice is not a gift; it is a democratic right. It is a human right. Freire always emphasized that the raison d'être of struggles for liberation is the reclamation of these rights, which can never be achieved without autonomy. In turn, autonomy cannot be achieved without a true communion with the people with whom we are engaged in a struggle for liberation. In other words, the dominant language of critique that denounces social injustices through written discursive practice only, but which lacks a corresponding action together with the people, represents a "situational communion." This is often the case when academics, as anthropological tourists, enter into communion with the people for a brief time while, for example, collecting data for their research project, but leave the struggling community at its own mercies soon after.

Communion with the oppressed means one's willingness to commit class and race suicide, which represents much more than the mere crossing of a border from one space to another—a geographical crossing from oppressor to oppressed. Class suicide is a form of Easter. It involves problematizing a passage through a cultural and ideological context. It is the commitment to meaningful and lasting solidarity with the oppressed that counts. Succinctly put, the denial of communion is the revolutionary process. Avoidance of dialogue with people under the pretext of organizing them, of strengthening revolutionary power, or ensuring a united front is really a fear of freedom. It is fear of lack of faith in the people. The revolution is made neither by the leaders for the people nor by the people for the leaders, but by both acting together in unshakable solidarity.

This solidarity is born only when the leaders witness to it by their humble, loving, and courageous encounter with the people. Not all men and women have sufficient courage for this encounter, but when they avoid encounter, they become inflexible and treat others as mere objects. Instead of nurturing life, they kill life. Instead of searching for life, they flee from it. And these are oppressor characteristics.

Preface: These pages, which introduce *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*, result from my observations during six years of political exile—observations which have enriched those previously afforded by my educational activities in Brazil. I've encountered both in training courses which analyze the role of conscientização and in actual experimentation with a truly liberating education the fear of freedom discussed in the first chapter of this book. Not infrequently, training course participants call attention to the danger of conscientism in a way that reveals their own fear of freedom. "Critical consciousness," they say, "is anarchic." Others add that critical consciousness may lead to disorder. Some, however, confess: "Why deny it? I was afraid of freedom. I am no longer afraid."

In one of these discussions, the group was debating whether the conscientization of men and women to a specific situation of injustice might not lead them to destructive fanaticism or to a sensation of total collapse of their world. In the midst of the argument, a person who previously had been a factory worker for many years spoke out: "Perhaps I'm the only one here of working-class origin. I can't say that I've understood everything you've said just now, but I can say one thing: when I began this course, I was naive. And when I found out how naive I was, I started to get critical. But this discovery hasn't made me fanatic, and I don't feel any collapse either."

Doubt regarding the possible effects of conscientism implies a premise which the debate does not always make explicit: it is better for the victims of injustice not to recognize themselves as such. In fact, however, conscientização does not lead people to destructive fanaticism. On the contrary, by making it possible for people to enter the historical process as responsible subjects, conscientização enrolls them in the search for self-affirmation and thus avoids fanaticism. The awakening of critical consciousness leads the way to the expression of social discontents precisely because these discontents are real components of an oppressive situation.

Fear of freedom, of which its possessor is not necessarily aware, makes him see ghosts. Such an individual is actually taking refuge in an attempt to achieve security, which he or she prefers to the risks of liberty. As Hegel testifies, "It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained. The individual who has not staked his or her life may no doubt be recognized as a person, but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness." Men and women rarely admit their fear of freedom openly, however, tending rather to camouflage it, sometimes unconsciously, by presenting themselves as defenders of freedom. They give their doubts and misgivings an air of profound sobriety, as befitting custodians of freedom. But they confuse freedom with the maintenance of the status quo, so that if conscientism threatens to place that status quo in question, it thereby seems to constitute a threat to freedom itself.

Thought and study alone did not produce *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*. It is rooted in concrete situations and describes the reactions of laborers, peasant or urban, and of middle-class persons whom I have observed directly or indirectly during the course of my educative work. Continued observation will afford me an opportunity to modify or to corroborate in later studies the points proposed in this introductory work.

This volume will probably arouse negative reactions in a number of readers. Some will regard my position vis-à-vis the problem of human liberation as purely idealistic or may even consider discussion of ontological vocation, love, dialogue, hope, humility, and sympathy as so much reactionary blah. Others will not or will not wish to accept my denunciation of a state of oppression that gratifies the oppressors. Accordingly, the submittedly tentative work is for radicals. I'm certain that Christians and Marxists, though they may disagree with me in part or in whole, will continue reading to the end. But the reader who dogmatically assumes closed, irrational positions will reject the dialogue. I hope this book will open sectarianism fed by fanaticism is always castrating; radicalization nourished by a critical spirit is always creative.

Sectarianism mythicizes and thereby alienates; radicalization criticizes and thereby liberates. Radicalization involves increased commitment to the position one has chosen and thus ever greater engagement in the effort to transform concrete, objective reality. Conversely, sectarianism, because it is mythicizing and irrational, turns reality into a false and therefore unchangeable reality. Sectarianism in any quarter is an obstacle to the emancipation of mankind. The rightist version thereof is not always, unfortunately, called forth its natural counterpart: radicalization of the revolutionary. Not infrequently, revolutionaries themselves become reactionary by falling into sectarianism in the process of responding to the sectarianism of the right.

This possibility, however, should not lead the radical to become a docile pawn of the elites engaged in the process of liberation. He or she cannot remain passive in the face of the oppressor's violence. On the other hand, the radical is never a subjectivist, for this individual, the subjective aspect exists only in relation to the objective aspect—the concrete reality which is the object of analysis. Subjectivity and objectivity thus join in a dialectical unity, producing knowledge in solidarity with action and vice versa.

For his or her part, the sectarian of whatever persuasion, blinded by irrationality, does not or cannot perceive the dynamic of reality, or else misinterprets it. Should this person think dialectically, it is with a domesticated dialectic. The rightist sectarian, whom I've previously termed a "born sectarian," wants to slow down the historical process, to domesticate time, and thus to domesticate men and women. The leftist turned sectarian goes totally astray when he or she attempts to interpret reality and history dialectically and falls into essentially fatalistic positions.

The rightist sectarian differs from his or her leftist counterpart in that the former attempts to domesticate the present so that he or she hopes the future will reproduce this domesticated present, while the latter considers the future pre-established—a kind of inevitable fate, fortune, or destiny. For the rightist sectarian, today, linked to the past, is something given and immutable. For the leftist sectarian, tomorrow is decreed beforehand, is inexorably preordained. This rightist and this leftist are both reactionary because, starting from their respectively false views of history, both develop forms of action that negate freedom.

The fact that one person imagines a well-behaved present and the other a predetermined future does not mean that they therefore fold their arms and become spectators. The former, expecting that the present will continue; the latter, waiting for the already known future to come to pass. On the contrary, closing themselves into circles of certainty from which they cannot escape, these individuals make their own truth. It is not the truth of men and women who struggle to build the future, running the risks involved in this very construction, nor is it the truth of men and women who fight side by side and learn together how to build this future, which is not something given to be received by people, but is rather something to be created by them.

Both types of sectarian, treating history in an equally proprietary fashion, end up without the people, which is another way of being against them. Whereas the rightist sectarian, closing himself in his truth, does no more than fulfill a natural role; the leftist, to become sectarian and rigid, negates his or her very nature. Each, however, as he revolves about his truth, feels threatened if that truth is questioned. Thus, each considers anything that is not his truth a lie. As the journalist Marcia Moreira Alves once told me, "They both suffer from an absence of doubt."

The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a circle of certainty within which reality is also imprisoned. On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality, so that knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people or the liberator of the oppressed, but he or she does commit himself or herself within history to fight at their side.

The pedagogy of the oppressed, the introductory outlines of which are presented in the following pages, is a task for radicals. It cannot be carried out by sectarians. I will be satisfied if among the readers of this work, they are though sufficiently critical to correct mistakes and misunderstandings, to deepen affirmations, and to point out aspects I've not perceived. It is possible that some may question my right to discuss revolutionary cultural action, a subject of which I have no concrete experience. The fact that I've not personally participated in revolutionary action, however, does not negate the possibility of my reflecting on this theme. Furthermore, in my experience as an educator with the people, using a dialogical and problem-posing education, I've accumulated a comparative wealth of material that challenged me to run the risk of making the affirmations contained in this work.

From these pages, I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the people and my faith in men and women and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love. Here, I would like to express my gratitude to Elsa, my wife and first reader, for the understanding and encouragement she has shown my work, which belongs to her as well. I would also like to extend my thanks to a group of friends for their comments on my manuscript. At the risk of omitting some names, I must mention João de Vega Coutinho, Richard Shaw, Jim Lamb, Myron Jovalina Ramos, Paula de Tôrso, Almino Alfonso, Plínio Sampaio, Hernani Maria Fiore, Marcela Guajardo, José Luis Fiore, and Jazza Cariotti. The responsibility for the affirmations made herein is, of course, mine alone.

Paulo Freire

Chapter 1. While the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind's central problem, it now takes on the character of an inescapable concern. Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality. And as an individual perceives the extent of dehumanization, he or she may ask if humanization is a viable possibility within history.

In concrete, objective contexts, both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a person as an uncompleted being, conscious of their incompletion. But while both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives, only the first is the people's vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation. It is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the violence of the oppressors. It is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity.

Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen but also, though in a different way, those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. This distortion occurs within history, but it is not an historical vocation. Indeed, to admit of dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons, would be meaningless.

This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed. Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later, being less human leaves the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.

This then is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to soften the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity. Indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their generosity, the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well.

An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this generosity, which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source. True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and the subdued, the rejects of life, to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands, whether of individuals or entire peoples, need to be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work, and working, to transform the world.

This lesson and their apprenticeship must come, however, from the oppressed themselves and from those who are truly solidary with them. As individuals or as people, by fighting for the restoration of their humanity, they will be attempting the restoration of true generosity. Who are better prepared than the oppressed to understand the terrible significance of an oppressive society? Who suffer the effects of oppression more than the oppressed? Who can better understand the necessity of liberation? They will not gain this liberation by chance, but through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to fight for it. And this fight, because of the purpose given it by the oppressed, will actually constitute an act of love, opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressor's violence. Lovelessness, even when clothed in false generosity.

But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors or sub-oppressors. The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of adhesion to the oppressor. Under these circumstances, they cannot consider him sufficiently clearly to objectivize him, to discover him outside themselves.

This does not necessarily mean that the oppressed are unaware that they are downtrodden, but their perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression. At this level, their perception of themselves as opposites of the oppressor does not yet signify engagement in a struggle to overcome the contradiction. The one pole aspires not to be liberation, but to identification with its opposite pole. In this situation, the oppressed do not see the new man as the person to be born from the resolution of this contradiction as oppression gives way to liberation. For them, the new man or woman themselves become oppressors. Their vision of the new man or woman is individualistic. Because of their identification with the oppressor, they have no consciousness of themselves as persons or as members of an oppressed class.

It is not to become free that they want agrarian reform, but in order to acquire land and thus become landowners or, more precisely, bosses over other workers. It is a rare peasant who, once promoted to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself. This is because the context of the peasant situation—that is, oppression—remains unchanged. In this example, the overseer, in order to make sure of his job, must be as tough as the owner and more so. Thus is illustrated our previous assertion that during the initial stage of their struggle, the oppressed find in the oppressor their model of manhood.

Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by establishing the process of liberation, must confront this phenomenon. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly participate in revolution intend, conditioned by the myths of the old order, to make it their private revolution. The shadow of their former oppressor is still cast over them. The fear of freedom, which afflicts the oppressed—a fear which may equally lead them to desire the role of oppressor or bind them to the role of oppressed—should be examined.

One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual's choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the prescriber's consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor. The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.

Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man, nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest of human completion. To surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognize its causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity. But the struggle to be more fully human has already begun in the authentic struggle to transform the situation.

Although the situation of oppression is a dehumanized and dehumanizing totality, affecting both the oppressors and those whom they oppress, it is the latter who must, from their stifled humanity, wage for both the struggle for a fuller humanity. The oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead the struggle. However, the oppressed, who have adapted to the structure of domination in which they are immersed and have become resigned to it, are inhibited from waging the struggle for freedom so long as they feel incapable of running the risks it requires.

Moreover, their struggle for freedom threatens not only the oppressor but also their own oppressed comrades, who are fearful of still greater repression. When they discover within themselves the yearning to be free, they perceive that this yearning can be transformed into reality only when the same yearning is aroused in their comrades. But while dominated by the fear of freedom, they refuse to appeal to others, or to listen to the appeals of others, or even to the appeals of their own conscience. They prefer gregariousness to authentic comradeship; they prefer the security of conformity with their state of unfreedom to the creative communion produced by freedom.

And even the very pursuit of freedom, the oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically; yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized. The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting them; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being silent. Castrated in their power to create and recreate, in their power to transform the world, this is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed, which their education must take into account.

This book will present some aspects of what the writers termed the pedagogy of the oppressed, a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed, with individuals or peoples in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity. This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation, and in the struggle, this pedagogy will be made and remade.

The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided and authentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be hosts of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization. Liberation is that a childbirth, and a painful one. The man or woman who emerges is a new person, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is superseded by the humanization of all people. Or to put it another way, the solution of this contradiction is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being, no longer oppressor, no longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom.

This solution cannot be achieved in idealistic terms. In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. This perception is a necessary but not sufficient condition for liberation. It must become the motivating force for liberating action. Nor does the discovery by the oppressed that they exist in a dialectical relationship to the oppressor, as his antithesis, that without them the oppressor could not exist, in itself constitute liberation. The oppressed can overcome the contradiction in which they are caught only when this perception enlists them in the struggle to free themselves.

The same is true with respect to the individual oppressor. As a person discovering himself to be an oppressor may cause considerable anguish, but it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed. Rationalizing his guilt through paternalistic treatment of the oppressed, all the while holding them fast in a position of dependence, will not do. Solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is solidary. It is a radical posture. If what characterizes the oppressed is their subordination to the consciousness of the master, as Hegel affirms, true solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these beings for another.

The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor; when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in its praxis. To affirm that men and women are persons and, as persons, should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a fuss, since it is a concrete situation that the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is established. The resolution of this contradiction must be objectively verifiable. Hence the radical requirement, both for the individual who discovers himself or herself to be an oppressor and for the oppressed, that the concrete situation which begets oppression must be transformed.

To present this radical demand for the objective transformation of reality, to combat subjectivist immobility which would divert the recognition of oppression into patient waiting for oppression to disappear by itself, is not to dismiss the role of subjectivity in the struggle to change structures. On the contrary, one cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity; neither can exist without the other, nor can they be dichotomized. The separation of objectivity from subjectivity, the denial of the latter when analyzing reality or acting upon it, is objectivism. On the other hand, the denial of objectivity in analysis or action, resulting in a subjectivism which leads to solipsistic positions, denies action itself by denying objective reality. Neither objectivism nor subjectivism, nor yet psychologism, is propounded here, but rather subjectivity and objectivity in constant dialectical relationship.

To deny the importance of subjectivity in the process of transforming the world and history is naive and simplistic. It is to admit the impossible: a world without people. The subjectivistic position is as ingenious as that of subjectivism, which postulates people without a world. And human beings do not exist apart from each other; they exist in constant interaction. Marx does not espouse such a dichotomy, nor does any other critical realistic thinker. What Marx criticized and scientifically destroyed was not subjectivity, but subjectivism and psychologism. Just as objective social reality exists not by chance but as the product of human action, so it is not transformed by chance. If humankind produces social reality which, in the inversion of the praxis, turns back upon them and conditions them, then transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for humanity.

Reality which becomes oppressive results in the contra-distinction of men as oppressors and oppressed. The latter, whose task it is to struggle for their liberation together with those who show true solidarity, must acquire a critical awareness of oppression through the praxis of this struggle. One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings' consciousness. Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.

Making real oppression more oppressive still by adding to it the realization of oppression corresponds to the dialectical relation between the subjective and the objective. Only in this interdependence is an authentic practice possible, without which it is impossible to resolve the oppressor-oppressed contradiction. To achieve this goal, the oppressed must confront reality critically, simultaneously objectifying and acting upon that reality. A mere perception of reality, not followed by this critical intervention, will not lead to a transformation of objective reality precisely because it is not a true perception. This is the case of a purely subjectivist perception by someone who forsakes objective reality and creates a false substitute.

A different type of false perception occurs when a change in objective reality would threaten the individual or class interests of the perceiver. In the first instance, there is no critical intervention in reality because that reality is fictitious. There is none in the second instance because intervention would contradict the class interests of the perceiver. In the latter case, the tendency of the perceiver is to behave neurotically. The fact exists, but both the fact and what may result from it may be prejudicial to the person. Thus, it becomes necessary not precisely to deny the fact, but to see it differently. This rationalization, as a defense mechanism, coincides in the end with subjectivism. A fact which is not denied, but whose truths are rationalized, loses its objective base; it ceases to be concrete and becomes a myth created in defense of the class of the perceiver.

Herein lies one of the reasons for the prohibitions and the difficulties to be discussed at length in chapter 4, designed to dissuade the people from critical intervention in reality. The oppressor knows full well that this intervention would not be to his interest. What is to his interest is for the people to continue in a state of submersion, impotent in the face of oppressive reality. Of relevance here is Lukács' warning to the revolutionary party: "Il dua poor employ explanably posing the problem of critical intervention to explain to the masses their own action is to clarify and illuminate that action, both regarding its relationship to the objective facts by which it was prompted and regarding its purposes." The more the people unveiled this challenging reality which is to be the object of their transforming action, the more critically they enter that reality. In this way, they are consciously activating the subsequent development of their experiences.

There would be no human action if there were no objective reality, no world to be not only of the person and to challenge them, just as there would be no human action if humankind were not a project, if he or she were not able to transcend himself or herself, if one were not able to perceive reality and understand it in order to transform it. In dialectical thought, world and action are intimately interdependent, but action is human only when it is not merely an occupation but also a preoccupation—that is, when it is not dichotomized from reflection. Reflection, which is essential to action, is implicit in Lukács' requirement of explaining to the masses their own action, just as it is implicit in the purpose he attributes to this explanation: that of consciously activating the subsequent development of experience.

For us, however, the requirement is seen not in terms of explaining to, but rather dialoguing with the people about their actions. In any event, no reality transforms itself, and the duty which Lukács ascribes to the revolutionary party of explaining to the masses their own action coincides with our affirmation of the need for the critical intervention of the people in reality through the praxis. The pedagogy of the oppressed, which is the pedagogy of people engaged in the fight for their own liberation, has its roots here, and those who recognize or begin to recognize themselves as oppressed must be among the developers of this pedagogy. No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.

The pedagogy of the oppressed, animated by authentic humanist, not humanitarian, generosity, presents itself as a pedagogy of humankind. Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interests of the oppressors (egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes of the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and embodies oppression. It is an instrument of dehumanization. This is why, as we affirmed earlier, the pedagogy of the oppressed cannot be developed or practiced by the oppressors. It would be a contradiction in terms if the oppressors not only defended but actually implemented a liberating education.

But if the implementation of a liberating education requires political power, and the oppressed have none, how then is it possible to carry out the pedagogy of the oppressed prior to the revolution? This is a question of the greatest importance, the reply to which is at least tentatively outlined in chapter 4. An aspect of the reply is to be found in the distinction between systematic education, which can only be changed by political power, and educational projects, which should be carried out with the oppressed in the process of organizing them.

The pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and libertarian pedagogy, has two distinct stages. In the first, the oppressed unveil a world of oppression and, through the praxis, commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in which the reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation. In both stages, it is always through action in depth that the culture of domination is culturally confronted. In the first stage, this confrontation occurs through the change in the way the oppressed perceived the world of oppression. In the second stage, through the expulsion of the myths created and developed in the old order, which like specters haunt the new structure emerging from the revolutionary transformation.

The pedagogy of the first stage must deal with the problem of the oppressed consciousness and the oppressor consciousness—the problem of men and women who oppress and men and women who suffer oppression. It must take into account their behavior, their view of the world, and their ethics. A particular problem is the duality of the oppressed: they are contradictory, divided beings, shaped by and existing in a concrete situation of oppression and violence. Any situation in which A objectively exploits B or hinders his or her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence, even when sweetened by false generosity, because it interferes with the individual's ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human.

With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation. Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons, not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized. It is not the unloved to initiate disaffection, but those who cannot love because they love only themselves. It is not the helpless subject to terror who initiate terror, but the violent who, with their power, create the concrete situation which begets the rejects of life. It is not the tyrannized to initiate despotism, but the tyrants. It is not the despised to initiate hatred, but those who despise. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate humankind, but those who deny that humanity, thus negating their own as well. Force is not used by those who have become weak under the preponderance of the strong, but by the strong who have emasculated them.

For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed (and they obviously never call the oppressed, but depending on whether they are fellow countrymen or not, "those people" or "the blind and envious masses" or "savages" or "natives" or "subversives") who are disaffected, who are violent, barbaric, wicked, or ferocious when they react to the violence of the oppressors. Yet, it is paradoxical, though it may seem, precisely in the response of the oppressed to the violence of their oppressors that a gesture...

Of love may be found consciously or unconsciously. The act of rebellion by the oppressed, an act which is always or nearly always as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors, can initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human. The response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human.

As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed fighting to be human take away the oppressor's power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. The latter, as an oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves.

It is therefore essential that the oppressed wage the struggle to resolve the contradiction in which they are caught. And the contradiction will be resolved by the appearance of the new man: neither oppressor nor oppressed, but man in the process of liberation. If the goal of the oppressed is to become fully human, they will not achieve their goal by merely reversing the terms of the contradiction, by simply changing poles.

This may seem simplistic; it is not. Resolution of the oppressor-oppressed contradiction indeed implies the disappearance of the oppressors as a dominant class. However, the restraints imposed by the former oppressed on their oppressors so that the latter cannot assume their former position, does not constitute oppression. An act is oppressive only when it prevents people from being more fully human. Accordingly, these necessary restraints do not in themselves signify that yesterday's oppressed have become today's oppressors.

Acts which prevent the restoration of the oppressive regime cannot be compared with those which create and maintain it. Cannot be compared with those by which a few men and women deny the majority their right to be human. However, the moment the new regime hardens into a dominating bureaucracy, the humanist dimension of the struggle is lost, and it is no longer possible to speak of liberation. Hence our insistence that the authentic solution of the oppressor-oppressed contradiction does not lie in a mere reversal of position, in moving from one pole to the other. Nor does it lie in the replacement of the former oppressors with new ones who continue to subjugate the oppressed, all in the name of their liberation.

Even when the contradiction is resolved authentically by a new situation established by the liberated laborers, the former oppressors do not feel liberated. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formally, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven, while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on this way of life in the name of the rights of the community appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights, although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair.

For the oppressors, human beings refer only to themselves; other people are things. For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over against the right (not always even recognized, but simply conceded) of the oppressed to survival. And they make this concession only because the existence of the oppressed is necessary to their own existence. This behavior, this way of understanding the world and people, which necessarily makes the oppressors resist the installation of a new regime, is explained by their experience as a dominant class.

Once the situation of violence and oppression has been established, it engenders an entire way of life and behavior for those caught up in it. Oppressors and oppressed alike, both are submerged in the situation, and both bear the marks of oppression. Analysis of existential situations of oppression reveals that their inception lay in an act of violence initiated by those with power. This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors who become its heirs and are shaped in its climate.

This climate creates in the oppressor a strongly possessive consciousness: possessive of the world and of men and women. Apart from direct, concrete, material possession of the world and of people, the oppressor consciousness could not understand itself, could not even exist. It is said of this consciousness that without such possession, it would lose contact with the world. The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination: the earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time—everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal.

In their unrestrained eagerness to possess, the oppressors developed the conviction that it is possible for them to transform everything into objects of their purchasing power. Hence their strictly materialistic concept of existence: money is the measure of all things, and profit the primary goal. For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more, always more, even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have, and to be the class of the haves.

As beneficiaries of a situation of oppression, the oppressors cannot perceive that if having is a condition of being, it is a necessary condition for all women and men. This is why their generosity is false. Humanity is a thing, and they possess it in an exclusive right, as inherited property. To the oppressor consciousness, the humanization of the others, of the people, appears not as the pursuit of full humanity, but as a subversion.

The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that in the egoistic pursuit of having, as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are they merely haves. For them, having more is an inalienable right, a right they acquired through their own effort, with their courage to take risks. If others do not have more, it is because they are incompetent and lazy, and worst of all, it is their unjustifiable ingratitude towards the generous gestures of the dominant class.

Precisely because they are ungrateful and envious, the oppressed are regarded as potential enemies who must be watched. It could not be otherwise. If the humanization of the oppressed signifies subversion, so also does their freedom. Hence the necessity for constant control. And the more the oppressors control the oppressed, the more they change them into apparently inanimate things.

This tendency of the oppressor consciousness to inanimate everything and everyone it encounters in its eagerness to possess unquestionably corresponds with a tendency to sadism. The pleasure in complete domination over another person or other animate creature is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform a man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate. Since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life—freedom—sadistic love is a perverted love, a love of death, not of life.

One of the characteristics of the oppressor consciousness and its necrophilic view of the world is thus sadism. As their oppressor consciousness, in order to dominate, tries to deter the drive to search, the restlessness, and the creative power which characterize life, it kills life more and more. The oppressors are using science and technology as unquestionably powerful instruments for their purpose: the maintenance of the oppressive order through manipulation and repression. The oppressed, as objects, as things, have no purposes except those they oppress as prescribed for them.

Given the preceding context, another issue of indubitable importance arises: the fact that certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, thus moving from one pole of the contradiction to the other. Theirs is a fundamental role and has been so throughout the history of the struggle. It happens, however, that they cease to be exploiters or indifferent spectators or simply the heirs of exploitation and move to the side of the exploited. They almost always bring with them the marks of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which include a lack of confidence in the people's ability to think, to want, and to know.

Accordingly, these adherents to the people's cause constantly run the risk of falling into a type of generosity as malefic as that of the oppressors. The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order, but because of their background, they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. They talk about the people, but they do not trust them. And trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change.

A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor. Without that trust, those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly. This conversion is so radical as not to allow of ambiguous behavior. To affirm this commitment but to consider oneself the proprietor of revolutionary wisdom, which must then be given to or imposed on the people, is to retain the old ways.

The man or woman who proclaims devotion to the cause of liberation, yet is unable to enter into communion with the people, whom he or she continues to regard as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived. The convert who approaches the people but feels alarm at each step they take, each doubt they express, and each suggestion they offer, and attempts to impose his status, remains nostalgic towards his origins. Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth; those who undergo it must take on a new form of existence. They can no longer remain as they were.

Only through comradeship with the oppressed can the converts understand their characteristic ways of living and behaving, which in diverse moments reflect the structure of domination. One of these characteristics is the previously mentioned existential duality of the oppressed, who are at the same time themselves and the oppressor whose image they have internalized. Accordingly, until they concretely discover their oppressor and, in turn, their own consciousness, they nearly always express fatalistic attitudes towards this situation.

The peasant begins to get courage to overcome his dependence when he realizes that he is dependent. Until then, he goes along with the boss and says, "What can I do? I'm only a peasant." When superficially analyzed, this fatalism is sometimes interpreted as a docility, that is, a trait of national character. Fatalism in the guise of docility is the fruit of an historical and sociological situation, not an essential characteristic of a people's behavior. It almost always is related to the power of destiny or fate or fortune, inevitable forces, or to a distorted view of God, under the sway of magic and myth.

The oppressed, especially the peasants who are almost submerged in nature, see their suffering, the fruit of exploitation, as the will of God, as if God were the creator of this organized disorder. Submerged in reality, the oppressed cannot perceive clearly the order which serves the interests of the oppressors, whose image they have internalized. Chafing under the restrictions of this order, they often manifest a type of horizontal violence, striking out at their own comrades for the pettiest reasons.

The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people. This is the period when they beat each other up, and the police and magistrates do not know which way to turn when faced with the astonishing waves of crime in North Africa. While the settler, the policeman, has the right to live long days, to strike the native, to insult him, and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native. For the last resort of the native is to defend his personality vizavi his brother.

It is possible that in this behavior they are once more manifesting their duality, because the oppressor exists within their oppressed comrades. When they attack those comrades, they are indirectly attacking the oppressor as well. On the other hand, at a certain point in their existential experience, the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction towards the oppressors and their way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration in their alienation. The oppressed want, at any cost, to resemble the oppressors, to imitate them, to follow them. This phenomenon is especially prevalent in the middle-class oppressed who yearn to be equal to the eminent men and women of the upper class.

Albert Memmi, in an exceptional analysis of the colonized mentality, refers to the contempt felt towards the colonizer mixed with passionate attraction towards him. "How could the colonizer look after his workers while periodically gunning down a crowd of colonized? How could the colonized deny himself so cruelly? It makes such excessive demands. How could he hate the colonizers and yet admire them so passionately? I too felt this admiration in spite of myself."

Self-depreciation is another characteristic of the oppressed, which derives from the internalization of the opinion the oppressors hold of them. So often do they hear that they are "good for nothing," "no-nothing," and "incapable of learning anything," but they are "lazy" and "unproductive," that in the end they become convinced of their own unfitness. The peasant feels inferior to the boss because the boss seems to be the only one who knows things and is able to run things. They call themselves ignorant and say the professor is the one who has the knowledge and to whom they should listen.

The criteria of knowledge imposed upon them are the conventional ones. "Why don't you," said a peasant participating in a culture circle, "explain the pictures first? That way it'll take less time and won't give us a headache." Almost never do they realize that they too know things they have learned in their relations with the world and with other women and men. Given the circumstances which have produced their duality, it is only natural that they distrust themselves.

Not infrequently, peasants in educational projects begin to discuss a generative theme in a lively manner, then stop suddenly and say to the educator, "Excuse us, we ought to keep quiet and let you talk. You are the one who knows; we don't know anything." They often insist that there is no difference between them and the animals. When they do admit a difference, it favors the animals: "They are freer than we are."

It is striking, however, to observe how the self-depreciation changes with the first changes in the situation of oppression. I heard a peasant leader say in an asentamiento meeting: "They used to say we were unproductive because we were lazy and drunkards. All lies! Now that we are respected as men, we're going to show everyone that we were never drunkards or lazy; we were exploited."

As long as their ambiguity persists, the oppressed are reluctant to resist and totally lack confidence in themselves. They have a diffuse, magical belief in the invulnerability and power of the oppressor. The magical force of the landowner's power holds particular sway in the rural areas. A sociologist friend of mine tells of a group of armed peasants in a Latin American country who recently took over a latifundium. For tactical reasons, they planned to hold the landowner as a hostage, but not one peasant had the courage to guard him. His very presence was terrifying. It is also possible that the act of opposing the boss provoked guilt feelings. In truth, the boss was inside them.

The oppressed must see examples of the vulnerability of the oppressor so that a contrary conviction can begin to grow within them. Until this occurs, they will continue disheartened, fearful, and beaten. As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their condition, they fatalistically accept their exploitation. Further, they are apt to react in a passive and alienated manner when confronted with a necessity to struggle for their freedom and self-affirmation. Little by little, however, they tend to try out forms of rebellious action.

In working towards liberation, one must neither lose sight of this passivity nor overlook the moment of awakening within their unauthentic view of the world and of themselves. The oppressed feel like things owned by the oppressor, for the latter to be is to have, almost always at the expense of those who have nothing. For the oppressed, at a certain point in the existential experience, to be is not to resemble the oppressor, but to be under him, to depend on him. Accordingly, the oppressed are emotionally dependent.

The peasant is dependent; he can't say what he wants. Before he discovers his dependence, he suffers. He lets off steam at home, where he shouts at his children, beats them, and despairs. He complains about his wife and thinks everything is dreadful. He doesn't let off steam with the boss because he thinks the boss is a superior being. Lots of times the peasant gives vent to his sorrows by drinking.

This total emotional dependence can lead the oppressed to what Fromm calls necrophilic behavior: the destruction of life, their own or that of their oppressed fellows. It is only when the oppressed find the oppressor out and become involved in the organized struggle for their liberation that they begin to believe in themselves. This discovery cannot be purely intellectual but must involve action, nor can it be limited to mere activism but must include serious reflection. Only then will it be a praxis.

Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried on with the oppressed at whatever stage of their struggle for liberation. The content of that dialogue can and should vary in accordance with historical conditions and the level at which the oppressed perceive reality. But to substitute monologue, slogans, and communiqués for dialogue is to attempt to liberate the oppressed with the instruments of domestication. Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a burning building. It is to lead them into the populist pitfall and transform them into masses which can be manipulated.

At all stages of their liberation, the oppressed must see themselves as women and men engaged in the ontological and historical vocation of becoming more fully human. Reflection and action become imperative when one does not erroneously attempt to dichotomize the content of humanity from its historical forms. The insistence that the oppressed engage in reflection on their concrete situation is not a call to armchair revolution. On the contrary, reflection, true reflection, leads to action. On the other hand, when the situation calls for action, that action will constitute an authentic praxis only if its consequences become the object of critical reflection.

In this sense, the praxis is the new raison d'être of the oppressed, and the revolution which inaugurates the historical moment of this is not viable apart from their concomitant conscious involvement. Otherwise, action is pure activism. To achieve this praxis, however, it is necessary to trust in the oppressed and in their ability to reason. Whoever lacks this trust will fail to initiate or will abandon dialogue, reflection, and communication, and will fall into using slogans, communiqués, monologues, and instructions.

Superficial conversions to the cause of liberation carry this danger. Political action on the side of the oppressed must be pedagogical action in the authentic sense of the word, and therefore action with the oppressed. Those who work for liberation must not take advantage of the emotional dependence of the oppressed—dependence that is the fruit of the concrete situation of domination which surrounds them and which engendered their unauthentic view of the world. Using their dependence to create still greater dependence is an oppressor tactic.

Libertarian action must recognize this dependence as a weak point and must attempt, through reflection and action, to transform it into independence. However, not even the best-intentioned leadership can bestow independence as a gift. The liberation of the oppressed is a liberation of women and men, not things. Accordingly, while no one liberates himself by his own efforts alone, neither is he liberated by others. Liberation, a human phenomenon, cannot be achieved by semi-humans. Any attempt to treat people as semi-humans only dehumanizes them.

When people are already dehumanized due to the oppression they suffer, the process of their liberation must not employ the methods of dehumanization. The correct method for a revolutionary leadership to employ in the task of liberation is therefore not libertarian propaganda, nor can the leadership merely implant in the oppressed a belief in freedom, thus thinking to win their trust. The correct method lies in dialogue. The conviction of the oppressed that they must fight for their liberation is not a gift bestowed by the revolutionary leadership, but the result of their own conscientization.

The revolutionary leaders must realize that their own conviction of the necessity for struggle, an indispensable dimension of revolutionary wisdom, was not given to them by anyone else. If it is authentic, this conviction cannot be packaged and sold; it is reached rather by means of a totality of reflection and action. Only the leader's own involvement in reality, within an historical situation, led them to criticize the situation and to wish to change it. Likewise, the oppressed, who do not commit themselves to the struggle unless they are convinced, and who, if they do not make such a commitment, withhold the indispensable conditions for this struggle, must reach this conviction as subjects, not as objects.

They must also intervene critically in the situation which surrounds them and whose mark they bear. Propaganda cannot achieve this. While the conviction of the necessity for struggle, without which the struggle is unfeasible, is indispensable to the revolutionary leadership—indeed, it was this conviction which constituted that leadership—it is also necessary for the oppressed. It is necessary, that is, unless one intends to carry out the transformation for the oppressed rather than with them. It is my belief that only the latter form of transformation is valid.

The object in presenting these considerations is to defend the eminently pedagogical character of the revolution. The revolutionary leaders of every epoch who have affirmed that the oppressed must accept the struggle for their liberation, an obvious point, have also thereby implicitly recognized the pedagogical aspect of the struggle. Many of these leaders, however, perhaps due to natural and understandable biases against pedagogy, have ended up using the educational methods employed by the oppressor. They deny pedagogical action in the liberation process, but they use propaganda to convince.

It is essential for the oppressed to realize that when they accept the struggle for humanization, they also accept, from that moment, their total responsibility for the struggle. They must realize that they are fighting not merely for freedom from hunger, but for freedom to create and to construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine. It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life but love of death.

The oppressed, to have been shaped by the death-affirming climate of oppression, must find through their struggle the way of life-affirming humanization, which does not lie simply in having more to eat, although it does involve having more to eat and cannot fail to include this aspect. The oppressed have been destroyed precisely because their situation has reduced them to things. In order to regain their humanity, they must cease to be things and fight as men and women. This is a radical requirement. They cannot enter the struggle as objects in order later to become human beings.

The struggle begins with men's recognition that they have been destroyed. Propaganda, management, manipulation—all arms of domination—cannot be the instrument of their rehumanization. The only effective instrument is the humanizing pedagogy in which the revolutionary leadership establishes a permanent relationship of dialogue with the oppressed. In a humanizing pedagogy, the method ceases to be an instrument by which the teachers (in this instance, the revolutionary leadership) can manipulate the students (in this instance, the oppressed), because it expresses the consciousness of the students themselves. The method is, in fact, the external form of consciousness manifested in acts which takes on the fundamental property of consciousness: its intentionality.

The essence of consciousness is being with the world, and this behavior is permanent and unavoidable. Accordingly, consciousness is, in essence, a way towards something apart from itself, outside itself, which surrounds it and which it apprehends by being of its ideational capacity. Consciousness is thus, by definition, a method in the most general sense of the word. A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education: teachers and students, leadership and people, co-intent on reality, are both subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of recreating that knowledge.

As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent creators. In this way, the presence of the oppressed in the struggle for their liberation will be what it should be: not pseudo-participation, but committed involvement.

Chapter 2. A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness. The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable, or else expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students.

His task is to fill the students with the contents of his narration, contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity. The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. "Four times four is sixteen." "The capital of Para is Belem." The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of capital in the affirmation "the capital of Para is Belem"—that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil.

Narration, with a teacher as narrator, leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into containers, into receptacles to be filled by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is; the more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are. Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teachers the depositors. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues, communicates, and makes deposits, which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.

This is the banking concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits entrusted to them. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or catalogers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who have filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this at best misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursuing the world with the world and with each other.

In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance unto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher's existence. But unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.

Of liberation, education on the other hand lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students. The solution is not, nor can it be, found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:

A. The teacher teaches and the students are taught.

B. The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing.

C. The teacher thinks and the students are thought about.

D. The teacher talks and the students listen meekly.

E. The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined.

F. The teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply.

G. The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher.

H. The teacher chooses the program content, and the students, who are not consulted, adapt to it.

I. The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students.

J. The teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the student's creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their humanitarianism to preserve a profitable situation. Thus, they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with the partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another. Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them. For the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated.

To achieve this end, the oppressors use the banking concept of education in conjunction with the paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of "welfare recipients." They are treated as individual cases, as marginal persons who deviate from the general configuration of a good, organized, and just society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society, which must therefore adjust these incompetent and lazy folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be integrated, incorporated into the healthy society that they're forsaken.

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not marginals, are not people living outside society. They have always been inside the structure which made them beings for others. The solution is not to integrate them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become beings for themselves. Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressor's purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientization.

The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never propose to students that they critically consider reality. It will deal instead with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat and insist on the importance of learning that, on the contrary, Roger gave green grass to the rabbit. The humanism of the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons, the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human. Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly, for their innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are serving only to dehumanize, fail to perceive that the deposits themselves contain contradictions about reality.

But sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate reality. They may discover, through existential experience, that their present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human. They may perceive, through their relations with reality, that reality is really a process undergoing constant transformation. If men and women are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them and then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation.

But the humanist revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibility to materialize. From the outset, her efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in people and their creative power. To achieve this, they must be partners of the students in their relations with them. The banking concept does not admit to such partnership, and necessarily so. To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to exchange the role of depositor, prescriber, domesticator for the role of student among students, would be to undermine the power of oppression and serve the cause of liberation.

Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world. A person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others. The individual is a spectator, not recreator. In this view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo-consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness, an empty mind passively opened to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside. For example, my desk, my books, my coffee cup—all the objects before me as bits of the world which surround me—would be inside me, exactly as I am inside my study right now.

This view makes no distinction between being accessible to consciousness and entering consciousness. The distinction, however, is essential. The objects which surround me are simply accessible to my consciousness, not located within it. I'm aware of them, but they are not inside me. It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educator's role is to regulate the way the world enters into the students. The teacher's task is to organize a process which already occurs spontaneously, to fill the students by making deposits of information which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge.

And since people receive the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still and adapt them to the world. The educated individual is the adapted person because she or he is better fit for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created and how little they question it. The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant minority prescribe for them, thereby depriving them of the right to their own purposes, the more easily the minority can continue to prescribe.

The theory and practice of banking education serve this end quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements, the methods for evaluating knowledge, the distance between the teacher and the taught, the criteria for promotion—everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate thinking. The bank-clerk educator does not realize that there is no true security in his hypertrophied role, that one must seek to live with others in solidarity. One cannot impose oneself, nor even merely coexist with one's students. Solidarity requires true communication, and the concept by which such an educator is guided fears and proscribes communication. Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning.

The teacher's thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students' thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her thoughts on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible. Because banking education begins with a false understanding of men and women as objects, it cannot promote the development of what Fromm calls biophilia, but instead produces its opposite: necropoly.

When life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional manner, the necropolis person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The necrophilus person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things. Memory rather than experience, having rather than being, is what counts. The necropolis person can relate to an object, a flower, or a person only if he possesses it. Hence, a threat to his possession is a threat to himself. If he loses possession, he loses contact with the world. He loves control, and in the act of controlling, he kills life.

Oppression, overwhelming control, is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.

When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find themselves unable to use their faculties, people suffer. This suffering due to impotence is rooted in the very fact that the human equilibrium has been disturbed. But the inability to act, which causes people's anguish, also causes them to reject their impotence by attempting to restore their capacity to act. But can they, and how? One way is to submit to and identify with a person or group having power. By this symbolic participation in another person's life, men have the illusion of acting when in reality they only submit to and become a part of those who act.

Populist manifestations perhaps best exemplify this type of behavior by the oppressed, who, by identifying with charismatic leaders, come to feel that they themselves are active and effective. The rebellion they express as they emerge in the historical process is motivated by that desire to act effectively. The dominant elites consider the remedy to be more domination and repression, carried out in the name of freedom, order, and social peace—that is, the peace of the elites. Thus, they can condemn, logically from their point of view, the violence of a strike by workers and can call upon the state, in the same breath, to use violence in putting down the strike.

Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. This accusation is not made in the naive hope that the dominant elites will thereby simply abandon the practice; its objective is to call the attention of true humanists to the fact that they cannot use banking educational methods in the pursuit of liberation, for they would only negate that very pursuit. Nor may a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society. The revolutionary society which practices banking education is either misguided or mistrusting of people. In either event, it is threatened by the specter of reaction.

Unfortunately, those who espouse the cause of liberation are themselves surrounded and influenced by the climate which generates the banking concept and often do not perceive its true significance or its dehumanizing power. Paradoxically, then, they utilize the same instrument of alienation in what they consider an effort to liberate. Indeed, some revolutionaries brand as "innocent dreamers" or even "reactionaries" those who would challenge this educational practice. But one does not liberate people by alienating them.

Authentic liberation, the process of humanization, is not another deposit to be made in men. Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it. Those truly committed to the cause of liberation can accept neither the mechanistic concept of consciousness as an empty vessel to be filled, nor the use of banking methods of domination (propaganda, slogans, deposits) in the name of liberation. Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world.

They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings in their relations with the world: problem-posing education. Responding to the essence of consciousness—intentionality—rejects, communicates, and embodies communication. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian split: consciousness as consciousness of consciousness.

Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object, far from being the end of the cognitive act, intermediates the cognitive actors (teacher on the one hand and students on the other). Accordingly, the practice of problem-posing education entails at the outset that the teacher-student contradiction be resolved. Dialogical relations, indispensable to the capacity of cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object, are otherwise impossible.

Indeed, problem-posing education, which breaks with vertical patterns characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function as the practice of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction through dialogue. The teacher of the students and the students of the teacher cease to exist; a new term emerges: teach-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the one who teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn, while being taught, also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow.

In this process, arguments based on authority are no longer valid. In order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are owned by the teacher. The banking concept, with its tendency to dichotomize everything, distinguishes two stages in the action of the educator: during the first, he cognizes a cognizable object while he prepares his lessons in his study or is laboratory; during the second, he expounds to his students about that object.

The students are not called upon to know, but to memorize the contents narrated by the teacher. Nor do the students practice any act of cognition, since the object towards which that act should be directed is the property of the teacher rather than a medium evoking the critical reflection of both teacher and students. Hence, in the name of the preservation of culture and knowledge, we have a system which achieves neither true knowledge nor true culture.

The problem-posing method does not dichotomize the activity of the teacher-student. She's not cognitive at one point and narrative at another; she's always cognitive, whether preparing a project or engaging in dialogue with the students. He does not regard cognizable objects as his private property but as the object of reflection by himself and the students. In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly reforms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students no longer doze as listeners but are critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher.

The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration and reconsiders her earlier considerations as the students express their own. The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doctor is superseded by true knowledge at the level of the logos. Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.

Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as a theoretical question. The resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings, and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed.

Education as the practice of freedom, as opposed to education as the practice of domination, denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world. It also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world. In these relations, consciousness and world are simultaneous. Consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it.

As in one of our culture circles in Chile, the group was discussing, based on a codification, the anthropological concept of culture. In the midst of the discussion, a peasant, who by banking standards was completely ignorant, said, "Now I see that without man there is no world." When the educator responded, "Let's say, for the sake of argument, that all men on Earth were to die, but that the Earth itself remained, together with trees, birds, animals, rivers, seas, and stars. Wouldn't all this be a world?" "Oh no," the peasant replied emphatically, "there would be no one to say 'this is a world'." The peasant wished to express the idea that they would be lacking the consciousness of the world, which necessarily implies the world of consciousness. "I cannot exist without a non-I; in turn, the not-I depends on that existence. The world which brings consciousness into existence becomes the world of that consciousness." Hence the previous cited affirmation of Sartre: "La conscience."

As women and men simultaneously reflecting on themselves and on the world, increase the scope of their perception, they begin to direct their observations towards previously inconspicuous phenomena. In perception properly so-called, as an explicit awareness, I'm turned towards the object, to the paper, for instance. I apprehend it as being "this here and now." The apprehension is a singling out. Every object having a background in experience: around and about the paper, light, books, pencils, inkwell, and so forth. And these, in a certain sense, are also perceived perceptually, there in the field of intuition. But whilst I was turned towards the paper, there was no turning in their direction, nor any apprehending of them, not even in a secondary sense. They appeared, and yet were not singled out, were not posited on.

Their own account, every perception of a thing has such a zone of background intuitions or background awareness. If intuiting already includes the state of being turned towards, and this also is a conscious experience, or more briefly, a consciousness of all indeed that, in point of fact, lies in the co-perceived objective background. That which has existed objectively but had not been perceived in its deeper implications, if indeed it was perceived at all, begins to stand out, assuming the character of a problem and therefore of challenge.

Thus, men and women begin to single out elements from their background awareness and to reflect upon them. These elements are now objects of their consideration and, as such, objects of their action and cognition. In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world, with which and in which they find themselves. They come to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in process, in transformation.

Although the dialectical relations of women and men in the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived or whether or not they are perceived at all, it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent the function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world, without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action.

Once again, the two educational concepts and practices under analysis come into conflict. Banking education, for obvious reasons, attempts by mythicizing reality to conceal certain facts which explain the way human beings exist in the world. Problem-posing education sets itself the task of demythologizing. Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality. Banking education treats students as objects of assistance; problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers. Banking education inhibits creativity and domesticates, although it cannot completely destroy the intentionality of consciousness by isolating consciousness from the world, thereby denying people their ontological and historical vocation of becoming more fully human. Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of persons as beings who are authentic only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation.

In some, banking theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating forces, failed to acknowledge men and women as historical beings. Problem-posing theory and practice take the people's historicity as their starting point. Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming, as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality. Indeed, in contrast to other animals who are unfinished but not historical, people know themselves to be unfinished. They are aware of their incompletion. In this incompletion and this awareness lie the very roots of education in an exclusively human manifestation.

The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity. Education is thus constantly remade in the praxis. In order to be, it must become. Its duration, in the Bergsonian meaning of the word, is found in the interplay of the opposites, permanence and change. The banking method emphasizes permanence and becomes reactionary. Problem-posing education, which accepts neither a well-behaved present nor predetermined future, roots itself in the dynamic present and becomes revolutionary. Problem-posing education is revolutionary futurity; hence, it is prophetic and, as such, hopeful. Hence, it corresponds to the historical nature of humankind. Hence, it affirms women and men as beings who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, for whom immobility presents a fatal threat, for whom looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future. Hence, it identifies with a movement which engages people as beings aware of their incompletion, an historical movement which has at its point of departure its subjects and its objective.

The point of departure of the movement lies in the people themselves. But since people do not exist apart from the world, apart from reality, the movement must begin with a human-world relationship. Accordingly, the point of departure must always be with men and women in the here and now, which constitutes the situation within which they are submerged, from which they emerge, and in which they intervene. Only by starting from the situation which determines their perception of it can they begin to move. To do this authentically, they must perceive their state not as fated and unalterable, but merely as limiting and therefore challenging.

Where is the banking method directly or indirectly reinforces men's fatalistic perception of their situation, the problem-posing method presents this very situation to them as a problem. As the situation becomes the object of their cognition, the naive or magical perception which produced their fatalism gives way to perception which is able to perceive itself even as it perceives reality and can thus be critically objective about that reality. A deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation. Resignation gives way to the drive for transformation and inquiry, over which men feel themselves to be in control. If people, as historical beings, necessarily engage with other people in a movement of inquiry, did not control that movement, it would be and is a violation of their humanity. Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important. To alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects. This movement of inquiry must be directed towards humanization, the people's historical vocation, the pursuit of full humanity.

However, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity. Therefore, it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relations between oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so. Attempting to be more human individualistically leads to having more egotistically, a form of dehumanization. Not that it is not fundamental to have in order to be human, precisely because it is necessary. Some men's having must not be allowed to constitute an obstacle to others' having; must not consolidate the power of the former to crush the latter.

Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits it is fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation. To that end, it enables teachers and students to become subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and alienating intellectualism. It also enables people to overcome their false perception of reality. The world, no longer something to be described with deceptive words, becomes the object of that transforming action by men and women which results in their humanization. Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor. No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question why. Only a revolutionary society can carry out this education in systematic terms. The revolutionary leaders need not take full power before they can employ the method. In the revolutionary process, the leaders cannot utilize the banking method as an interim measure, justified on grounds of expediency with the intention of later behaving in a genuinely revolutionary fashion. They must be revolutionary, that is to say, dialogical from the outset.

Chapter 3. As we attempt to analyze dialogue as a human phenomenon, we discover something which is the essence of dialogue itself: the word. But the word is more than just an instrument which makes dialogue possible. Accordingly, we must seek its constitutive elements. Within the word, we find two dimensions: reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed, even in part, the other immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world. An unauthentic word, one which is unable to transform reality, results when dichotomy is imposed upon its constitutive elements. When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well. The word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating blah. It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action.

On the other hand, if action is emphasized exclusively to the detriment of reflection, the word is converted into activism. The latter, action for action's sake, negates the true praxis and makes dialogue impossible. Either dichotomy, by creating unauthentic forms of existence, creates also unauthentic forms of thought which reinforce the original dichotomy. Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words with which men and women transform the world. To exist humanly is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world, in its turn, reappears to the neighbors as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action, reflection. But while to say the true word, which is work, which is praxis, is to transform the world, saying that word is not the privilege of some few persons, but the right of everyone. Consequently, no one can say a true word alone, nor can she say it for another in a prescriptive act which robs others of their words.

Dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world. Hence, dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming; between those who deny others the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. Those who have been denied their primordial right to speak their word must first reclaim this right and prevent the continuation of this dehumanizing aggression. If it is in speaking their word that people, by naming the world, transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which they achieve significance as human beings. Dialogue is thus an existential necessity. And since dialogue is the encounter in which the united reflection and action of the dialoguers are addressed to the world which is to be transformed and humanized, this dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person's depositing ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be consumed by the discussions, nor yet is it a hostile, polemical argument between those who are committed neither to the naming of the world nor to the search for truth, but rather to the imposition of their own truth.

Because dialogue is an encounter among women and men who name the world, it must not be a situation where some name on behalf of others. It is an act of creation. It must not serve as a crafty instrument for the domination of one person by another. The domination implicit in dialogue is that of the world by the dialoguers; it is conquest of the world for the liberation of humankind. Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people. The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and recreation, is not possible if it is not infused with love. Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself. It is thus necessarily the task of responsible subjects and cannot exist in a relation of domination. Domination reveals the pathology of love: sadism in the dominator and masochism in the dominated. Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is a commitment to their cause, the cause of liberation. And this commitment, because it is loving, is dialogical. As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental. As an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love. Only by abolishing the situation of oppression is it possible to restore the love which that situation made impossible. If I do not love the world, if I do not love life, if I do not love people, I cannot enter into dialogue.

On the other hand, dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world, through which people constantly recreate that world, cannot be an act of arrogance. Dialogue, as an encounter of those addressed to the common task of learning and acting, is broken if the parties, or one of them, lack humility. How can I dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own? How can I dialogue if I regard myself as a case apart from others, mere it's in whom I cannot recognize other eyes? How can I dialogue if I consider myself a member of an in-group of pure men, the owners of truth and knowledge, for whom all non-members of these people are the great unwashed? How can I dialogue if I start from the premise that naming the world is the task of an elite and that the presence of the people in history is a sign of deterioration thus to be avoided? How can I dialogue if I'm close to and even offended by the contribution of others? How can I dialogue if I'm afraid of being displaced, the mere possibility causing me torment and weakness? Self-sufficiency is incompatible with dialogue.

Men and women who lack humility or have lost it cannot come to the people, cannot be their partners in naming the world. Someone who cannot acknowledge himself to be as mortal as everyone else still has a long way to go before he can reach the point of encounter. At the point of encounter, they are neither utter ignoramuses nor perfect sages; they are only people who are attempting together to learn more than they now know.

Dialogue further requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and recreate, faith in their vocation to be more fully human, which is not the privilege of an elite but the birthright of all. Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue. The dialogical man believes in others, even before he meets them face to face. His faith, however, is not naive. The dialogical man is critical and knows that although it is within the power of humans to create and transform, in a concrete situation of alienation, individuals may be impaired in the use of that power. From destroying his faith in the people, however, this possibility strikes him as a challenge to which he must respond. He's convinced that the power to create and transform, even when thwarted in concrete situations, tends to be reborn, and that rebirth can occur not gratuitously, but in and through the struggle for liberation, in the supersedence of slave labor by emancipated labor which gives zest to life. Without this faith in people, dialogue is a farce which inevitably degenerates into paternalistic manipulation.

Founding itself upon love, humility, and faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the dialoguers is the logical consequence. It would be a contradiction in terms if dialogue, loving, humble, and full of faith, did not produce this climate of mutual trust which leads the dialoguers into ever closer partnership in the naming of the world. Conversely, such trust is obviously absent in the anti-dialogics of the banking method of education. Where is faith in humankind an a priori requirement for dialogue, trust is established by dialogue. Should it founder, it will be seen that the preconditions were lacking: false love, false humility, and feeble faith in others cannot create trust. Trust is contingent on the evidence which one party provides the others of his true concrete intentions. It cannot exist if that party's words do not coincide with their actions. To say one thing and do another, to take one's own word lightly, cannot inspire trust. To glorify democracy and to silence the people is a farce; to discourse on humanism and to negate people is a lie.

Nor yet can dialogue exist without hope. Hope is rooted in men's incompletion, from which they move out in constant search, a search which can be carried out only in communion with others. Hopelessness is a form of silence, of denying the world and fleeing from it. The dehumanizing resulting from an unjust order is not a cause for despair, but for hope, leading to the incessant pursuit of the humanity denied by injustice. Hope, however, does not consist in crossing one's arms and waiting. As long as I fight, I am moved by hope, and if I fight with hope, then I can wait.

As the encounter of women and men seeking to be more fully human, dialogue cannot be carried on in a climate of hopelessness. If the dialogue is expect nothing to come of their efforts, their encounter will be empty and sterile, bureaucratic and tedious. Finally, true dialogue cannot exist unless the dialogue is engage in critical thinking, thinking which discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and the people and admits of no dichotomy between them, thinking which perceives reality as process, as transformation, rather than as a static entity, thinking which does not separate itself from action but constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved. Critical thinking contrasts with naive thinking, which sees historical time as a weight, a stratification of the acquisitions and experiences of the past, from which the presence should emerge normalized and well-behaved. For the naive thinker, the important thing is accommodation to this normalized today. For the critic, the important thing is the continuing transformation of reality in behalf of the continuing humanization of men. In the words of Pierre Ferta, "the goal will no longer be to eliminate the risks of temporality by clutching to guaranteed space, but rather to temporalize space. The universe is revealed to me not as space imposing a massive presence to which I can but adapt, but as a scope, a domain which takes shape as I act upon it." For naive thinking, the goal is precisely to hold fast to this guaranteed space and to adjust to it. By thus denying temporality, it denies itself as well.

Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is also capable of generating critical thinking. Without dialogue, there is no communication, and without communication, there can be no true education. Education which is able to resolve the contradiction between teacher and student takes place in a situation in which both address their act of cognition to the object by which they are mediated. Thus, the dialogical character of education as the practice of freedom does not begin when the teacher's student meets with a student's teachers in a pedagogical situation, but rather when the former first asks herself or himself what she or he will dialogue with the latter about. The preoccupation with the content of dialogue is really preoccupation with a program. Content of education. For the anti-diological banking educator, the question of content simply concerns the program about which he will discuss to his students and the answers his own question by organizing his own program. For the dialogical problem-posing teacher-student, the program content of education is neither a gift nor an imposition, bits of information to be deposited in the students, but rather the organized, systematized, and developed representation to individuals of the things about which they want to know more. Authentic education is not carried on by A for B or by A about B, but rather by A with B, mediated by the world, a world which impresses and challenges both parties, giving rise to views or opinions about it. These views, impregnated with anxieties, doubts, hopes, or hopelessness, imply significant themes on the basis of which the program content of education can be built.

In its desire to create an ideal model of the "good man" and an evenly conceived humanism, often overlooks the concrete existential present situation of real people. Authentic humanism, in Pierre Ferda's words, "consists in permitting the emergence of the awareness of our full humanity as a condition and as an obligation, as a situation and as a project." We simply cannot go to the laborers, urban or peasant, in the banking style, to give them knowledge or to impose upon them the model of the "good man" contained in a program whose content we have ourselves organized. Many political and educational plans have failed because their authors designed them according to their own personal views of reality, never once taking into account, except as mere objects of their actions, the men in a situation to whom their program was ostensibly directed.

For the truly humanist educator and the authentic revolutionary, the object of action is the reality to be transformed by them, together with other people, not other men and women themselves. The oppressors are the ones who act upon the people to indoctrinate them and adjust them to a reality which must remain untouched. Unfortunately, however, in their desire to obtain the support of the people for revolutionary action, revolutionary leaders often fall for the banking line of planning program content from the top down. They approach the peasant or urban masses with projects which may correspond to their own view of the world, but not to that of the people. They forget that their fundamental objective is to fight alongside the people for the recovery of the people's stolen humanity, not to win the people over to their side. Such a phrase does not belong in the vocabulary of revolutionary leaders, but in that of the oppressor. The revolutionary's role is to liberate and be liberated with the people, not to win them over.

In their political activity, the dominant elites utilize the banking concept to encourage passivity in the oppressed, corresponding with the latter's submerged state of consciousness, and take advantage of that passivity to fill that consciousness with slogans which create even more fear of freedom. This practice is incompatible with a truly liberating cause of action which, by presenting the oppressor slogans as a problem, helps the oppressed to eject those slogans from within themselves. After all, the task of the humanists is surely not that of pitting their slogans against the slogans of the oppressors with the oppressed as the testing ground, housing the slogans of first one group and then the other. On the contrary, the task of the humanists is to see that the oppressed become aware of the fact that, as dual beings housing the oppressors within themselves, they cannot be truly human. This task implies that revolutionary leaders do not go to the people in order to bring them a message of salvation, but in order to come to know, through dialogue with them, both their objective situation and their awareness of that situation, the various levels of perception of themselves and of the world in which and with which they exist.

One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding. The starting point for organizing the program content of educational political action must be the present existential concrete situation, reflecting the aspirations of the people. Utilizing certain basic contradictions, we must pose this existential concrete presence situation to the people as a problem which challenges them and requires a response, not just at the intellectual level, but at the level of action. We must never merely discourse on the present situation; must never provide the people with programs which have little or nothing to do with their own preoccupations, doubts, hopes, and fears; programs which at times, in fact, increase the fears of the oppressed consciousness.

It is not our role to speak to the people about our own view of the world, nor to attempt to impose that view on them, but rather to dialogue with the people about their view and ours. We must realize that their view of the world, manifested variously in their actions, reflects their situation in the world. Educational and political action which is not critically aware of this situation runs the risk either of banking or of preaching in the desert. Often, educators and politicians speak and are not understood because their language is not attuned to the concrete situation of the people they address. Accordingly, their talk is just alienated and alienating rhetoric.

The language of the educator or the politician, it seems more and more clear, that the latter must also become an educator in the broadest sense of the word. Like the language of the people, cannot exist without thought, and either language nor thought can exist without a structure to which they refer in order to communicate effectively. Educator and politician must understand the structural conditions in which the thought and language of the people are dialectically framed. It is to the reality which mediates men and to the perception of that reality held by educators and people that we must go to find the program content of education.

The investigation of what I have termed the people's thematic universe, the complex of their generative themes, inaugurates the dialogue of education as the practice of freedom. The methodology of that investigation must likewise be dialogical, affording the opportunity both to discover generative themes and to stimulate people's awareness in regard to these themes. Consistent with the liberating purpose of dialogical education, the object of the investigation is not persons, as if they were anatomical fragments, but rather the thought, language with which men and women refer to reality, the levels at which they perceive that reality, and their view of the world in which their generative themes are found.

Before describing a generative theme, or precisely which will also clarify what is meant by a minimum thematic universe, it seems to me indispensable to present a few preliminary reflections. The concept of a generative theme is neither an arbitrary invention nor a working hypothesis to be proved. If it were a hypothesis to be proved, the initial investigation would seek not to ascertain the nature of the theme, but rather the very existence or non-existence of themes themselves. In that event, before attempting to understand the theme in its richness, significance, its plurality, its transformations, and its historical composition, we would first have to verify whether or not it is an objective fact. Only then could we proceed to apprehend it. Although an attitude of critical doubt is legitimate, it does appear possible to verify the reality of the generative theme not only through one's own existential experience, but also through critical reflection on the human-world relationship and on the relationships between people implicit in the former.

This point deserves more attention. One may well remember, trite as it seems, that of the uncompleted beings, man is the only one to treat not only his actions but his very self as the object of his reflection. This capacity distinguishes him from the animals, which are unable to separate themselves from their activity and thus are unable to reflect upon it. In this apparently superficial distinction lie the boundaries which delimit the action of each in his life space. Because the animal's activity is an extension of themselves, the results of that activity are also inseparable from themselves. Animals can neither set objectives nor infuse their transformation of nature with any significance beyond itself. Moreover, the decision to perform this activity belongs not to them, but to their species. The animals are accordingly fundamentally beings in themselves, unable to decide for themselves, unable to objectify either themselves or their activity, lacking objectives which they themselves have set, living submerged in a world to which they can give no meaning, lacking a tomorrow and a today because they exist in an overwhelming present. Animals are a-historical. Their a-historical life does not occur in the world taken in its strict meaning. For the animal, the world does not constitute a not-I which could set him apart as an I. The human world, which is historical, serves as a mere prop for the being in itself. Animals are not challenged by the configuration which confronts them; they are merely stimulated. Their life is not one of risk-taking, for they are not aware of taking risks. Risks are not challenges perceived upon reflection, but merely noted by the signs which indicate them. They accordingly do not require decision-making responses. Consequently, animals cannot commit themselves. Their a-historical condition does not permit them to take on life. Because they do not take it on, they cannot construct it, and if they do not construct it, they cannot transform its configuration, nor can they know themselves to be destroyed by life, for they cannot expand their prop world into a meaningful, symbolic world which includes culture and history. As a result, animals do not animalize their configuration in order to animalize themselves, nor do they de-animalize themselves. Even in the forest, they remain beings in themselves, as animal-like there as in the zoo.

In contrast, the people, aware of their activity and the world in which they are situated, acting in function of the objectives which they propose, having the seat of their decisions located in themselves and in their relations with the world and with others, infusing the world with their creative presence by means of the transformation they affect upon it, unlike animals, not only live but exist, and their existence is historical. Animals live out their lives on an a-temporal, flat, uniform prop. Humans exist in a world which they are constantly recreating and transforming. For animals, here is only a habitat with which they enter into contact. For people, here signifies not merely a physical space, but also an historical space. Strictly speaking, here, now, there, tomorrow, and yesterday do not exist for the animal whose life, lacking self-consciousness, is totally determined. Animals cannot surmount the limits imposed by the here and the now or the there. Humans, however, because they are aware of themselves and thus of the world, because they are conscious beings, exist in a dialectical relationship between the determination of limits and their own freedom. As they separate themselves from the world which they objectify, as they separate themselves from their own activity, as they locate the seat of their decisions in themselves and in their relations with the world and others, people overcome the situations which limit them. The limit situations, once perceived by individuals as fetters, as obstacles to their liberation, these situations stand out in relief from the background, revealing their true nature as concrete historical dimensions of a given reality. Men and women respond to the challenge with actions which Vieira Pinto calls limit acts: those directed at negating and overcoming rather than passively accepting the given. Thus, it is not the limit situations in and of themselves which create a climate of hopelessness, but rather how they are perceived by women and men at a given historical moment, whether they appear as fetters or as insurmountable barriers. As critical perception is embodied in action, a climate of hope and confidence develops which leads men to attempt to overcome the limit situations. This objective can be achieved only through action upon the concrete historical reality in which limit situations historically are found. As reality is transformed and these situations are superseded, new ones will appear which, in turn, will evoke new limit acts.

The prop world of animals contains no limit situations due to its a-historical character. Similarly, animals lack the ability to exercise limit acts, which require a decisive attitude towards the world, separation from and objectification of the world in order to transform it. Organically bound to their prop, animals do not distinguish between themselves and the world. Accordingly, animals are not limited by limit situations, which are historical, but rather by the entire prop. And the appropriate role for animals is not to relate to their prop; in that event, the prop would be a world, but to adapt to it. Thus, when animals produce a nest, a hive, or a burrow, they are not creating products which result from limit acts, that is, transforming responses. Their productive activity is subordinated to the satisfaction of a physical necessity which is simply stimulating rather than challenging. An animal's product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. Only products which result from the activity of a being but do not belong to its physical body, these products may bear its seal, can give a dimension of meaning to the context which thus becomes a world. A being capable of such production, who thereby is necessarily aware of himself, is a being for himself. Could no longer be if she or he were not in the process of being in the world with which he or she relates, just as the world would no longer exist if this being did not exist.

The difference between animals, who because their activity does not constitute limit acts cannot create products detached from themselves, and humankind, who through their action upon the world create the realm of culture and history, is that only the latter are beings of the Praxis. Only human beings are Praxis, the Praxis which, as the reflection and action which truly transform reality, is the source of knowledge and creation. Animal activity, which occurs without a Praxis, is not creative. People's transforming activity is. It is this transforming and creative beings that humans, in their permanent relations with reality, produce not only material goods, tangible objects, but also social institutions, ideas, and concepts. Through their continuing practice, men and women simultaneously create history and become historical social beings because, in contrast to animals, people can tri-dimensionalize time into the past, the present, and the future. Their history, in function of their own creations, develops as a constant process of transformation within which epocal units materialize. These epocal units are not closed periods of time, static compartments within which people are confined. Were this the case, a fundamental condition of history, its continuity, would disappear. On the contrary, epocal units interrelate in the dynamics of historical continuity. An Epoch is characterized by a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values, and challenges in dialectical interaction with their opposites, striving toward plenitude. The concrete representation of many of these ideas, values, concepts, and hopes, as well as the obstacles which impede the people's full humanization, constitute the themes of that Epoch. These themes imply others which are opposing or even antithetical. They also indicate tasks to be carried out and fulfilled. Thus, historical themes are never isolated, independent, disconnected, or static; they are always interacting dialectically with their opposites. Nor can these themes be found anywhere except in the human-world relationship.

The complex of interacting themes of an Epoch constitutes its thematic universe. Confronted by this universe of themes in dialectical contradiction, persons take equally contradictory positions. Some work to maintain the structures; others to change them. As antagonism deepens between themes which are the expression of reality, there is a tendency for the themes and for reality itself to be mythicized, establishing a climate of irrationality and sectarianism. This climate threatens to drain the themes of their deeper significance and to deprive them of their characteristically dynamic aspect. In such a situation, myth-creating irrationality itself becomes a fundamental theme. Its opposing theme, the critical, dynamic view of the world, strives to unveil reality and mask its mythicization and achieve a full realization of the human task: the permanent transformation of reality in favor of the liberation of people.

In the last analysis, the themes both contain and are contained in limit situations. The tasks they imply are require limit acts. When the themes are concealed by the limit situations and thus are not clearly perceived, the corresponding tasks, people's responses in the form of historical action, can be neither authentically nor critically fulfilled. In this situation, humans are unable to transcend the limit situations, to discover that beyond these situations and in contradiction to them lies an untested feasibility. In some, limit situations imply the existence of persons who are directly or indirectly served by these situations and of those who are negated and curbed by them. Once the latter come to perceive these situations as the frontier between being and being more human, rather than the frontier between being and nothingness, they begin to direct their increasingly critical actions towards achieving the untested feasibility implicit in that perception. On the other hand, those who are served by the present limit situation regard the untested feasibility as a threatening limit situation which must not be allowed to materialize and act to maintain the status quo. Consequently, liberating actions upon an historical milieu must correspond not only to the generative themes but to the way in which these themes are perceived. This requirement, in turn, implies another: the investigation of meaningful thematics.

Generative themes can be located in concentric circles, moving from the general to the particular. The broadest epocal unit, which includes a diversified range of units and subunits (continental, regional, national, and so forth), contains themes of a universal character. I consider the fundamental theme of our Epoch to be that of domination, which implies its opposite, the theme of liberation, as the objective to be achieved. It is this tormenting theme which gives our Epoch the anthropological character mentioned earlier. In order to achieve humanization, which presupposes the elimination of dehumanizing oppression, it is absolutely necessary to surmount the limit situations in which people are reduced to things.

Within the smaller circles, we find themes and limit situations characteristic of societies on the same continent or on different continents, which through these themes and limit situations share historical similarities. For example, underdevelopment, which cannot be understood apart from the relationship of dependency, represents a limit situation characteristic of societies of the Third World. The task implied by this limit situation is to overcome the contradictory relation of these object societies to the metropolitan societies. This task constitutes the untested feasibility for the Third World.

Any given society within the broader epocal unit contains, in addition to the universal, continental, or historical similar themes, its own particular themes, its own limit situations. Within yet smaller circles, thematic diversifications can be found within the same society, divided into areas and sub-areas, all of which are related to the societal whole. These constitute epocal subunits. For example, within the same national unit, one can find the contradiction of the coexistence of the non-contemporaneous. Within these subunits, national themes may or may not be perceived in their true significance; they may simply be felt, sometimes not even that. But the non-existence of themes within the subunits is absolutely impossible. The fact that individuals in a certain area do not perceive a generative theme, or perceive it in a distorted way, may only reveal a limited situation of oppression in which people are still submerged. In general, a dominated consciousness, which is not yet perceived a limit situation in its totality, apprehends only its epiphenomena and transfers to the latter the inhibiting force which is the property of the limit situation.

The fact is of great importance for the investigation of generative themes. When people lack a critical understanding of their reality, apprehending it in fragments which they do not perceive as interacting constituent elements of the whole, they cannot truly know that reality. To truly know it, they would have to reverse their starting point. They would need to have a total vision of the context in order subsequently to separate and isolate its constituent elements and, by means of this analysis, achieve a clearer perception of the whole. Equally appropriate for the methodology of thematic investigation and for problem-posing education is this effort to present significant dimensions of an individual's contextual reality, the analysis of which will make it possible for him to recognize the interaction of the various components. Meanwhile, the significant dimensions, which in their turn are constituted of parts of an interaction, should be perceived as dimensions of total reality. In this way, a critical analysis of a significant existential dimension makes possible a new critical attitude toward the limit situations. The perception and comprehension of reality are rectified and acquire new depth when carried out with the methodology of conscientização. The investigation of the generative theme contained in the minimum thematic universe.

The generative themes in interaction thus introduces, or begins to introduce, women and men to a critical form of thinking about their world. In the event, however, that human beings perceive reality as dense, impenetrable, and enveloping, it is indispensable to proceed with the investigation by means of abstraction. This method does not involve reducing the concrete to the abstract, which would signify the negation of its dialectical nature, but rather maintaining both elements as opposites which interrelate dialectically in the act of reflection. This dialectical movement of thought is exemplified perfectly in the analysis of a concrete existential coded situation. Its decoding requires moving from the abstract to the concrete. This requires moving from the part to the whole and then returning to the parts. This in turn requires that the subject recognize himself in the object (the coded concrete existential situation) and recognize the object as a situation in which he finds himself together with other subjects. If the decoding is well done, this movement of flux and reflux from the abstract to the concrete, which occurs in the analysis of a coded situation, leads to the supersedence of abstraction by the critical perception of the concrete, which has already ceased to be a dense, impenetrable reality.

When an individual is presented with a coded existential situation sketch or a photograph which leads by abstraction to the concreteness of existential reality, his tendency is to split that coded situation. In the process of decoding, the separation corresponds to the stage we call the description of the situation and facilitates the discovery of the interaction among the parts of the disjointed whole. This whole, a coded situation which previously had only been diffusely apprehended, begins to acquire meaning as thought flows back to it from the various dimensions. Since, however, the coding is the representation of an existential situation, the decoder tends to take the step from the representation to the very concrete situation in which and with which she finds herself. It is thus possible to explain conceptually why individuals begin to behave differently with regard to objective reality once that reality has ceased to look like a blind alley and has taken on its true aspect: a challenge which human beings must meet.

In all stages of decoding, people exteriorize their view of the world and in the way they think about and face the world: fatalistically, dynamically, or statically. Their generative themes may be found. A group which does not concretely express a generative thematics, a fact which might appear to imply the non-existence of themes, is on the contrary suggesting a very dramatic theme: the theme of silence. The theme of silence suggests a structure of mutism in face of the overwhelming force of the limit situations. I must re-emphasize that the generative theme cannot be found in people divorced from reality, nor yet in reality divorced from people, much less in no man's land. It can only be apprehended in the human-world relationship.

To investigate the generative theme is to investigate people's thinking about reality and people's action upon reality, which is their practice. For precisely this reason, the methodology proposed requires that the investigators and the people who would normally be considered objects of that investigation should act as co-investigators. The more active an attitude men and women take in regard to the exploration of their thematics, the more they deepen their critical awareness of reality and, in spelling out those thematics, take possession of that reality.

Some may think it inadvisable to include the people as investigators in the search for their own meaningful thematics, that their intrusive influence, envy the intrusion of those who are most interested or ought to be in their own education, will adulterate the findings and thereby sacrifice the objectivity of the investigation. This view mistakenly presupposes that themes exist in their original objective purity outside people, as if themes were things. Actually, themes exist in people, in their relations with the world, with reference to concrete facts. The same objective fact could evoke different complexes of generative themes in different epocal subunits. There is, therefore, a relation between the given objective fact, the perception women and men have of this fact, and the generative themes. A meaningful thematics is expressed by people, and a given moment of expression will differ from an earlier moment if they have changed their perception of the objective facts to which the themes refer.

From the investigator's point of view, the important thing is to detect the starting point at which the people visualize the given and to verify whether or not during the process of investigation any transformation has occurred in their way of perceiving reality. Objective reality, of course, remains unchanged. If the perception of that reality changes in the course of the investigation, that fact does not impair the validity of the investigation. We must realize that the aspirations, the motives, and the objectives implicit in the meaningful thematics are human aspirations, motives, and objectives. They do not exist out there somewhere as aesthetic entities; they are occurring; they are as historical as human beings themselves. Consequently, they cannot be apprehended apart from them. To apprehend these themes and to understand them is to understand both the people who embody them and the reality to which they refer. But precisely because it is not possible to understand these themes apart from people, it is necessary that those concerned understand them as well.

Thematic investigation thus becomes a common striving towards awareness of reality and towards self-awareness, which makes this investigation a starting point for the educational process or for cultural action of a liberating character. The real danger of the investigation is not that the supposed objects of the investigation, discovering themselves to be co-investigators, might adulterate the analytical results. On the contrary, the danger lies in the risk of shifting the focus of the investigation from the meaningful themes to the people themselves, thereby treating the people as objects of the investigation. Since this investigation is to serve as a basis for developing an educational program in which teacher-student and students-teachers combine their cognitions of the same object, the investigation itself must likewise be based on reciprocity of action.

Thematic investigation, which occurs in the realm of human cannot be reduced to a mechanical act. As a process of search, of knowledge, and thus of creation, it requires the investigators to discover the interpenetration of problems in the linking of meaningful themes. The investigation will be most educational when it is most critical, and most critical when it avoids the narrow outlines of partial or focalized views of reality and sticks to the comprehension of total reality. Thus, the process of searching for the meaningful thematics should include a concern for the links between themes, a concern to pose these themes as problems, and a concern for the historical, cultural context.

Just as the educator may not elaborate a program to present to the people, neither may the investigator elaborate itineraries for researching the thematic universe starting from points which he has predetermined. Both education and the investigation designed to support it must be sympathetic activities (in the etymological sense of the word), that is, they must consist of communication and of the common experience of a reality perceived in the complexity of its constant becoming.

The investigator, who, in the name of scientific objectivity, transforms the organic into something inorganic, what is becoming into what is, life into death, is a person who fears change. He or she sees in change, which is not denied but neither is it desired, not a sign of life but a sign of death and decay. He or she does want to study change, but in order to stop it, not in order to stimulate or deepen it. However, in seeing change as a sign of death and in making people the passive objects of investigation in order to arrive at rigid models, one betrays their own character as a killer of life.

I repeat: the investigation of thematics involves the investigation of people's thinking. Thinking which occurs only in and among people together seeking out reality. I cannot think for others or without others, nor can others think for me. Even if the people's thinking is superstitious or naive, it is only as they rethink their assumptions in actions that they can change. Producing and acting upon their own ideas, not consuming those of others, must constitute that process.

People, as beings in a situation, find themselves rooted in temporal, spatial conditions which mark them and which they also mark. They will tend to reflect on their own situationality to the extent that they are challenged by it to act upon it. Human beings are because they are in a situation, and they will be more the more they're not only critically reflect upon their existence but critically act upon it.

Reflection upon situationality is reflection about the very condition of existence. Critical thinking, by means of which people discover each other to be in a situation, only as this situation ceases to present itself as a dense, enveloping reality or a tormenting blind alley, can they come to perceive it as an objective, problematic situation. Only then can commitment exist.

Humankind emerge from their submersion and acquire the ability to intervene in reality as it is unveiled. Intervention in reality, historical awareness itself, thus represents a step forward from emergence and results from the *consciente zazao* of the situation. *Consciente zazao* is a deepening of the attitude of awareness characteristic of all emergence. Every thematic investigation which deepens historical awareness is thus really educational, while all authentic education investigates thinking. The more educators and the people investigate the people's thinking and are thus jointly educated, the more they continue to investigate education.

And thematic investigation in the problem-posing concept of education are simply different moments of the same process. In contrast with the anti-ideological and non-communicative deposits of the banking method of education, the program content of the problem-posing method, dialogical *par excellence*, is constituted and organized by the student's view of the world where their own generative themes are found. The content thus constantly expands and renews itself.

The task of the dialogical teacher in an interdisciplinary team working on the thematic universe revealed by their investigation is to represent that universe to the people from whom she or he first received it and represented, not as a lecture, but as a problem. Let us say, for example, that a group has the responsibility of coordinating a plan for adult education in a peasant area with a high percentage of illiteracy. The plan includes a literacy campaign and a post-literacy phase. During the former stage, problem-posing education seeks out and investigates the generative word; in the post-literacy stage, it seeks out and investigates the generative theme.

Let us here, however, consider only the investigation of the generative themes or the meaningful thematics. Once the investigators have determined the area in which they will work and have acquired a preliminary acquaintance with the area through the secondary sources, they initiate the first stage of the investigation. This beginning, like any beginning in any human activity, involves difficulties and risks which are, to a certain point, normal, although they are not always evident in the first contact with the individuals of the area.

In this first contact, the investigators need to get a significant number of persons to agree to an informal meeting during which they can talk about the objectives of their presence in the area. In this meeting, they explain the reason for the investigation, how it is to be carried out, and to what use it will be put. They further explain that the investigation will be impossible without a relation of mutual understanding and trust.

If the participants agree both to the investigation and to the subsequent process, the investigator should call for volunteers among the participants to serve as assistance. These volunteers will gather a series of necessary data about the life of the area. Of even greater importance, however, is the active presence of these volunteers in the investigation.

Meanwhile, the investigators begin their own visits to the area, never forcing themselves, but acting as sympathetic observers with an attitude of understanding towards what they see. While it is normal for investigators to come to the area with values which influence their perceptions, this does not mean that they may transform the thematic investigation into a means of imposing these values. The only dimension of these values which it is hoped the people whose thematics are being investigated will come to share, if it is presumed that the investigators possess this quality, is a critical perception of the world which applies a correct method of approaching reality in order to unveil it. And critical perception cannot be imposed.

Thus, from the very beginning, thematic investigation is expressed as an educational pursuit, as cultural action. During their visits, the investigators set their critical aim on the area under study as if it were for them an enormous, unique, living code to be deciphered. They regard the area as a totality and, visit upon visit, attempt to split it by analyzing the partial dimensions which impress them. Through this process, they expand their understanding of how the various parts interact, which will later help them penetrate the totality itself.

During this decoding stage, the investigators observe certain moments of the life of the area, sometimes directly, sometimes by means of informal conversations with the inhabitants. They register everything in their notebooks, including apparently unimportant items: the way the people talk, their style of life, their behavior, church and at work. They record the idiom of the people, their expressions, their vocabulary, and their syntax—not their incorrect pronunciation, but rather the way they construct their thought.

It is essential that the investigators observe the area under varying circumstances: labor in the fields, meetings of a local association, noting the behavior of the participants, the language used, and the relations between the officers and the members; the role played by women and by young people; leisure hours, games, and sports; conversations with people in their homes, noting examples of husband-wife and parent-child relationships. No activity must escape the attention of the investigators during the initial survey of the area.

After each observation visit, the investigator should draw up a brief report to be discussed by the entire team in order to evaluate the preliminary findings of both the professional investigators and the local assistants. To facilitate the participation of the assistance, the evaluation meeting should be held in the area itself. The evaluation meetings represent a second stage in the decoding of the unique living code.

As each person, in his decoding essay, relates how he perceived or felt a certain occurrence or situation, his exposition challenges all the other decoders by representing to them the same reality upon which they have themselves been intent. At this moment, they reconsider, through the considerations of others, their own previous consideration. Thus, the analysis of reality made by each individual decoder sends them all back, dialogically, to the disjoint whole, which once more becomes a totality, evoking a new analysis by the investigators, following which a new evaluative and critical meeting will be held.

Representatives of the inhabitants participate in all activities as members of the investigating team. The more the group divides and reintegrates the whole, the more closely they approach the nuclei of the principal and secondary contradictions which involve the inhabitants of the area. By locating these nuclei of contradictions, the investigators might even at this stage be able to organize the program content of their educational action. Indeed, if the content reflected these contradictions, it would undoubtedly contain the meaningful thematics of the area, and one can safely affirm that action based on these observations would be much more likely to succeed than that based on decisions from the top.

The investigators should not, however, be tempted by this possibility. The basic thing, starting from the initial perception of these nuclei of contradictions, which include the principal contradiction of society as a larger, epochal unit, is to study the inhabitants' level of awareness of these contradictions. Intrinsically, these contradictions constitute limit situations, involve themes, and indicate tasks. If individuals are caught up in and are unable to separate themselves from these limit situations, their theme, in reference to these situations, is fatalism, and the task implied by the theme is the lack of a task.

Thus, although the limit situations are objective realities which call forth needs in individuals, one must investigate with these individuals their level of awareness of these situations. A limit situation, as a concrete reality, can call forth from persons in different areas and even in sub-areas of the same area quite opposite themes and tasks. Thus, the basic concern of the investigators should be to concentrate on the knowledge of what Goldman calls "real consciousness" and "potential consciousness."

Real consciousness is the result of the multiple obstacles and deviations that the different factors of empirical reality put into opposition and submit for realization by the potential consciousness. Real consciousness implies the impossibility of perceiving the untested feasibility which lies beyond the limit situations. But whereas the untested feasibility cannot be achieved at the level of real or present consciousness, it can be realized through testing action which reveals its hitherto unperceived viability. The untested feasibility and real consciousness are related, as are testing action and potential consciousness.

Goldman's concept of potential consciousness is similar to what Nikolai terms "unperceived practical solutions." It is untested feasibility in contrast to "perceived practicable solutions" and "present practiced solutions," which correspond to Goldman's real consciousness. Accordingly, the fact that the investigators may, in the first stage of the investigation, approximately apprehend the complex of contradictions does not authorize them to begin to structure the program content of educational action. This perception of reality is still their own, not that of the people.

It is with the apprehension of the complex of contradictions that the second stage of the investigation begins. Always acting as a team, the investigators will select some of these contradictions to develop the codifications to be used in the thematic investigation. Since the codifications—sketches or photographs—are the objects which mediate the decoders in their critical analysis, the preparation of these codifications must be guided by certain principles other than the usual ones for making visual aids.

The first requirement is that these codifications must necessarily represent situations familiar to the individuals whose thematics are being examined, so that they can easily recognize the situations and thus their own relation to them. It is inadmissible, whether during the process of investigation or in the following stage when the meaningful thematics are presented as program content, to present pictures of reality unfamiliar to the participants. The latter procedure, although dialectical (because individuals analyzing an unfamiliar reality could compare it with their own and discover the limitations of each), cannot proceed. The more basic one, dictated by the participant state of submersion, is the process in which individuals analyzing their own reality become aware of their prior distorted perceptions and thereby come to have a new perception of that reality.

An equally fundamental requirement for the preparation of the codifications is that their thematic nucleus be neither overly explicit nor overly enigmatic. The former may degenerate into mere propaganda with no real decoding to be done beyond stating the obviously predetermined content. The latter runs the risk of appearing to be a puzzle or a guessing game. Since they represent existential situations, the codification should be simple in their complexity and offer various decoding possibilities. In order to avoid the brainwashing tendencies of propaganda, codifications are not slogans; they are cognizable objects, challenges towards which the critical reflection of the decoder should be directed.

In order to offer various possibilities of analysis and the decoding process, the codification should be organized as a thematic fan. As the decoders reflect on the codifications, the codification should open up in the direction of other themes. This opening up, which does not occur if the thematic content is either too explicit or too enigmatic, is indispensable to the perception of the dialectical relations which exist between the themes and their opposites. Accordingly, the codifications reflecting an existential situation must objectively constitute a totality; its elements must interact in the makeup of the whole.

In the process of decoding, the participants externalize their thematics and thereby make explicit their real consciousness of the world. As they do this, they begin to see how they themselves acted while actually experiencing the situation they are now analyzing and thus reach a perception of their previous perception. By achieving this awareness, they come to perceive reality differently. By broadening the horizon of their perception, they discover more easily, in their background awareness, the dialectical relations between the two dimensions of reality. By stimulating perception of the previous perception and knowledge of the previous knowledge, decoding stimulates the appearance of a new perception and the development of new knowledge. The new perception and knowledge are systematically continued with the inauguration of the educational plan, which transforms the untested feasibility into testing action as potential consciousness supersedes real consciousness.

Preparing the codifications further requires that, insofar as possible, they should represent contradictions, inclusive of others, which constitute the system of contradictions of the area under study. As each of these inclusive codifications is prepared, the other contradictions contained therein should also be codified. The decoding of the former will be dialectically clarified by the decoding of the latter.

In this connection, a very valuable contribution to our method has been made by Gabriel Bodí, a young Chilean civil servant in one of the most significant Chilean governmental institutions, the Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuario. In depth, during his use of this method in the post-literacy stage, Bodí observed that the peasants became interested in the discussion only when the codification related directly to their felt needs. Any deviation in the codification, as well as any attempt by the educator to guide the decoding discussion into other areas, produced silence and indifference.

On the other hand, he observed that even when the codification centered on their felt needs, the peasants could not manage to concentrate systematically on the discussion, which often digressed to the point of never reaching a synthesis. Also, they almost never perceived the relationship of their felt needs to the direct and indirect causes of these needs. One might say that they fail to perceive the untested feasibility lying beyond the limit situations which engendered their needs.

Bodí then decided to experiment with a simultaneous projection of different situations. In this technique lies the value of his contribution. Initially, he projects a very simple codification of an existential situation. He terms his first codification "essential"; it represents the basic nucleus and opens up into a thematic fan, extending to auxiliary codifications. After the essential codification is decoded, the educator maintains its projected image as a reference for the participants and successively projects alongside it the auxiliary codifications. By means of the latter, which are directly related to the essential codification, he sustains the vivid interest of the participants, who are thereby enabled to reach a synthesis.

The great achievement of Gabriel Bodí is that by means of the dialectics between the essential and the auxiliary codifications, he has managed to communicate to the participants a sense of totality. Individuals who were submerged in reality, merely feeling their needs, emerge from reality and perceive the causes of their needs. In this way, they can go beyond the level of real consciousness to that of potential consciousness much more rapidly.

Once the codifications have been prepared and all their possible thematic facets have been studied by the interdisciplinary team, the investigators begin the third stage of the investigation by returning to the area to initiate decoding dialogues in the thematic investigation circles. These discussions, which decode the material prepared in the preceding stage, are taped for subsequent analysis by the interdisciplinary team. In addition to the investigator acting as decoding coordinator, two other specialists—a psychologist and a sociologist—attend the meetings. Their task is to note and record the significant and apparently insignificant reactions of the decoders during the decoding process.

The coordinator must not only listen to the individuals but must challenge them, posing as problems both the codified existential situation and their own answers. Due to the cathartic force of the methodology, the participants of the thematic investigation circles externalize a series of sentiments and opinions about themselves, the world, and others that perhaps they would not express under different circumstances.

In one of the thematic investigations carried out in Santiago, a group of tenement residents discussed a scene showing a drunken man walking on the street and three young men conversing on the corner. The group participants commented that the only one there who is productive and useful to his country is the drunkard who is returning home after working all day for low wages and who is worried about his family because he can't take care of their needs. "He's the only worker; he's a decent worker and a sales like us." The investigator had intended to study aspects of alcoholism. He probably would not have elicited the above responses if he had presented the participants with a questionnaire he had elaborated himself. If asked directly, they might even have denied ever taking a drink themselves. But in their comments on the codification of an existential situation they could recognize, and in which they could recognize themselves, they said what they really felt.

There are two important aspects to these declarations. On the one hand, they verbalize the connection between earning low wages, feeling exploited, and getting drunk—getting drunk as a flight from reality, as an attempt to overcome the frustration of inaction, as an ultimately self-destructive solution. On the other hand, they manifest the need to rate the drunkard highly: "He's the only one useful to his country because he works, while the others only gab." After praising the drunkard, the participants then identify themselves with him as workers who also drink, "decent workers."

Contrast this with the failure of a moralistic educator sermonizing against alcoholism and presenting as an example of virtue something which, for these men, is not a manifestation of virtue. In this and the other cases, the only sound procedure is the conscientization of the situation, which should be attempted from the start of the thematic investigation. Obviously, *consciente zazao* does not stop at the level of mere subjective perception of a situation but, through action, prepares men for the struggle against the obstacles to their humanization.

In another experience, this time with peasants, I observed that the unchanging motif during an entire discussion of a situation depicting work in the fields was the demand for an increase in wages and the necessity of joining together to create a union to obtain this particular demand. Three situations were discussed during the session, and the motif was always the same. Now, imagine an educator who has organized his educational program for these men consisting of reading wholesome texts in which one learns that "the water is in the well." But precisely this type of thing happens all the time in both education and politics because it is not realized that the dialogical nature of education begins with thematic investigation.

Once the decoding in the circles has been completed, the last stage of the investigation begins as the investigators undertake a systematic, interdisciplinary study of their findings. Listening to the tapes recorded during the decoding sessions and studying the notes taken by the psychologists and the sociologists, the investigators begin to list the themes, explicit or implicit, in the affirmations made during the sessions. These themes should be classified according to the various social sciences.

Classification does not mean that when the program is elaborated, the themes will be seen as belonging to isolated categories, but only that a theme is viewed in a specific manner by each of the social sciences to which it is related. The theme of development, for example, is especially appropriate to the field of economics, but not exclusively so. This theme would also be focalized on sociology, anthropology, and social psychology—fields concerned with cultural change and with the modification of attitudes and values, questions which are equally relevant to a philosophy of development. It would be focalized by political science, a field concerned with the decisions which involve development, by education, and so forth.

In this way, the themes which characterize a totality will never be approached rigidly. It would indeed be a pity if the themes, after being investigated in the richness of the interpenetration with other themes of reality, was subsequently to be handled in such a way as to sacrifice their richness, and hence their force, to the strictures of specialties.

Once the thematic demarcation is completed, each specialist presents to the interdisciplinary team a project for the breakdown of his theme. In breaking down the theme, the specialist looks for the fundamental nuclei which, comprising learning units and establishing a sequence, give a general view of the theme. As each specific project is discussed, the other specialists make suggestions. These may be incorporated into the project and/or may be included in the brief essays to be written on the theme. These essays, to which bibliographic suggestions are annexed, are valuable aids in training the teacher's students who will work in the culture circles.

During this effort to break down the meaningful thematics, the team will recognize the need to include some fundamental themes which were not directly suggested by the people during the preceding investigation. The introduction of these themes has proved to be necessary and also corresponds to the dialogical character of education. If educational programming is dialogical, the teacher-students also have the right to participate by including themes not previously suggested. I call the latter type of theme "hinged themes" due to their function. They may either facilitate the connection between two themes in the program unit, filling a possible gap between the two, or they may illustrate the relations between the general program content and the view of the world held by the people. Hence, one of these themes may be located at the beginning of thematic units. The anthropological concept of culture is one of these hinged themes; it clarifies the role of people in the world and with the world as transforming rather than adaptive beings.

Once the breakdown of the thematics is completed, it follows the stage of its codification, choosing the best channel of communication for each theme and its representation. A codification may be simple or compound. The former utilizes either the visual, pictoralographic, the tactile, or the auditive channel; the latter utilizes various channels. The selection of the pictorial or graphic channel depends not only on the material to be codified but also whether or not the individuals with whom one wishes to communicate are literate.

After the thematics have been codified, the didactic material (photographs, slides, filmstrips, posters, reading texts, and so forth) is prepared. The team may propose some themes or aspects of some themes to outside specialists as topics for recorded interviews. Let us take the theme of development as an example. The team approaches two or more economists of varying schools of thought, tells them about the program, and invites them to contribute an interview on the subject in language comprehensible to the audience. If the specialists accept, an interview of 15 to 20 minutes is taped. A photograph may be taken of each specialist while he is speaking.

When the taped interview is presented to the culture circle, an introductory statement indicates who each speaker is, what she or he has written, done, and is doing now. Meanwhile, the speaker's photograph is projected on a screen. If, for instance, the speaker is a university professor, the introduction could include a discussion regarding what the participants think of universities and what they expect of them. The group has already been told that the recorded interview will be followed by a discussion of its contents, which function as an auditive codification. The team subsequently reports to the specialist the reaction of the participants during the discussion.

This technique links intellectuals, often well-intentioned but not infrequently alienated from the reality of the people, to that reality. It also gives the people an opportunity to hear and criticize the thought of intellectuals. Some themes or nuclei may be presented by means of brief dramatizations containing the theme only—no solutions. The dramatization acts as a codification, as a problem-posing situation to be discussed.

Another didactic resource, as long as it is carried out within a problem-posing rather than a banking approach to education, is the reading and discussion of magazine articles, newspapers, and book chapters. Beginning with passages, as in the case of the recorded interviews, the author is introduced before the group begins, and the contents are discussed afterward. Along the same lines, it is indispensable to analyze the contents of newspaper editorials following any given event. Why do different newspapers have such different interpretations of the same fact? This practice helps develop a sense of criticism so that people will react to newspapers or news broadcasts not as passive objects of the communique directed at them, but rather as consciousnesses seeking to be free.

With all the didactic material prepared, to which should be added small introductory manuals, the team of educators is ready to represent to the people their own thematics in systematized and amplified form. The thematics which have come from the people return to them not as contents to be deposited, but as problems to be solved.

The first task of the basic education teacher is to present the general program of the educational campaign. The people will find themselves in this program; it will not seem strange to them since it originated with them. The educators will also explain, based on the dialogical character of education, the presence in the program of the hinged themes and their significance.

If educators lack sufficient funds to carry out the preliminary thematic investigation as described above, they can, with a minimum knowledge of the situation, select some basic themes to serve as codifications to be investigated. Accordingly, they can begin with introductory themes and simultaneously initiate further thematic investigation. One of the basic themes, and one which I consider central and indispensable, is the anthropological concept of culture. Where the men and women of peasants or urban workers, learning to read or enrolled in a post-literacy program, the starting point of their search to know more (in the instrumental meaning of the term) is the debate of the concept. As they discuss the world of culture, they express their level of awareness of reality in which various themes are implicit. Their discussion touches upon other aspects of reality which come to be perceived in an increasingly critical manner. These aspects, in turn, involve many other themes.

With the experience now behind me, I can affirm that the concept of culture, discussed imaginatively in all or most of its dimensions, can provide various aspects of an educational program. In addition, after several days of dialogue with the culture circle participants, the educators can ask the participants directly: "What other themes or subjects could we discuss besides these?" As each person replies, the answer is noted down and is immediately proposed to the group as a problem. One of the group members may say, for example, "I'd like to talk about nationalism." "Very well," says the educator, noting down the suggestion, and adds, "What does nationalism mean? Why is a discussion about nationalism of any interest to us?" My experience shows that when a suggestion is posed as a problem to the group, new themes appear.

If, in an area where, for example, 30 culture circles meet on the same night, all the coordinators-educators proceed in this fashion, the central team will have a rich variety of thematic material for study. The important thing, from the point of view of libertarian education, is for the people to come to feel like masters of their thinking by discussing the thinking and views of the world explicitly or implicitly manifest in their own suggestions and those of their comrades. Because this view of education starts with a conviction that it cannot present its own program but must search for this program dialogically with the people it serves, it introduces the pedagogy of the oppressed, in the elaboration of which the oppressed must participate.

Chapter 4. This chapter, which analyzes the theories of cultural action which develop from anti-ideological and dialogical matrices, will make frequent reference to points presented in the previous chapters, either to expand these points or to clarify new affirmations. I shall start by reaffirming that humankind, as beings of praxis, differ from animals, which are beings of pure activity. Animals do not consider the world; they are immersed in it. In contrast, human beings emerge from the world, objectify it, and in doing so, can understand it and transform it with their labor. Animals, which do not labor, live in a setting which they cannot transcend. Hence, each animal species lives in the context appropriate to it, and these contexts, while open to humans, cannot communicate among themselves.

But human activity consists of action and reflection. It is praxis. It is transformation of the world, and as praxis, it requires theory to illuminate it. Human activity is theory and practice; it is reflection and action. It cannot, as I stressed in Chapter 2, be reduced to either verbalism or activism.

Lenin's famous statement, "Without a revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement," means that a revolution is achieved with neither verbalism nor activism, but rather with praxis—that is, both reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed. The revolutionary effort to transform these structures radically cannot designate its leaders as thinkers and the oppressed as mere doers. If true commitment to the people, involving the transformation of reality by which they are oppressed, requires the theory of transforming action, this theory cannot fail to assign the people a fundamental role in the transformation process.

The leaders cannot treat the oppressed as mere activists to be denied the opportunity of reflection and allowed merely the illusion of acting, whereas in fact they would continue to be manipulated—and in this case, by the presumed foes of manipulation. The leaders do bear the responsibility for coordination and, at times, direction. But leaders who deny praxis to the oppressed thereby invalidate their own praxis. By imposing their word on others, they falsify that word and establish a contradiction between their methods and their objectives. If they are truly committed to liberation, their action and reflection cannot proceed without the action and reflection of others.

Revolutionary praxis must stand opposed to the praxis of the dominant elites, for they are by nature antithetical. Revolutionary praxis cannot tolerate an absurd dichotomy in which the praxis of the people is merely that of following the leader's decisions—a dichotomy reflecting the prescriptive methods of the dominant elites. Revolutionary praxis is a unity, and the leaders cannot treat the oppressed as their possession. Manipulation, sloganizing, depositing, regimentation, and prescription cannot be components of revolutionary praxis precisely because they are components of the praxis of domination.

In order to dominate, the dominator has no choice but to deny true praxis to the people, deny them the right to say their own word and think their own thoughts. He or she cannot act dialogically, for to do so would mean either that they had relinquished their power to dominate and join the cause of the oppressed, or had lost that power through miscalculation. Adversely, revolutionary leaders who do not act dialogically in their relations with the people either have retained characteristics of the dominator and are not truly revolutionary, or they are totally misguided in their conception of their role and prisoners of their own sectarianism, are equally non-revolutionary. They may even reach power, but the validity of any revolution resulting from anti-dialogical action is thoroughly doubtful.

It is absolutely essential that the oppressed participate in the revolutionary process with an increasingly critical awareness of their role as subjects of the transformation. If they are drawn into the process as ambiguous beings, partly themselves and partly the oppressors housed within them, and if they come to power still embodying that ambiguity imposed on them by the situation of oppression, it is my contention that they will merely imagine they have reached power. Their existential duality may even facilitate the rise of a sectarian climate, leading to the installation of bureaucracies which undermine the revolution. If the oppressed do not become aware of this ambiguity during the course of the revolutionary process, they may participate in that process with a spirit more advanced than revolutionary; they may aspire to revolution as a means of domination rather than as a road to liberation.

If revolutionary leaders who incarnate genuine humanism have difficulties and problems, the difficulties and problems will be far greater for a group of leaders who try, even with the best intentions, to carry out the revolution for the people. To attempt this is equivalent to carrying out a revolution without the people, because the people are drawn into the process by the same methods and procedures used to oppress them.

Dialogue with the people is radically necessary to every authentic revolution. This is what makes a revolution, as distinguished from a military coup. One does not expect dialogue from a coup; only deceit in order to achieve legitimacy or force in order to repress. Sooner or later, a true revolution must initiate a courageous dialogue with the people. Its very legitimacy lies in that dialogue. It cannot fear the people, their expression, their effective participation in power. It must be accountable to them, must speak frankly to them of its achievements, its mistakes, its miscalculations, and its difficulties. The earlier dialogue begins, the more revolutionary will the movement be.

The dialogue which is radically necessary to revolution corresponds to another radical need: that of women and men as beings who cannot be truly human apart from communication, for they are essentially communicative creatures. To impede communication is to reduce men to the status of things, and this is a job for oppressors, not for revolutionaries.

Let me emphasize that my defense of praxis implies no dichotomy by which this praxis could be divided into a prior stage of reflection and a subsequent stage of action. Action and reflection occur simultaneously. A critical analysis of reality may, however, reveal that a particular form of action is impossible or inappropriate at the present time. Those who, through reflection, perceive the infeasibility or inappropriateness of another form of action which should accordingly be postponed or substituted cannot thereby be accused of inaction. Critical reflection is also action.

I previously stated that in education, the attempt of the teacher's student to understand a cognizable object is not exhausted in that object because this act extends to other student-teachers in such a way that the cognizable object mediates their capacity for understanding. The same is true of revolutionary action. That is, the oppressed and the leaders are equally the subjects of revolutionary action, and reality serves as the medium for the transforming action of both groups. In this theory of action, one cannot speak of an actor, nor simply of actors, but rather of actors in intercommunication.

This affirmation might appear to imply division, dichotomy, rupture of the revolutionary forces. In fact, it signifies exactly the opposite: their communion. Apart from this communion, we do see dichotomy: leaders on one side and people on the other, in a replica of the relations of oppression. Denial of communion in the revolutionary process, avoidance of dialogue with the people under the pretext of organizing them, of strengthening revolutionary power, or of ensuring a united front, is really a fear of freedom. It is fear of, or lack of faith in, the people. But if the people cannot be trusted, there is no reason for liberation. In this case, the revolution is not even carried out for the people, but by the people for the leaders—a complete self-negation.

The revolution is made neither by the leaders for the people nor by the people for the leaders, but by both acting together in unshakable solidarity. This solidarity is born only when the leaders witness it to their humble, loving, and courageous encounter with the people. Not all men and women have sufficient courage for this encounter, but when they avoid encounter, they become inflexible and treat others as mere objects. Instead of nurturing life, they kill life; instead of searching for life, they flee from it. And these are oppressor characteristics.

Some may think that to affirm dialogue, the encounter of women and men in the world in order to transform the world, is naively and subjectively idealistic. There is nothing, however, more real or concrete than people in the world and with the world, than humans with other humans, and some people against others as oppressing and oppressed classes. Authentic revolution attempts to transform the reality which begets this dehumanizing state of affairs. Those whose interests are served by that reality cannot carry out this transformation; it must be achieved by the tyrannized with their leaders. This truth, however, must become radically consequential; that is, the leaders must incarnate it through communion with the people. In this communion, both groups grow together, and the leaders, instead of being simply self-appointed, are installed or authenticated in their practices with the praxis of the people.

Many persons bound to a mechanistic view of reality do not perceive that the concrete situation of individuals conditions their consciousness of the world, and that, in turn, this consciousness conditions their attitudes and their ways of dealing with reality. They think that reality can be transformed mechanistically, without posing the person's false consciousness of reality as a problem or through revolutionary action developing a consciousness which is less and less false.

There is no historical reality which is not human. There is no history without humankind, and no history for human beings. There is only history of humanity, made by people and, as Marx pointed out, in turn making them. It is when the majorities are denied their right to participate in history as subjects that they become dominated and alienated. Thus, to supersede their conditions as objects by the status of subjects, the objective of any true revolution requires that the people act as well as reflect upon the reality to be transformed.

It would indeed be idealistic to affirm that by merely reflecting on oppressive reality and discovering their status as objects, persons have thereby already become subjects. But while this perception, in and of itself, does not mean that thinkers have become subjects, it does mean, as many of my co-investigators affirmed, that they are subjects in expectancy—an expectancy which leads them to seek to solidify their new status.

On the other hand, it would be a false premise to believe that activism, which is not true action, is the road to revolution. People will be truly critical if they live the plenitude of the praxis; that is, if their action encompasses a critical reflection which increasingly organizes their thinking and thus leads them to move from a purely naive knowledge of reality to a higher level—one which enables them to perceive the causes of reality.

If revolutionary leaders deny this right to the people, they impair their own capacity to think, or at least to think correctly. Revolutionary leaders cannot think without the people, nor for the people, but only with the people. The dominant elites, on the other hand, can and do think without the people, although they do not permit themselves the luxury of failing to think about the people in order to know them better and thus dominate them more efficiently. Consequently, any apparent dialogue or communication between the elites and the masses is really the depositing of communiques whose contents are intended to exercise a domesticating influence.

Why do the dominant elites not become debilitated when they do not think with the people? Because the latter constitute their antithesis, their very reason for existence. If the elites were to think with the people, the contradiction would be superseded, and they could no longer dominate. From the point of view of the dominators, in any epoch, correct thinking presupposes the non-thinking of the people.

A Mr. Giddy, later president of the Royal Society, raised objections which could be matched in every country: "However spacious in theory the project might be of giving education to the laboring classes of the poor, it would be prejudicial to their morals and happiness. It would teach them to despise their lot in life instead of making them good servants in agricultural and other laborious employments. Instead of teaching them subordination, it would render them fractious and refractory, as was evident in the manufacturing countries. It would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against Christianity. It would render them insolent to their superiors, and in a few years the legislature would find it necessary to direct the strong arm of power against them."

What Mr. Giddy really wanted, and what the elites of today want, although they do not denounce popular education so cynically and openly, was for the people not to think. Since the Mr. Giddies of all epochs, as the oppressor class, cannot think with the people, neither can they let the people think for themselves. The same is not true, however, of revolutionary leaders. If they do not think with the people, they become devitalized. The people are their constituent matrix, not mere objects thought of. Although revolutionary leaders may also have to think about the people in order to understand them better, this thinking differs from that of the elite, for in thinking about the people in order to liberate rather than dominate them, the leaders give of themselves to the thinking of the people. One is the thinking of the master; the other is the thinking of the comrade.

Domination, by its very nature, requires only a dominant pole and a dominated pole in antithetical contradiction. Revolutionary liberation, which attempts to resolve this contradiction, implies the existence not only of these poles but also of a leadership group which emerges during this attempt. This leadership group either identifies itself with the oppressed state of the people, or it is not revolutionary. To simply think about the people, as the dominators do, without any self-giving in that thought, to fail to think with the people, is a sure way to cease being revolutionary.

Leaders in the process of oppression subsist on the living death of the oppressed and find their authentication in the vertical relationship between themselves and the latter. In the revolutionary process, there is only one way for the emerging leaders to achieve authenticity: they must die in order to be reborn through and with the oppressed. We can legitimately say that in the process of oppression, someone oppresses someone else. We cannot say that in the process of revolution, someone liberates someone else, nor yet that someone liberates himself, but rather that human beings, in communion, liberate each other.

This affirmation is not meant to undervalue the importance of revolutionary leaders, but on the contrary, to emphasize their value. What could be more important than to live and work with the oppressed, with the rejects of life, with the wretched of the earth? In this communion, the revolutionary leader should find not only their *raison d'être* but a motive for rejoicing. By their very nature, revolutionary leaders can do what the dominant elites, by their very nature, are unable to do.

In authentic terms, every approach to the oppressed by the elites as a class is couched in terms of the false generosity described in Chapter 1. But the revolutionary leaders cannot be falsely generous, nor can they manipulate. Whereas the oppressor leaders flourish by trampling the people underfoot, the revolutionary leaders can flourish only in communion with the people. Thus, it is that the activity of the oppressor cannot be humanist, while that of the revolutionary is necessarily so.

The inhumanity of the oppressors and revolutionary humanism both make use of science. But science and technology at the service of the former are used to reduce the oppressed to the status of things; at the service of the latter, they are used to promote humanization. The oppressed must become subjects of the latter process, however, lest they continue to be seen as mere objects of scientific interest.

Scientific, revolutionary humanism cannot, in the name of revolution, treat the oppressed as objects to be analyzed and, based on that analysis, presented with prescriptions for behavior. To do this would be to fall into one of the myths of the oppressor ideology: the absolutizing of ignorance. This myth applies the existence of someone who decrees the ignorance of someone else. The one who is doing the decreeing defines himself and the class to which he belongs as those who know or were born to know. He thereby defines others as alien entities. The words of his own class come to be the true words which he imposes or attempts to impose on the others.

The oppressed, whose words have been stolen from them, those who steal the words of others, develop a deep doubt in the abilities of the others and consider them incompetent. Each time they say their word without hearing the word of those whom they are forbidden to speak, they grow more accustomed to power and acquire a taste for guiding, ordering, and commanding. They can no longer live without having someone to give orders to. Under these circumstances, dialogue is impossible.

Scientific and humanist revolutionary leaders, on the other hand, cannot believe in the myth of the ignorance of the people. They do not have the right to doubt, for a single moment, that it is only a myth. They cannot believe that they, and only they, know anything, for this means to doubt the people. Although they may legitimately recognize themselves as having, due to their revolutionary consciousness, a level of revolutionary knowledge different from the level of empirical knowledge held by the people, they cannot impose themselves and their knowledge on the people. They cannot sloganize the people, but must enter into dialogue with them so that the people's empirical knowledge of reality, nourished by the leader's critical knowledge, gradually becomes transformed into knowledge of the causes of reality.

It would be naive to expect oppressor leads to denounce the myth which absolutizes the ignorance of the people. It would be a contradiction in terms if revolutionary leaders were not to do so, and more contradictory still were they to act in accordance with that myth. The task of revolutionary leaders is to pose as problems not only this myth but all the other myths used by the oppressor elites to oppress.

If instead, revolutionary leaders persist in imitating the oppressors' methods of domination, the people may respond in either of two ways. In certain historical circumstances, they may become domesticated by the new contents which the leaders deposit in them. In other circumstances, they may become

Frightened by a word which threatens the oppressor housed within them, in either event do they become revolutionary? In the first case, the revolution is an illusion. In the second case, an impossibility.

Some well-intentioned but misguided persons suppose that since the dialogical process is prolonged (which, incidentally, is not true), they ought to carry out the revolution without communication, by means of communiques. And that once the revolution is won, they will then develop a thorough-going educational effort. They further justify this procedure by saying that it is not possible to carry out education, liberating education, before taking power.

It is worth analyzing some fundamental points of the Baba assertions. These men and women, or most of them, believe in the necessity for dialogue with the people, but do not believe this dialogue is feasible prior to taking power. When they deny the possibility that the leaders can behave in a critically educational fashion before taking power, they deny the revolution's educational quality as cultural action preparing to become cultural revolution. On the other hand, they confuse cultural action with the new education to be inaugurated once power is taken.

I've already affirmed that it would indeed be naive to expect the oppressor leads to carry out a liberating education. But because the revolution undeniably has an educational nature, in the sense that unless it liberates, it is not Revolution. The taking of power is only one moment, no matter how decisive, in the revolutionary process. As process, the "before" of the revolution is located within the oppressor society and is apparent only to the revolutionary consciousness. The revolution is born as a social entity within the oppressor's society. To the extent that it is cultural action, it cannot fail to correspond to the potentialities of the social entity in which it originated. Every entity develops or is transformed within itself through the interplay of its contradictions. External conditioners, while necessary, are effective only if they coincide with those potentialities. The newness of the revolution is generated within the old oppressive society. The taking of power constitutes only a decisive moment of the continuing revolutionary process. In a dynamic rather than static view of Revolution, there is no absolute "before" or "after" with the taking of power as the dividing line. Originating in objective conditions, Revolution seeks to supersede the situation of Oppression by inaugurating a society of women and men in the process of continuing liberation. The educational dialogical quality of Revolution, which makes it a cultural revolution as well, must be present in all its stages. This educational quality is one of the most effective instruments for keeping the revolution from becoming institutionalized and stratified in a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy. For counter-revolution is carried out by revolutionaries who become reactionary.

Were it not possible to dialogue with the people before power is taken because they have no experience with dialogue, neither would it be possible for the people to come to power, for they are equally inexperienced in the use of power. The revolutionary process is dynamic, and it is in this continuing dynamics, in the praxis of the people, where the revolutionary leaders, that the people and the leaders will learn both dialogue and the use of power. This is as obvious as affirming that a person learns to swim in the water, not in a library. Dialogue with the people is neither a concession or a gift, much less a tactic to be used for domination. Dialogue is the encounter among men to name the world is a fundamental precondition for their true humanization. In the words of Gajo Petrovic, "a free action can only be won by which a man changes his world and himself." The positive condition of freedom is the knowledge of the limits of necessity, the awareness of human creative possibilities. The struggle for a free society is not a struggle for a free society unless through it an even greater degree of individual freedom is created. If this view is true, the Revolutionary process is eminently educational in character. Thus, the road to Revolution involves openness to the people, not imperviousness to them. It involves communion with the people, not mistrust. And as Lenin pointed out, the moral Revolution requires Theory. The moyet's leaders must be with the people in order to stand against the power of Oppression.

Based on these general propositions, let us undertake a more lengthy analysis of the theories of anti-diological and dialogical action.

Conquest. The first characteristic of anti-diological action is the necessity for conquest. The anti-diological individual needs relations with others, aims at conquering them increasingly and by every means, from the toughest to the most refined, from the most repressive to the most solicitous paternalism. Every act of conquest implies a conqueror and someone or something which is conquered. The conqueror imposes his objectives on the vanquished and makes them his possession. He imposes his own contours on the vanquished, who internalize the shape and become ambiguous beings, housing another. From the first, the act of conquest, which reduces persons to the status of things, is necrophilic. Just as anti-diological action is a concomitant of the real, concrete situation of Oppression, dialogical action is indispensable to the Revolutionary supersedence of that situation. An individual is not anti-diological or dialogical in the abstract, but in the world. He or she is not first anti-diological than oppressor, but both simultaneously within an objective situation of Oppression. Anti-dialogue is necessary to the oppressor as a means of further oppression, not only economic but cultural. The vanquished are dispossessed of their word, their expressiveness, their culture. Further, once the situation of Oppression has been initiated, anti-dialock becomes indispensable to its preservation. Because liberating action is dialogical in nature, dialogue cannot be posteriority to that action, but must be concomitant with it. And since liberation must be a permanent condition, dialogue becomes a continuing aspect of liberating action.

The desire for conquest, or rather the necessity of conquest, is at all times present in anti-diological action. To this end, the oppressors attempt to destroy in the oppressed their quality as considerators of the world. Since the oppressors cannot totally achieve this destruction, they must mythicize the world in order to present for the consideration of the oppressed and subjugated a world of deceit designed to increase their alienation and passivity. The oppressors develop a series of methods precluding any presentation of the world as a problem and showing it rather as a fixed entity, as something given, something to which people, as mere spectators, must adapt. It is necessary for the oppressors to approach the people in order, via subjugation, to keep them passive. This approximation, however, does not involve being with the people or acquire true communication. It is accomplished by the oppressors depositing myths indispensable to the preservation of the status quo. For example, the myth that the oppressive order is a free society; the myth that all persons are free to work where they wish, that if they don't like their boss, they can leave him and look for another job; the myth that this order respects human rights and is therefore worthy of esteem; the myth that anyone who is industrious can become an entrepreneur; worse yet, the myth that the street vendor is as much an entrepreneur as the owner of a large factory; the myth of the universal right of education, when of all the Brazilian children who enter primary schools, only a tiny fraction ever reach the University; the myth of the equality of all individuals, when the question, "Do you know who you're talking to?" is still current among us; the myth of the heroism of the oppressor classes as defenders of Western Christian civilization against materialist barbarism; the myth of the charity and generosity of the elites, when what they really do as a class is to foster selective good deeds, subsequently elaborated into the myth of disinterested aid, which on the international level was severely criticized by Pope John the 23rd; the myth that the dominant elites, recognizing their duties, promote the advancement of the people so that the people, in a gesture of gratitude, should accept the words of the elites and be conformed to them; the myth that rebellion is a sin against God; the myth of private property is fundamental to personal human development, so long as oppressors are the only true human beings; the myth of the industriousness of the oppressors and the laziness and dishonesty of the oppressed, as well as the myth of the natural inferiority of the latter and the superiority of the former.

All these myths and others the reader could list, the internalization of which is essential to the subjugation of the oppressed, are presented to them by well-organized propaganda and slogans, via the mass communications media, as if such alienation constituted real communication. In some, there is no oppressive reality which is not at the same time necessarily anti-diological, just as there's no anti-dialogue in which the oppressors do not untiringly dedicate themselves to the constant conquest of the oppressed. In ancient Rome, the dominant elite spoke of the need to give bread and circuits to the people in order to soften them up and to secure their own tranquility. The dominant elites of today, like those of any epoch, continue in a version of original sin to need to conquer others, with or without bread and circus. The content and methods of conquest vary historically. What does not vary, as long as dominant elites exist, is the necrophilic passion to oppress, divide, and rule.

This is another fundamental dimension of the theory of oppressive action, which is as old as oppression itself. As the oppressive minority subordinates and dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in power. The minority cannot permit itself the luxury of tolerating the unification of the people, which would undoubtedly signify a serious threat to their own hegemony. Accordingly, the oppressors halt by any method, including violence, any action which in even incipient fashion could awaken the oppressed to the need for unity. Concepts such as unity, organization, and struggle are immediately labeled as dangerous. In fact, of course, these concepts are dangerous to the oppressors, for their realization is necessary to actions of liberation. It is in the interest of the oppressor to weaken the oppressed still further, to isolate them, to create and deepen rifts among them. This is done by varied means, from the repressive methods of the government bureaucracy to the forms of cultural action with which they manipulate the people by giving them the impression that they are being helped.

One of the characteristics of oppressive cultural action, which is almost never perceived by the dedicated but naive professionals who are involved, is the emphasis on a focalized view of problems rather than on seeing them as dimensions of a totality. In community development projects, the more regional area is broken down into local communities without the study of these communities both as totalities in themselves and as parts of another totality (the area, region, and so forth, which in its turn is part of a still larger totality, the nation, as part of the continental totality), the more alienation is intensified. And the more alienated people are, the easier it is to divide them and keep them divided. These focalized forms of action, by intensifying the focalized way of life of the oppressed, especially in rural areas, hampered the oppressed from perceiving reality critically and keep them isolated from the problems of oppressed women and men in other areas. The same divisive effect occurs in connection with the so-called leadership training courses, which are, although carried out without any such intention by many of their organizers, in the last analysis alienating. These courses are based on the naive assumption that one can promote the community by training its leaders, as if it were the parts that promote the whole, and not the whole which, in being promoted, promotes the parts. Those members of the communities who show sufficient leadership capacities to be chosen for these courses necessarily reflect and express the aspirations of the individuals of their community. They are in harmony with the way of the living and thinking about reality which characterizes their comrades, even though there reveal special abilities which give them the status of leaders. As soon as they complete the course and return to the community with resources they did not formally possess, they either use these resources to control the submerged and dominated consciousness of their comrades or they become strangers in their own communities, and their former leadership position is thus threatened. In order not to lose their leadership status, they will probably tend to continue manipulating the community, but in a more efficient manner.

When cultural action, as a totalized and totalizing process, approaches an entire community and not merely its leaders, the opposite process occurs. Either the former leaders grow along with everyone else, or they are replaced by new leaders who emerge as a result of the new social consciousness of the community. The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders. The latter course, by preserving a state of alienation, hinders the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in a total reality, and without this critical intervention, it is always difficult to achieve the unity of the oppressed as a class.

Class conflict is another concept which upsets the oppressors, since they do not wish to consider themselves an oppressive class. Unable to deny, try as they may, the existence of social classes, they preach the need for understanding and harmony between those who buy and those who are obliged to sell their labor. However, the unconcealable antagonism which exists between the two classes makes this harmony impossible. The elites call for harmony between classes as if classes were fortuitous agglomerations of individuals curiously looking at a shop window on a Sunday afternoon. The only harmony which is viable and demonstrable is that found among the oppressors themselves. Although they may diverge and upon occasion even clash over group interests, they unite immediately at a threat to the class. Similarly, the harmony of the oppressed is only possible when its members are engaged in the struggle for liberation. Only in exceptional cases is it not only possible but necessary for both classes to unite and act in harmony. But when the emergency which United them is passed, they will return to the contradiction which defines their existence and which never really disappeared.

All the actions of the dominant class manifest its need to divide in order to facilitate the preservation of the oppressor state. Its interference in the unions, favoring certain representatives of the dominated classes who actually represent the oppressor, not their own comrades; its promotion of individuals who reveal leadership capacity and could signify a threat if they were not softened up in this way; its distribution of benefits to some and penalties to others—all these are ways of dividing in order to preserve the system which favors the elite. They are forms of action which exploit directly or indirectly one of the weak points of the oppressed: their basic insecurity. The oppressed are insecure in their duality as beings which house the oppressor. On the one hand, they resist her or him; on the other hand, at a certain stage in their relationship, they are attracted by him or her. Under these circumstances, the oppressors easily obtain positive results from devise of action. In addition, the oppressed know from experience the price of not accepting an invitation offered for the purpose of preventing their unity as a class. Losing their jobs and finding their names on a blacklist signifying closed doors to other jobs is the least that can happen. Their basic insecurity is thus directly linked to the enslavement of their labor, which really implies the enslavement of their person.

As Bishops split emphasized, "people are fulfilled only to the extent that they create their world, which is a human world and created with their transforming labor." The fulfillment of humankind as human beings lies then in the fulfillment of the world. If for a person to be in the world of work is to be totally dependent, insecure, and permanently threatened, if their work does not belong to them, the person cannot be fulfilled. Work that is not free ceases to be a fulfilling pursuit and becomes an effective means of dehumanization.

Every move by the oppressed towards unity points towards other actions. It means that sooner or later the oppressed will perceive their state of depersonalization and discover that as long as they are divided, they will always be easy prey for manipulation and domination. Unity and organization can enable them to change their weakness into a transforming force with which they can recreate the world and make it more human. The more human world to which they justly aspire, however, is the antithesis of the human world of the oppressors—a world which is the exclusive possession of the oppressors, who preach an impossible harmony between themselves (who dehumanize) and the oppressed (who are dehumanized). Since oppressors and oppressed are antithetical, what serves the interests of one group deserves the interests of the others. Dividing in order to preserve the status quo, then, is necessarily a fundamental objective of the theory of anti-diological action.

In addition, the dominators try to present themselves as saviors of the women and men they dehumanize and divide. This messianism, however, cannot conceal their true intention: to save themselves. They want to save their riches, their power, their way of life—the things that enable them to subjugate others. Their mistake is that men cannot save themselves, no matter how one understands salvation, either as individuals or as an oppressor class. Salvation can be achieved only with others. To the extent, however, that the elite suppress, they cannot be with the oppressed, for being against them is the essence of Oppression. A psychoanalysis of oppressive action might reveal the false generosity of the oppressor, described in chapter 1, as a dimension of the latter's sense of guilt. With this false generosity, he attempts not only to preserve an unjust and necrophilic order but to buy peace for himself. It happens that peace cannot be bought. Peace is experienced in solidary and loving acts, which cannot be incarnated in oppression. Hence, the Messianic element of the theory of anti-diological action reinforces the first characteristic of this action: the necessity for conquest. Since it is necessary to divide the people in order to preserve the status quo and thereby the power of the dominators, it is essential for the oppressors to keep the oppressed from perceiving their strategy. So the former must convince the latter that they are being defended against the "demonic action" of "marginals," "rowdies," and "enemies of God," for these are the epithets directed at men who lived and are living the brave pursuit of man's humanization. In order to divide and confuse the people, the Destroyers call themselves Builders and accuse the True Builders of being destructive. History, however, always takes it upon itself to modify these designations. Today, although the official terminology continues to call Tiradentes a conspirator in confidence and the libertarian movement which he led a conspiracy in confidencia, the national hero is not the man who called Tiradentes abandoned, ordered him hanged, and at pieces of the bloody corpse strewn through the streets of the neighboring villages as an example. It is Tiradentes who is the hero. History tore up the title given him by the elites and recognized his action for what it was. It is the men who, in their own time, sought unity for liberation, who are the heroes, not those who used their power to divide and rule.

Manipulation. Manipulation is another dimension of the theory of anti-diological action and, like the strategy of division, is an instrument of conquest, the objective around which all the dimensions of the theory revolve. By means of manipulation, the dominant elites try to conform the masses to their objectives. And the greater the political immaturity of these people, rural or urban, the more easily the latter can be manipulated by those who do not wish to lose their power. The people are manipulated by a series of myths described earlier in this chapter and by yet another myth: the model of itself which the bourgeoisie presents to the people as the possibility for their own ascent. In order for these myths to function, however, the people must accept the word of the bourgeoisie. Within certain historical conditions, manipulation is accomplished by means of pacts between the dominant and the dominated classes. Pacts which, if considered superficially, might give the impression of a dialogue between the classes. In reality, however, these pacts are not dialogue because their true objectives are determined by the unequivocal interest of the dominant elites. In the last analysis, pacts are used by the dominators to achieve their own ends. The support given by the people to the so-called national bourgeoisie in defense of so-called national capitalism is an example in point. Sooner or later, these pacts always increase the subjugation of the people. They are proposed only when the people begin, even naively, to emerge from the historical process and, by this emergence, to threaten the dominant elites. The presence of the people in the historical process, no longer as mere spectators but with the first signs of aggressivity, is sufficiently disquieting to frighten the dominant elites into doubling the tactics of manipulation. In this historical phase, manipulation becomes a fundamental instrument for the preservation of domination. Prior to the emergence of the people, there is no manipulation, precisely speaking, but rather total suppression. When the oppressed are almost completely submerged in reality, it is unnecessary to manipulate them.

In the anti-diological theory of action, manipulation is the response of the oppressor to the new concrete conditions of the historical process. Through manipulation, the dominant elites can lead the people into an unauthentic type of organization and can thus avoid the threatening alternative: the true organization of the emerged and emerging people. The latter have only two possibilities as they enter the historical process: either they must organize authentically for their liberation, or they will be manipulated by the elites. Authentic organization is obviously not going to be stimulated by the dominators; it is the task of the revolutionary leaders. It happens, however, that large sectors of the oppressed form an urban proletariat, especially in the more industrialized centers of the country. Although these sectors are occasionally restive, they lack revolutionary consciousness and consider themselves privileged. Manipulation, with its series of deceits and promises, usually finds fertile ground here. The antidote to manipulation lies in a critically conscious revolutionary organization, which will pose to the people as problems their position in the historical process, the national reality, and manipulation itself. In the words of Francisco Webbitt, "all the policies of the left are based on the masses and depend on the consciousness of the latter. If that consciousness is confused, the left will lose its roots and certain downfall will be imminent." Although, as in the Brazilian case, the left may be deluded into thinking it can achieve the Revolution by means of a quick return to power, in a situation of manipulation, the left is almost always tempted by a quick return to power, forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organization, and strays into an impossible dialogue with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites and, not infrequently, itself falls into an elitist game which should cause realism.

Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to anesthetize the people so they will not think. For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in Revolution. Whether one calls this correct thinking, revolutionary consciousness, or class consciousness, it is an indispensable precondition of revolution. The dominant elites are so well aware of this fact that they instinctively use all means, including physical violence, to keep the people from thinking. They have a shrewd intuition of the ability of dialogue to develop a capacity for criticism. While some revolutionary leaders consider dialogue with the people a bourgeois and reactionary activity, the bourgeoisie regard dialogue between the oppressed and the revolutionary leaders as a very real danger to be avoided.

One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with a bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly through populist leaders. As whether it points out, these leaders serve as intermediaries between the oligarchical elites and the people. The emergence of populism, a style of political action, thus coincides causally with the emergence of the oppressed. The populist leader, who rises from this process, is an ambiguous being, an amphibian who lives in two elements, shuttling back and forth between the people and the dominant oligarchies. He bears the marks of both groups. Since the populist leader simply manipulates instead of fighting for authentic popular organization, this type of leader serves the revolution little, if at all. Only by abandoning his ambiguous character and dual action and by opting decisively for the people, thus ceasing to be populist, does he renounce manipulation and dedicate himself to the revolutionary task of organization. At this point, he ceases to be an intermediary between the people and the elites and becomes a contradiction of the latter. Thereupon, the elites immediately join forces to curb him.

Observe the dramatic and finally unequivocal terms in which Getúlio Vargas spoke to the workers at a May 1 celebration during his last period as head of state: "I want to tell you that the gigantic work of renewal which my administration is beginning to carry out cannot be completed successfully without the support and the daily steadfast cooperation of the workers." Vargas then spoke of his first 90 days in office, which he called an estimate of the difficulties and obstacles which here and there are being raised in opposition to the actions of the government. He spoke directly to the people about how deeply he felt the helplessness, poverty, the high cost of living, low salaries, the hopelessness of the unfortunate, and the demands of the majority who live in hope of better days. His appeal to the workers then took on more objective tones: "I've come to say that at this moment the administration does not yet have the laws or the concrete instruments for immediate action to defend the people's economy. It is thus necessary for the people to organize not only to defend their own interests but also to give the government the base of support it requires to carry out its objectives. I need your unity! I need for you, in solidarity, to organize yourselves in unions! I need for you to form a strong and cohesive block to stand beside the government so that it will have all the faults it needs to solve your problems! I need your unity so you can fight against saboteurs, so you do not fall prey to the interests of speculators and rapacious scoundrels in detriment of the interests of the people! The hour has come to appeal to the Workers: Unite in your unions as free and organized forces! At the present time, no administration can survive or dispose of sufficient force to achieve its social ends if it does not have the support of all laboring organizations."

In some, in this speech, Vargas appealed vehemently to the people to organize and to unite in defense of their rights, and he told them, as chief of state, of the obstacles, the hindrances, and the innumerable difficulties involving in governing with them. From that moment on, his administration encountered increasing difficulties until the tragic climax of August 1954. If Vargas had not, in his last term, shown such open encouragement to the organization of the people, subsequently linked to a series of measures in defense of the national interest, possibly the reactionary elites would not have taken the extreme measures they did.

Any populist leader who moves, even discreetly, towards the people in any way other than as the intermediary of the oligarchies will be curbed by the latter, if they have sufficient force to stop him. But as long as the leader restricts himself to paternalism and social welfare activities, although there may be occasional divergences between him and groups of oligarchies whose interests have been touched, deep differences are rare. This is because welfare programs, as instruments of manipulation, ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solution of their problems. They splinter the oppressed into groups of individuals hoping to get a few more benefits for themselves. This situation contains, however, a positive element: the individuals who receive some aid always want more. Those who do not receive aid, seeing the example of those who do, grow envious and also want assistance. Since the dominant elites cannot aid everyone, they end up by increasing the restiveness of the oppressed. The revolutionary leader should take advantage of the contradictions of manipulation by posing it as a problem to the oppressed, with the objective of organizing them.

Cultural Invasion. The theory of anti-diological action has one last fundamental characteristic: cultural invasion, which, like divisive tactics and manipulation, also serves the end of conquest. In this phenomenon, the invaders penetrate the cultural context of another group in disrespect of the latter's potentialities. They impose their own view of the world upon those they invade and inhibit the creativity of the invaded by curbing their expression. Whether urbain or harsh, cultural invasion is thus always an act of violence against the persons of the invaded culture, who lose their originality or face the threat of losing it.

In cultural invasion, as in the modalities of anti-diological action, the invaders are the authors of and actors in the process; those they invade are the objects. The invaders mold; those they invade are molded. The invaders choose; those they invade follow that choice or are expected to follow it. The invaders act; those they invade only have the illusion of acting through the action of the invaders. All domination involves invasion, at times physical and overt, at times camouflaged with the invader assuming the role of a helping friend. In the last analysis, invasion is a form of economic and cultural domination. Invasion may be practiced by a metropolitan society upon a dependent society, or it may be implicit in the domination of one class over another within the same society.

Cultural conquest leads to the cultural inauthenticity of those who are invaded. They begin to respond to the values, the standards, and the goals of the invaders. In their passion to dominate, to mold others to their patterns and their way of life, the invaders desire to know how those they have invaded apprehend reality, but only so they can dominate the latter more effectively. In cultural invasion, it is essential that those who are invaded come to see their reality with the outlook of the invaders rather than their own, for the more they mimic the invaders, the more stable the position of the latter becomes. For cultural invasion to succeed, it is essential that those invaded become convinced of their intrinsic inferiority. Since everything has its opposite, if those who are invaded consider themselves inferior, they must necessarily recognize the superiority of the invaders. The values of the latter thereby become the pattern for the former. The more invasion is accentuated and those invaded are alienated from the spirit of their own culture and from themselves, the more the latter want to be like the invaders—to walk like them, dressed like them, talk like them.

The social eye of the invaded person, like every social eye, is formed in the socio-cultural relations of the social structure and therefore reflects the duality of the invaded culture. This duality, which was described earlier, explains why invaded and dominated individuals, at a certain moment of their existential experience, almost adhere to the oppressor "thou." The oppressed eye must break with a sneer adhesion to the oppressor "thou," drawing away from the latter in order to see him more objectively, at which point she critically recognizes herself to be in contradiction with the oppressor. In so doing, he considers as a dehumanizing reality the structure in which he's being oppressed. This qualitative change in the perception of the world can only be achieved in the Praxis.

Cultural invasion is, on the one hand, an instrument of domination and, on the other, the result of domination. Thus, cultural action of a dominating character, like other forms of anti-diological action, in addition to being deliberate and planned, is in another sense simply a product of oppressive reality. For example, a rigid and oppressive social structure necessarily influences the institutions of child rearing and education within that structure. These institutions patent their action after the style of the structure and transmit the myths of the latter. Homes and schools, from nurseries to universities, exist not in the abstract but in time and space within the structures of domination. They function largely as agencies which prepare the invaders of the future. The parent-child relationship in the home usually reflects the objective cultural conditions of the surrounding social structure. If the conditions which penetrate the home are authoritarian, rigid, and dominating, the home will increase the climate of Oppression. As these authoritarian relations between parents and children intensify, children in their infancy increasingly internalize the paternal authority, presenting with these customary clarity the problem of necrophilia and biophilia. From analyzes the objective conditions which generate each condition, whether in the home (parent-child relations in a climate of indifference and oppression, or of love and freedom) or in a socio-cultural context. If children reared in an atmosphere of lovelessness and oppression, children whose potency has been frustrated, do not manage during their youth to take the path of authentic rebellion, they will either drift into total indifference, alienated from reality by the authorities and the myths the latter have used to shape them, or they may engage in forms of destructive action.

The atmosphere of the home is prolonged in the school, where the students soon discover that, as in the home, in order to achieve some satisfaction, they must adapt to the precepts which have been said from above. One of these precepts is not to think. Internalizing paternal authority through the rigid relationship structure emphasized by the school, these young people tend, when they become professionals, because of the very fear of freedom instilled by these relationships, to repeat the rigid patterns in which they were miseducated. This phenomenon, in addition to their class position, perhaps explains why so many professionals adhere to anti-diological action. Whatever the specialty that brings them into contact with the people, they are almost unshakably convinced that it is their mission to give the latter their knowledge and techniques. They see themselves as promoters of the people. Their programs of action, which might have been prescribed by any good theorist of oppressive action, include their own objectives, their own convictions, and their own preoccupations. They do not listen to the people but instead plan to teach them how to cast off the laziness which creates underdevelopment. To these professionals, it seems absurd to consider the necessity of respecting the view of the world held by the people. The professionals are the ones with the world view. Their regard as equally absurd the affirmation that one must necessarily consult the people when organizing the program content of educational action. They feel that the ignorance of the people is so complete that they are unfit for anything except to receive the teachings of the professionals.

When, however, at a certain point of their existential experience, those who have been invaded begin in one way or another to reject this invasion, to which they might earlier have adapted, the Professionals, in order to justify their failure, say that the members of the invaded group are inferior because they are ingrates, shiftless, diseased, or of mixed blood. Well-intentioned professionals, those who use invasion not as deliberate ideology but as the expression of their own upbringing, eventually discover that certain of their educational failures must be ascribed not to the intrinsic inferiority of the simple men of the people, but to the violence of their own act of invasion. Those who make this discovery face a difficult alternative. They feel the need to renounce invasion, but patterns of domination are so entrenched within them that this renunciation would become a threat to their own identities. To renounce invasion would mean ending their dual status as dominated and dominators. It would mean abandoning all the myths which nourish invasion and starting to incarnate dialogical action. For this very reason, it would mean to cease being over or inside as foreigners in order to be with as comrades. And so the fear of freedom takes hold of these men.

During this traumatic process, they naturally tend to rationalize Their Fear with a series of evasions. The fear of freedom is greater still in professionals who have not yet discovered for themselves the invasive nature of their action and who are told that their action is dehumanizing. Not infrequently, especially at the point of decoding concrete situations, training course participants ask the coordinator, in an irritated manner, "Where do you think you're steering us anyway?" The coordinator isn't trying to steer them anywhere. It is just that in facing a concrete situation as a problem, the participants begin to realize that if their analysis of the situation goes any deeper, they will either have to divest themselves of their myths or reaffirm them. Divesting themselves of and renouncing their myths represents, at that moment, an act of self-violence. On the other hand, to reaffirm those myths is to reveal themselves. The only way out which functions as a defense mechanism is to project onto the coordinator their own usual practices: steering, conquering, and invading.

The same retreat occurs, though on a smaller scale, among men of the people who have been ground down by the concrete situation of Oppression and domesticated by charity. One of the teachers of Full Circle, which carried out a valuable educational program in New York City under the coordination of Robert Fox, relates the following incident: A group in the New York ghetto was presented a coded situation showing a big pile of garbage on a street corner, the very same street where the group was meeting. One of the participants said at once, "I see a street in Africa or Latin America." "And why not in New York?" asks the teacher. "Because we are the United States, and that can't happen here." Beyond a doubt, this man and some of his comrades who agreed with him were retreating from a reality so offensive to them that even to acknowledge that reality was threatening. For an alienated person, conditioned by a culture of achievement and personal success, to recognize his situation as objectively unfavorable seems to hinder his own possibilities of success.

In the case cited and in that of the professionals, the determining force of the culture which develops the myths men subsequently internalize is evident. In both cases, the culture of the dominant class hinders the affirmation of men as beings of decision. Neither the professionals nor the discussion participants in the New York slums talk and act for themselves as active subjects of the historical process. None of them are theoreticians or ideologues of domination. On the contrary, they are effects which, in turn, become causes of domination. This is one of the most serious problems the revolution must confront when it reaches power. This stage demands maximum political wisdom, decision, and courage from the leaders, who for this very reason must have sufficient judgment not to fall into irrationally sectarian positions.

Professional women and men of any specialty, university graduates or not, are individuals who have been determined from above by a culture of domination which has constituted them as dual beings. If that come from the lower classes, this miseducation would be the same, if not worse. These professionals, however, are necessary to the reorganization of the new Society. And since many among them, even though afraid of freedom and reluctant to engage in humanizing action, are in truth more misguided than anything else, there not only could be but ought to be reclaimed by the revolution. This reclamation requires that the revolutionary leaders, progressing from what was previously dialogical cultural action, initiate the cultural revolution. At this point, revolutionary power moves beyond its role as a necessary obstacle confronting those who wish to negate humanity and assumes a new and bolder position with a clear invitation to all who wish to participate in the Reconstruction of society.

In this sense, cultural revolution is a necessary continuation of the dialogical cultural action which must be carried out before the Revolution reaches power. Cultural revolution takes the total society to be reconstructed, including all human activities, as the object of its remolding action. Society cannot be reconstructed in a mechanistic fashion. The culture which is culturally recreated through Revolution is the fundamental instrument for this reconstruction. Cultural revolution is the Revolutionary regime's maximum effort at conscientização, which should reach everyone regardless of their personal path. Consequently, this effort at conscientism cannot rest content with the technical or scientific training of intended specialists. The new Society becomes qualitatively distinct from the old in more than a partial way. Revolutionary Society cannot attribute to technology the same ends attributed by the previous Society. Accordingly, the training of people in the two societies must also differ. Technical and scientific training need not be inimical to humanistic education, as long as science and technology in the Revolutionary Society are at the service of permanent liberation of humanization. From this point of view, the training of individuals for any occupation, since all occupations occur in time and space, requires the understanding of: a) a culture as a superstructure which can maintain remnants of the past alive in the substructure undergoing revolutionary transformation, and b) the occupation itself as an instrument for the transformation of culture.

As the cultural revolution deepens conscientização in the creative Praxis of the new Society, people will begin to perceive why mythical remnants of the old Society survive in the new, and they will then be able to free themselves more rapidly of these specters which, by hindering the edification of a new Society, have always constituted a serious problem for every Revolution. Through these cultural remnants, the oppressor society continues to invade, this time invading the Revolutionary Society itself. This invasion is especially terrible because it is carried out not by the dominant Elite reorganized as such, but by those who have participated in the revolution as men who house the oppressor. They resist as might the latter themselves. The further basic steps which the revolution must take, and as dual beings they also accept, still due to the remnants, power which becomes bureaucratized and which violently represses them in turn. This violently repressive bureaucratic power can be explained by what Althusser calls the reactivation of old elements in the new Society, each time special circumstances permit.

For all the above reasons, I interpret the Revolutionary process as dialogical cultural action, which is prolonged in cultural revolution once power is taken. In both stages, a serious and profound effort at conscientização, by means of which the people, through a true Praxis, leave behind the status of objects to assume the status of historical subjects, is necessary. Finally, cultural revolution develops the practice of permanent dialogue between leaders and people and consolidates the participation of the people in power. In this way, as both leaders and people continue their critical activity, the Revolution Will more easily be able to defend itself against bureaucratic Tendencies which lead to new forms of Oppression and against invasion, which is always the same.

The invader, within a bourgeois or in a revolutionary Society, may be an agronomist or sociologist, an economist or a public health engineer, a priest or a pastor, an educator or a social worker, or a revolutionary. Cultural invasion, which serves the ends of conquest and the preservation of Oppression, always involves a parochial view of reality, a static perception of the world, and the imposition of one worldview upon another. It implies the superiority of the Invader and the inferiority of those who are invaded, as well as the imposition of values by the former, who possess the latter and are afraid of losing them. Cultural invasion further signifies that the ultimate seat of decision regarding the action of those who are invaded lies not with them but with the Invaders. And when the power of decision is located outside rather than within the one who should decide, the latter has only the illusion of deciding.

This is why there can be no socio-economic development in a dual reflex invaded Society. For development to occur, it is necessary: a) that there be a movement of search and creativity having its seat of decision in the Searcher; b) that this movement occur not only in space but in the existential time of the conscious Searcher. Thus, while all development is transformation, not all transformation is development. The transformation occurring in a seed, which under favorable conditions germinates and sprouts, is not development in the same way the transformation of an animal is not development. The transformations of seeds and animals are determined by the species to which they belong, and they occur in a time which does not belong to them, for time belongs to humankind.

Women and men, among the uncompleted beings, are the only ones which develop as historical, autobiographical beings for themselves. Their transformation, development, occurs in their own existential time, never outside it. Men who are submitted to concrete conditions of Oppression, in which they become alienated beings for another, the false being for himself on whom they depend, are not able to develop authentically. Deprived of their own power of decision, which is located in the oppressor, they follow the prescriptions of the latter. The oppressed only begin to develop when, surmounting the contradiction in which they are caught, they become beings for themselves.

If we consider society as a being, it is obvious that only a society which is a being for itself can develop. Societies which are dual reflex, invaded, and dependent on the Metropolitan Society cannot develop because they are alienated. Their political, economic, and cultural decision-making power is located outside themselves, in the Invaders' Society. In the last analysis, the latter determines the destiny of the former. Mere transformation, for it is their transformation, not their development, that is to the interest of the Metropolitan Society. It is essential not to confuse modernization with development. The former, although it may affect certain groups in the satellite Society, is almost always induced, and it is the Metropolitan society which derives the true benefits therefrom. A society which is merely modernized without developing will continue, even if it takes over some minimal delegated powers of decision, to depend on the outside country. This is the fate of any dependent society as long as it remains dependent. In order to determine whether or not a society is developing, one must go beyond criteria based on indices of per capita income, which expressed in statistical form are misleading, as well as those which concentrate on the study of gross income. The basic, elementary criterion is whether or not the society is a being for itself. If it is not, the other criteria indicate modernization rather than development. The principal contradiction of dual societies is the relationship of dependency between them and the Metropolitan Society. Once the contradiction has

been superseded. The transformation hitherto affected through aid, which has primarily benefited the Metropolitan Society, becomes true development which benefits the being for itself. For the above reasons, the purely reformist solutions attempted by these societies, even though some of the reforms may frighten and even panic the more reactionary members of the elite groups, do not resolve their external and internal contradictions.

Almost always, the Metropolitan Society induces these reformist solutions in response to the demands of the historical process as a new way of preserving its hegemony. It is as if the Metropolitan Society was saying, "Let us carry out reforms before the people carry out a revolution." And in order to achieve this goal, the Metropolitan Society has no options other than conquest, manipulation (economic and cultural), and sometimes military invasion of the dependent society. An invasion in which the elite leaders of the dominated society, to a large extent, act as mere brokers for the leaders of the Metropolitan Society.

To close this tentative analysis of the theory of anti-ideological action, I wish to reaffirm that revolutionary leaders must not use the same anti-ideological procedures used by the oppressors. On the contrary, revolutionary leaders must follow the path of dialogue and of communication. Before proceeding to analyze the theory of dialogical action, it is essential to discuss briefly how the revolutionary leadership group is formed and some of the historical and sociological consequences for the revolutionary process.

Usually, this leadership group is made up of men and women who, in one way or another, have belonged to the social strata of the dominators at a certain point in their existential experience and under certain historical conditions. These leaders renounce the class to which they belong and join the oppressed in an act of true solidarity, or so one would hope. Whether or not this adherence results from a scientific analysis of reality, it represents, when authentic, an act of love and true commitment.

Joining the oppressed requires going to them and communicating with them. The people must find themselves in emerging leaders, and the latter must find themselves in the people. The leaders who have emerged necessarily reflect the contradiction of the dominant elites, communicated to them by the oppressed who may not yet, however, clearly perceive their own state of oppression or critically recognize their relationship of antagonism to the oppressors. They may still be in the position previously termed adhesion to the oppressor.

On the other hand, it is possible that due to certain objective historical conditions, they have already reached a relatively clear perception of their state of oppression. In the first case, the adhesion or partial adhesion of the people to the oppressor makes it impossible for them to repeat Fannin's point, to locate him outside themselves. In the second case, they can locate the oppressor and can thus critically recognize their relationship of antagonism to him.

In the first case, the oppressor is housed within the people, and their resulting ambiguity makes them fearful of freedom. Their resort, stimulated by the oppressor, to magical explanations or a false view of God, to whom they fatalistically transfer the responsibility for their oppressed state, is extreme. It is extremely unlikely that these self-mistrustful, downtrodden, hopeless people will seek their own liberation, an act of rebellion which they may view as a disobedient violation of the will of God, as an unwarranted confrontation with destiny. Hence the oft-emphasized necessity of posing as problems the myths fed to the people by the oppressors.

In the second case, when the people have reached a relatively clear picture of oppression, which leads them to localize the oppressor outside themselves, they take up the struggle to surmount the contradiction in which they are caught. At this moment, they overcome the distance between class necessity and class consciousness. In the first case, the revolutionary leaders unfortunately and involuntarily become the contradiction of the people. In the second case, the emerging leaders receive from the people sympathetic and almost instantaneous support, which tends to increase during the process of revolutionary action.

The leaders go to the people in a spontaneously dialogical manner. There is an almost immediate empathy between the people and the revolutionary leaders. Their mutual commitment is almost instantly sealed in fellowship. They consider themselves co-equal contradictions of the dominant elites. From this point on, the established practice of dialogue between people and leaders is nearly unshakable. That dialogue will continue when power is reached, and the people will know that they have come to power. The sharing in no way diminishes the spirit of struggle, courage, capacity for love, or daring required of the revolutionary leaders.

Fidel Castro and his comrades, who many at the time termed irresponsible adventurers, were an eminently dialogical leadership group identified with the people who endured the brutal violence of the Batista dictatorship. This adherence was not easy. It required bravery on the part of the leaders to love the people sufficiently to be willing to sacrifice themselves for them. It required courageous witness by the leaders to recommence after each disaster, moved by undying hope in a future victory which, because forged together with the people, would belong not to the leaders alone, but to the leaders and the people, or to the people, including the leaders.

Fidel gradually polarized the adherents of the Cuban people who, due to their historical experience, had already begun to break their adhesion to the oppressor. This drawing away from the oppressor led the people to objectify him and to see themselves as his contradiction. So it was that Fidel never entered into contradiction with the people. The occasional desertions or betrayals registered by Guevara in *La Guerra de Guerrillas*, in which he also refers to the many who adhered, were to be expected.

Thus, due to certain historical conditions, the movement by the revolutionary leaders to the people is either horizontal, so that leaders and people form one body in contradiction to the oppressor, or it is triangular, with the revolutionary leaders occupying the vertex of the triangle in contradiction to the oppressors and to the oppressed as well. As we have seen, the latter situation is forced on the leaders when the people have not yet achieved a critical perception of oppressive reality.

Almost never, however, does a revolutionary leadership group perceive that it constitutes a contradiction to the people. Indeed, this perception is painful, and the resistance may serve as a defense mechanism. After all, it is not easy for leaders who have emerged through adherence to the oppressed to recognize themselves as being in contradiction with those to whom they adhered. It is important to recognize this reluctance when analyzing certain forms of behavior on the part of revolutionary leaders who involuntarily become a contradiction, although not antagonists, of the people.

In order to carry out the revolution, revolutionary leaders undoubtedly require the adherence of the people. When leaders who constitute a contradiction to the people seek this adherence and find rather a certain aloofness and mistrust, they often regard this reaction as indicating an inherent defect on the part of the people. They interpret a certain historical moment of the people's consciousness as evidence of their intrinsic deficiency. Since the leaders need the adherence of the people so that the revolution can be achieved, but at the same time mistrust the mistrustful people, they are tempted to utilize the same procedures used by the dominant elites to oppress, rationalizing their lack of confidence in the people. The leaders say, "It is impossible to dialogue with the people before taking power," thus opting for the anti-dialogical theory of action. Thenceforward, just like the dominant elites, they try to conquer the people. They become messianic; they use manipulation and carry out cultural invasion. By advancing along these paths, the paths of oppression, they will not achieve revolution, or if they do, it will not be authentic revolution.

The role of revolutionary leadership, under any circumstances, but especially so in those described, is to consider seriously, even as they act, the reasons for any attitude of mistrust on the part of the people and to seek out true avenues of communion with them, ways of helping the people to help themselves critically perceive the reality which oppresses them. The dominated consciousness is dual, ambiguous, full of fear and mistrust.

In his diary about the struggle in Bolivia, Guevara refers several times to the lack of peasant participation. "The peasant mobilization does not exist except for informative duties which annoy us somewhat. They are neither very rapid nor very efficient. They can be neutralized. Complete lack of incorporation of the peasants, although they are losing their fear of us and we are succeeding in winning their admiration. It is a slow and patient task." The internalization of the oppressor by the dominated consciousness of the peasants explains their fear and their inefficiency.

The behavior and reactions of the oppressed, which lead the oppressor to practice cultural invasion, should evoke from the revolutionary a different theory of action. What distinguishes revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not only their objectives but their procedures. If they act in the same way, the objectives become identical. It is self-contradictory for the dominant elites to pose human world relations as problems to the people, as it is for the revolutionary leaders not to do so.

Let us now analyze the theory of dialogical cultural action and attempt to apprehend its constituent elements. Cooperation in the theory of anti-dialogical action, conquest as its primary characteristic, involves a subject who conquers another person and transforms her or him into a thing. In a dialogical theory of action, subjects meet, incorporate, in order to transform the world. The anti-dialogical dominating "I" transforms the dominated, conquered "thou" into a mere "it." The dialogical "I," however, knows that it is precisely the "thou," not "I," which is called forth his or her own existence. He also knows that the "thou" which calls forth his own existence in turn constitutes an "I" which has in his "I" its "thou." The "I" and the "thou" thus become, in the dialectic of these relationships, two "thous" which become two "I's."

The dialogical theory of action does not involve a subject who dominates by virtue of conquest and a dominated object. Instead, they are subjects who meet to name the world in order to transform it. If, at a certain historical moment, the oppressed, for the reasons previously described, are unable to fulfill their vocation as subjects, the posing of their very oppression as a problem, which always involves some form of action, will help them achieve this vocation.

The above does not mean that in the dialogical task there is no role for revolutionary leadership. It means merely that the leaders, in spite of their important, fundamental, and indispensable role, do not own the people and have no right to steer the people blindly towards their salvation. Such salvation would be a mere gift from the leaders to the people, a breaking of the dialogical bond between them, and a reducing of the people from co-authors of liberating action into the objects of this action.

Cooperation, as a characteristic of dialogical action, which occurs only among subjects who may, however, have diverse levels of functions and thus of responsibility, can only be achieved through communication. Dialogue, as essential communication, must underlie any cooperation. In the theory of dialogical action, there is no place for conquering the people on behalf of the revolutionary cause, but only for gaining their adherence. Dialogue does not impose, does not manipulate, does not domesticate, does not sloganize.

This does not mean, however, that the theory of dialogical action leads nowhere, nor does it mean that the dialogical human does not have a clear idea of what she wants or of the objectives to which she's committed. The commitment of the revolutionary leaders to the oppressed is at the same time a commitment to freedom, and because of that commitment, the leaders cannot attempt to conquer the oppressed but must achieve their adherence to liberation. Conquered adherence is not adherence; it is adhesion of the vanquished to the conqueror who prescribes the options open to the former. Authentic adherence is the free coincidence of choices; it cannot occur apart from communication among people, mediated by reality.

Thus, cooperation leads dialogical subjects to focus their attention on the reality which mediates them and which, posed as a problem, challenges them. The response to that challenge is the action of dialogical subjects upon reality in order to transform it. Let me re-emphasize that posing reality as a problem does not mean sloganizing it; it means critical analysis of a problematic reality, as opposed to the mythicizing practices of the dominant elites.

Dialogical theory requires that the world be unveiled. No one can, however, unveil the world for another. Although one subject may initiate the unveiling on behalf of others, the others must also become subjects of this act. The adherence of the people is made possible by this unveiling of the world and of themselves in authentic praxis. This adherence coincides with the trust the people begin to place in themselves and in the revolutionary leaders as the former perceive the dedication and authenticity of the latter. The trust of the people in the leaders reflects the confidence of the leaders in the people.

This confidence should not, however, be naive. The leaders must believe in the potentialities of the people, whom they cannot treat as mere objects of their own action. They must believe that the people are capable of participating in the pursuit of liberation. But there must always be mistrust of the ambiguity of oppressed people, mistrust of the oppressor housed in the latter. Accordingly, when Guevara exhorts the revolutionary to be always mistrustful, he's not disregarding the fundamental condition of the theory of dialogical action; he's merely being a realist.

Although trust is basic to dialogue, it is not an a priori condition of the latter. It results from the encounter in which persons are co-subjects in denouncing the world as part of the world's transformation. But as long as the oppressor within the oppressed is stronger than they themselves are, their natural fear of freedom may lead them to denounce the revolutionary leaders instead. The leaders cannot be credulous but must be alert for these possibilities. Guevara's episodes confirm these risks, not only desertions but even betrayal of the cause at times.

In this document, while recognizing the necessity of punishing the deserter in order to preserve the cohesion and discipline of the group, Guevara also recognizes certain factors which explain the desertion. One of them, perhaps the most important, is the deserter's ambiguity. Another portion of Guevara's document, which refers to his presence not only as a guerrilla but as a medical doctor in a peasant community in the Sierra Maestra and relates to our discussion of cooperation, is quite striking. "As a result of daily contact with these people and their problems, we became firmly convinced of the need for a complete change in the life of our people. The idea of an agrarian reform became crystal clear. Communion with the people ceased to be a mere theory to become an integral part of ourselves. Guerrillas and peasants began to merge into a solid mass. No one can say exactly when, in this long process, the ideas became reality and we became a part of the peasantry. As far as I'm concerned, the contact with my patients in the Sierra turned a spontaneous and somewhat lyrical decision into a more serene force, one of an entirely different value. Those poor, suffering, loyal inhabitants of the Sierra cannot even imagine what a great contribution they made to the forging of our revolutionary ideology."

Note Guevara's emphasis that communion with the people was decisive for the transformation of a spontaneous and somewhat lyrical decision into a more serene force, one of an entirely different value. It was then, in dialogue with the peasants, that Guevara's revolutionary praxis became definitive. What Guevara did not say, perhaps due to humility, is that it was his own humility and capacity to love that made possible his communion with the people, and this indisputably dialogical communion became cooperation.

Note that Guevara, who did not climb the Sierra Maestra with Fidel and his comrades as a frustrated youth in search of adventure, recognizes that his communion with the people ceased to be a mere theory to become an integral part of himself. He stresses how, from the moment of that communion, the peasants became forges of his guerrilla's revolutionary ideology. Even Guevara's unmistakable style of narrating his and his comrades' experiences, of describing his contacts with the poor, loyal peasants in almost Evangelical language, reveals this remarkable man's deep capacity for love and communication. Thence emerges the force of his ardent testimony to the work of another loving man, Camilo Torres, the guerrilla priest.

Without the communion which engenders true cooperation, the Cuban people would have been mere objects of the revolutionary activity of the men of the Sierra Maestra, and as objects, their adherence would have been impossible. At the most, there might have been adhesion, but that is a component of domination, not revolution. In dialogical theory, at no stage can revolutionary action forego communion with the people. Communion, in turn, elicits cooperation, which brings leaders and people to the fusion described by Guevara. This fusion can exist only if revolutionary action is really human, empathetic, loving, communicative, and humble in order to be liberating. The revolution loves and creates life, and in order to create life, it may be obliged to prevent some men from circumscribing life.

In addition to the life-death cycle basic to nature, there is almost an unnatural living death: life which is denied its fullness. It should not be necessary here to cite statistics to show how many Brazilians and Latin Americans in general are living corpses, shadows of human beings, hopeless men, women, and children victimized by an endless invisible war in which their remnants of life are devoured by tuberculosis, schistosomiasis, infant diarrhea, by the myriad diseases of poverty, most of which, in the terminology of the oppressors, are called tropical diseases.

Father Chenu makes the following comments regarding possible reactions to situations as extreme as the above: "Many, both among the priests attending the council and the informed layman, fear that in facing the needs and suffering of the world, we may simply adopt an emotional protest in favor of palliating the manifestations and symptoms of poverty and injustice, without going on to analyze the causes of the latter, to denounce a regime which encompasses this injustice and engenders this poverty."

Unity for liberation. Whereas in the anti-dialogical theory of action, the dominators are compelled by necessity to divide the oppressed the more easily to preserve the state of oppression, in the dialogical theory, the leaders must dedicate themselves to an untiring effort for unity among the oppressed and unity of the leaders with the oppressed in order to achieve liberation. The difficulties that this category of dialogical action, like the others, cannot occur apart from praxis. The praxis of oppression is easy, or at least not difficult, for the dominant elite, but it is not easy for the revolutionary leaders to carry out a liberating praxis. The former group can rely on using the instruments of power; the latter group has this power directed against it. The former group can organize itself freely and, though it may undergo fortuitous and momentary divisions, it unites rapidly in the face of any threat to its fundamental interests. The latter group cannot exist without the people, and this very condition constitutes the first obstacle to its efforts at organization.

It would indeed be inconsistent of the dominant elite to allow the revolutionary leaders to organize. The internal unity of the dominant elite, which reinforces and organizes its power, requires that the people be divided. The unity of the revolutionary leaders only exists in the unity of the people among themselves and in turn with them. The unity of the elite derives from its antagonism with the people; the unity of the revolutionary leadership group grows out of communion with the United people.

The concrete situation of oppression, which dualizes the "I" of the oppressed, thereby making the oppressed person ambiguous, emotionally unstable, and fearful of freedom, facilitates the divisive action of the dominator by hindering the unifying action indispensable to liberation. Further, domination is itself objectively divisive. It maintains the oppressed "I" in a position of adhesion to a reality which seems all-powerful and overwhelming, and then alienates by presenting mysterious forces to explain this power. Part of the oppressed "I" is located in the reality to which it adheres; part is located outside the self in the mysterious forces which are regarded as responsible for a reality about which nothing can be done. The individual is divided between an identical past and present and a future without hope. He or she is a person who does not perceive himself or herself as becoming, hence cannot have a future to be built in unity with others. But as he or she breaks this adhesion and objectifies the reality from which he or she starts to emerge, the person begins to integrate as a subject, an "I" confronting an "object" reality. At this moment, sundering the false unity of the divided self, one becomes a true individual.

To divide the oppressed, ideology of oppression is indispensable. In contrast, achieving their unity requires a form of cultural action through which they come to know the why and how of their adhesion to reality. It requires de-ideologizing. Hence, the effort to unify the oppressed does not call for mere ideological sloganizing. The latter, by distorting the authentic relation between the subject and objective reality, also separates the cognitive, the effective, and the active aspects of the total, indivisible personality.

The object of dialogical libertarian action is not to dislodge the oppressed from a mythological reality in order to bind them to another reality. On the contrary, the object of dialogical action is to make it possible for the oppressed, by perceiving their adhesion to it, to transform an unjust reality. Since the unity of the oppressed involves solidarity among them, regardless of their exact status, the unity unquestionably requires class consciousness. However, the submersion in reality which characterizes the peasants of Latin America means that consciousness of being an oppressed class must be preceded or at least accompanied by achieving consciousness of being oppressed individuals.

Proposing as a problem to a European peasant the fact that he or she is a person might strike them as strange. This is not true of Latin American peasants whose world usually ends at the boundaries of the latifundium, whose gestures to some extent simulate those of animals and the trees, and who often consider themselves equal to the latter. Men who are bound to nature and to the oppressor in this way must come to discern themselves as persons. Prevented from being and discovering themselves means, in the first instance, discovering themselves as Pedro, as Antonio, or as Josefa. This discovery implies a different perception of the meaning of designations. The words "world," "men," "culture," "tree," "work," "animal" reassume their true significance. The peasants now see themselves as transformers of reality, previously a mysterious entity, through their creative labor. They discover that as people, they can no longer continue to be things possessed by others, and they can move from consciousness of themselves as oppressed individuals to the consciousness of an oppressed class.

Any attempt to unify the peasants based on activist methods which rely on slogans and do not deal with these fundamental aspects produces a mere juxtaposition of individuals, giving a purely mechanistic character to their action. The unity of the oppressed occurs at the human level, not at the level of things. It occurs in a reality which is only authentically comprehended in the dialectic between the sub- and superstructure. In order for the oppressed to unite, they must first cut the umbilical cord of magic and myth which binds them to the world of oppression. The unity which links them to each other must be of a different nature.

To achieve this indispensable unity, the revolutionary process must be, from the beginning, cultural action. The methods used to achieve the unity of the oppressed will depend on the latter's historical and existential experience within the social structure. Peasants live in a closed reality with a single, compact center of oppressive decision; the urban oppressed live in an expanding context in which the oppressive command center is plural and complex. Peasants are under the control of a dominant figure who incarnates the oppressive system; in urban areas, the oppressed are subjected to an oppressive impersonality. In both cases, the oppressive power is, to a certain extent, invisible: in the rural zone because of its proximity to the oppressed; in the cities because of its dispersion.

Forms of cultural action in such different situations as these have nonetheless the same objective: to clarify to the oppressed the objective situation which binds them to the oppressors, visible or not. Only forms of action which avoid mere speech-making and ineffective blah on the one hand, and mechanistic activism on the other, can also oppose the divisive action of the dominant elites and move towards the unity of the oppressed.

Organization. In the theory of anti-dialogical action, manipulation is indispensable to conquest and domination. In the dialogical theory of action, the organization of the people presents the antagonistic opposite of this manipulation. Organization is not only directly linked to unity but is a natural development of that unity. Accordingly, the leader's pursuit of unity is necessarily also an attempt to organize the people, requiring witness to the fact that the struggle for liberation is a common task. This constant, humble, and courageous witness, emerging from cooperation in a shared effort, the liberation of women and men, avoids the danger of anti-dialogical control.

The form of witness may vary depending on the historical conditions of any society. Witness itself, however, is an indispensable element of revolutionary action. In order to determine the what and how of that witness, it is therefore essential to have an increasingly critical knowledge of the current historical context, the view of the world held by the people, the principal contradiction of society, and the principle aspect of that contradiction. Since these dimensions of witness are historical, dialogical, and therefore dialectical, witness cannot simply import them from other contexts without previously analyzing its own. To do otherwise is to absolutize and mythologize the relative; alienation then becomes unavoidable.

Witness in the dialogical theory of action is one of the principal expressions of the cultural and educational character of the revolution. These central elements of witness, which do not vary historically, include: consistency between words and actions; boldness which urges the witnesses to confront existence as a permanent risk; radicalization, not sectarianism, leading both the witnesses and the ones receiving that witness to increasing action; courage to love, which far from being accommodation to an unjust world is rather the transformation of that world in behalf of the increasing liberation of humankind; and faith in the people, since it is to them that witness is made.

Although witness to the people, because of their dialectical relations with the dominant elites, also affects the latter, who respond to that witness in their customary way, all authentic, that is, critical, witness involves the daring to run risks, including the possibility that the leaders will not always win the immediate adherence of the people. Witness which is not born fruit at a certain moment and under certain conditions is not thereby rendered incapable of bearing fruit tomorrow. Since witness is not an abstract gesture but an action, a confrontation with the world and with people, it is not static. It is a dynamic element which becomes part of the societal context in which it occurred. From that moment, it does not cease to affect that context.

In anti-dialogical action, manipulation anesthetizes the people and facilitates their domination. In anti-dialogical action, manipulation serves the end of conquest, and conquest, the ends of domination. In dialogical action, daring and loving witness serve the ends of organization. For the dominant elites, organization means organizing themselves; for the revolutionary leaders, organization means organizing themselves with the people. In the first event, the dominant elite increasingly structures its power so that it can be more efficiently dominant and depersonalized. In the second, organization only corresponds to its nature and objective if, in itself, it constitutes the practice of freedom.

Accordingly, the discipline necessary to any organization must not be confused with regimentation. It is quite true that without leadership, discipline, determination, and objectives, without tasks to fulfill and accounts to be rendered, an organization cannot survive and revolutionary action is thereby diluted. This fact, however, can never justify treating the people as things to be used. The people are already de-personalized by oppression. If the revolutionary leaders manipulate them instead of working towards their conscientization, the very objective of organization, that is, liberation, is thereby negated.

Organizing the people is the process in which the revolutionary leaders, who are also prevented from saying their own word, initiate the experience of learning how to name the world. This is true learning experience and therefore dialogical. So it is that the leaders cannot say their word alone; they must say it with the people. Leaders who do not act dialogically but insist on imposing their decisions do not organize the people; they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated; they oppress.

The fact that the leaders who organize the people do not have the right to arbitrarily impose their word does not mean that they must therefore take a liberalist position which would encourage license among the people who are accustomed to oppression. The dialogical theory of action opposes both authoritarianism and license and thereby affirms authority and freedom. There is no freedom without authority, but there is also no authority without freedom. All freedom contains the possibility that, under special circumstances and at different existential levels, it may become authority. Freedom and authority cannot be isolated but must be considered in relationship to each other. Authentic authority is not affirmed as such by mere transfer of power but through delegation or in sympathetic adherence. If authority is merely transferred from one group to another or is imposed upon the majority, it degenerates into authoritarianism. Authority can avoid conflict with freedom only if it is freedom become authority. Hypertrophy of the one provokes atrophy of the other, just as authority cannot exist without freedom and vice versa. Authoritarianism cannot exist without denying freedom, nor license without denying authority.

In the theory of dialogical action, organization requires authority, so it cannot be authoritarian. It requires freedom, so it cannot be licentious. Organization is rather a highly educational process in which leaders and people together experience true authority and freedom, which they then seek to establish in society by transforming the reality which mediates them.

Cultural synthesis. Cultural action is always a systematic and deliberate form of action which operates upon the social structure, either with the objective of preserving that structure or of transforming it. As the form of deliberate and systematic action, all cultural action has its theory which determines its ends and thereby defines its methods. Cultural action either serves domination, consciously or unconsciously, or it serves the liberation of men and women. As these dialectically opposed types of cultural action operate in and upon the social structure, they create dialectical relations of permanence and change. The social structure, in order to be, must become; in other words, becoming is the way the social structure expresses duration in the Bergsonian sense of the term.

Dialogical cultural action does not have as its aim the disappearance of the permanence-change dialectic, an impossible aim since disappearance of the dialectic would require the disappearance of the social structure itself and thus of men. It aims rather at surmounting the antagonistic contradictions of the social structure, thereby achieving the liberation of human beings. Anti-dialogical cultural action, on the other hand, aims at mythicizing such contradictions, thereby hoping to avoid or hinder, insofar as possible, the radical transformation of reality. Anti-dialogical action explicitly or implicitly aims to preserve within the social structure situations which favor its own agents. While the latter would never accept a transformation of the structure sufficiently radical to overcome its antagonistic contradictions, they may accept reforms which do not affect their power of decision over the oppressed. Hence, this modality of action involves the conquest of the people, their division, their manipulation, and cultural invasion. It is necessarily and fundamentally an induced action.

Dialogical action, however, is characterized by the supersedence of any induced aspect. The incapacity of anti-dialogical cultural action to supersede its induced character results from its objective domination. The capacity of dialogical cultural action to do this lies in its objective liberation.

In cultural invasion, the actors draw the thematic content of their action from their own values and ideology. Their starting point is their own world, from which they enter the world of those they invade. In cultural synthesis, the actors who come from another world to the world of the people do so not as invaders. They do not come to teach or to transmit or to give anything, but rather to learn with the people about the people's world.

In cultural invasion, the actors, who need not even go personally to the invaded culture, increasingly carry out their action by technological instruments which superimpose themselves on the people, who are assigned the role of spectators or objects. In cultural synthesis, the actors become integrated with the people, who are co-authors of the action that both perform upon the world. In cultural invasion, both the spectators and the reality to be preserved are objects of the actor's action. In cultural synthesis, there are no spectators; the object of the actor's action is the reality to be transformed for the liberation of men.

Cultural synthesis is thus a mode of action for confronting culture itself as the preserver of the very structures by which it was formed. Cultural action, as historical action, is an instrument for superseding the dominant, alienated, and alienating culture. In this sense, every authentic revolution is a cultural revolution.

The investigation of the people's generative themes or meaningful thematics, described in Chapter 3, constitutes the starting point for the process of action as a cultural synthesis. Indeed, it is not really possible to divide this process into two separate steps: first, thematic investigation and then, action as a cultural synthesis. Such a dichotomy would imply an initial phase in which the people, as passive objects, would be studied, analyzed, and investigated by the investigators, a procedure congruent with anti-dialogical action. Such division would lead to the naive conclusion that action as synthesis follows from action as invasion. In dialogical theory, this division cannot occur. The subjects of thematic investigation are not only the professional investigators but also the men and women of the people whose thematic universe is being sought.

Investigation, the first moment of action as cultural synthesis, establishes the climate of creativity which will tend to develop in the subsequent stages of action. Such a climate does not exist in cultural invasion, which, through alienation, kills the creative enthusiasm of those who are invaded, leaving them hopeless and fearful of risking experimentation without which there is no true creativity. Those who are invaded, whatever their level, rarely go beyond the models which the invaders prescribe for them. In cultural synthesis, there are no invaders; hence, there are no imposed models. In their stead, they are actors who critically analyze reality, never separating this analysis from action, and intervene as subjects in the historical process. Instead of following predetermined plans, leaders and people, mutually identified, together create the guidelines of their action. In this synthesis, leaders and people are somehow reborn in new knowledge and new action. Knowledge of the alienated culture leads to transforming action, resulting in a culture which is being freed from alienation. The more sophisticated knowledge of the leaders is remade in the empirical knowledge of the people, while the latter is refined by the former.

In cultural synthesis, and only in cultural synthesis, is it possible to resolve the contradiction between the world view of the leaders and that of the people, to the enrichment of both. Cultural synthesis does not deny the differences between the two views; indeed, it is based on these differences. It does deny the invasion of one by the other but affirms the undeniable support each gives to the other.

Revolutionary leaders must avoid organizing themselves apart from the people. Whatever contradiction to the people may occur fortuitously due to certain historical conditions must be solved, not augmented, by the cultural invasion of an imposed relationship. Cultural synthesis is the only way. Revolutionary leaders commit many errors and miscalculations by not taking into account something so real as the people's view of the world, a view which explicitly and implicitly contains their concerns, their doubts, their hopes, their way of seeing the leaders, their perceptions of themselves and of the oppressors, their religious beliefs (almost always syncretic), their fatalism, their rebellious reactions. None of these elements can be seen separately for an interaction; all of them compose a totality.

The oppressor is interested in knowing the totality only as an aid to his action of invasion, in order to dominate or preserve domination. For the revolutionary leaders, the knowledge of this totality is indispensable to their action as cultural synthesis. Cultural synthesis, precisely because it is a synthesis, does not mean that the objectives of revolutionary action should be limited by the aspirations expressed in the world view of the people. If this were to happen, in the guise of respect for that view, the revolutionary leaders would be passively bound to that vision. Neither invasion by the leaders of the people's world view nor mere adaptation by the leaders to the often naive aspirations of the people is acceptable.

To be concrete, if at any given historical moment the basic aspiration of the people goes no further than a demand for salary increases, the leaders can commit one of two errors. They can limit their action to stimulating this one demand, or they can overrule this popular aspiration and substitute something more far-reaching, but something which has not yet come to the forefront of the people's attention. In the first case, the revolutionary leaders follow a line of adaptation to the people's demands. In the second case, by disrespecting the aspirations of the people, they fall into cultural invasion.

The solution lies in synthesis. The leaders must, on the one hand, identify with the people's demand for higher salaries, while on the other hand, they must pose the meaning of that very demand as a problem. By doing this, the leaders pose as a problem a real, concrete historical situation, of which the salary demand is one dimension. It will thereby become clear that salary demands alone cannot comprise a definitive solution. The essence of this solution can be found in the previously cited statement by Bishops of the Third World: "If the workers do not somehow come to be owners of their own labor, all structural reforms will be ineffective." They must be the owners, not sellers, of their labor, for any purchase or sale of labor is a type of slavery. To achieve critical consciousness of the facts that is necessary to be the owner of one's own labor, that labor constitutes part of the human person, and that a human being can neither be sold nor can he sell himself, is to go a step beyond the deception of palliative solutions. It is to engage in authentic transformation of reality in order, by humanizing that reality, to humanize women and men.

In the anti-dialogical theory of action, cultural invasion serves the ends of manipulation, which in turn serves the ends of conquest, and conquest, the ends of domination. Cultural synthesis serves the ends of organization; organization serves the ends of liberation. This work deals with a very obvious truth: just as the oppressor, in order to oppress, needs a theory of oppressive action, so the oppressed, in order to become free, also need a theory of action. The oppressor elaborates his theory of action without the people, for he stands against them. Nor can the people, as long as they are crushed and depressed, internalizing the image of the oppressor, construct by themselves the theory of their liberating action. Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders, in their communion, in their praxis, can this theory be built.

Aluta continua.

Afterward

To Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Irish Shaw College of Staten Island, CUNY, USA

"Now I am no longer part of the masses; I am people and I can demand my rights."

—Francisca Andrade, student in a Freirean literary circle in Angicos, 1963.

Kirkendale 40. The Angicos literary circle celebrated its final meeting April 2, 1963, with not only Paulo Freire in attendance but also the liberal president of the Republic, João Goulart. Freire told the president, "There exists today a people who decides, a people that is rising up, a people that has begun to become aware of its destiny and has begun to take part in the Brazilian historical process irreversibly." Kirkendale 40.

At that ceremony, another dignitary attending was General Humberto Castello Branco, who one year later, almost to the day, would reverse democracy by overthrowing Goulart, crushing Paulo's national program, and throwing Paulo in jail. The lights went out in Brazil for too many years after that. Perhaps I can say that this book was born in the dark, or better, born against the dark, or better yet, born for hope and resistance against oppression. Part of an advancing democratic movement in Brazil, Freire's method taught illiterates to read and write in only 40 hours of inexpensive instruction. Once basically literate, poor peasants and workers could finally qualify to vote after a very long silence imposed from the top down, vastly expanding the electorate from the bottom up.

If thousands of Freirean cultural circles had opened as planned after that terrible April 1964, millions of working-class illiterates would read and write well enough to register as new voters, pulling political power to the majority. To stop such a democratic possibility, the oligarchy and its army overthrew the elected Goulart administration, which had appointed Freire to his national post. Interrogated and jailed, Freire was forced to leave the country. He then wandered the world with his wife, Elsa, and five children until 1980. His books banned in Brazil, evicted from his homeland in the prime of his political life, others who could not escape were imprisoned, beaten, or hounded as the generals restored a conservative elite to unaccountable power.

In the years ahead, Paulo would use his survival well, addressing large crowds in Europe and North America, as well as consulting with governments, NGOs, and local projects, becoming the most famous educator of his time, as well as a foremost advocate for social justice, producing *A Pedagogy of the Oppressed* while the wounds of the coup were still fresh.

"Problem-posing education is revolutionary futurity. Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence." 65-66. Few books have been so widely debated, quoted, excerpted, and also used for teacher education, graduate and undergraduate courses, and in some high schools. As the banning of this book in Tucson in 2012 showed, 50 years later, what can explain the extraordinary appeal of *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*?

In four brief chapters, Paulo Freire integrated a remarkable array of concerns:

1. A theory and a practice for a critical pedagogy to question the status quo in the name of social justice.

2. The theory and practice involved a situated pedagogy which could be adapted for diverse places, different stakeholders, and varying conditions.

3. The situated pedagogy provided a rich lexicon of practice: a dialogue method of instruction, problem-posing inquiry instead of banking pedagogy, memorization, and tested feasibility limit situations and limit acts, the cultural circle, the teacher-student (with students as teachers), the vocabulary universe, the generative theme and the generative word, codification and decodification, conscientization or coming to critical consciousness, hinged themes, and the anthropological notion of culture, praxis (or action-reflection cyclically theorizing practice and practicing theory).

4. This lexicon for critical theory and practice evolved as Paulo experimented before the coup for 15 years in adult literacy education outside formal school systems. Later, it would be adapted for K-12 and higher education units.

5. Open to diverse settings for critical practice, this book crossed paths with multicultural, anti-racist, and feminist pedagogies and movements also emerging at that time with similar orientations toward equality, democracy, and social justice.

6. The social justice orientation of this book appeared just when mass movements for radical change became global phenomena, in a period famous for the "immense and proliferating criticizability of things, institutions, and practices and discourses," as Michel Foucault put it. 6. And when student-centered approaches and constructivist methods were on the offensive in educational circles.

7. Student-centered, constructivist, and critical of inequality, Freire's theory and practice proposed all education as politics. "No pedagogy can be neutral, because all develop human subjects and produce consciousness one way or another, depending on the ideology of the contents, the social relations of discourse, and the learning process of the curriculum. Any pedagogy or curriculum which does not question the status quo tacitly or actively endorses it." 8. This learning process offered appealing moral values based in ethics of mutuality and professional responsibility to teach for a world less violent and cruel. Freire's preoccupation with humanization and dehumanization launched this concern on the very first page.

9. Finally, Chapter 4 is an extraordinary epistle to would-be revolutionary leaders, not merely advice for critical educators. It rebukes oppositional leaders who denounce domination but slide into authoritarian monologue, exhortation, abstractness, bureaucratic rule, and propagandizing—not permissible in Freirean classrooms.

These points help account for the longevity and impact of this small book, which was not written as a scholastic treatise but rather grew from Freire's reflection on his practice and experiences. "Thought and study alone did not produce *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*," Freire wrote in the preface. "This book," he reported, "is rooted in concrete situations and describes the reaction of laborers, peasant or urban, and of middle-class persons whom I've observed directly or indirectly during the course of my educative work." (page 19).

Paulo considered critical education in schools or in social movements intellectually demanding and politically risky. Movements with internal education programs confront formidable authorities whom Paulo called "the power now in power." In schools and colleges, teachers and students "make themselves each day, but under terms largely dominated from outside and above." Limit situations against which critical pedagogy is a limit act. Power was especially oriented to the critical learning possible inside mass movements. "The power not yet in power," but found himself appointed Secretary of Education for São Paulo's 643 schools when the Workers Party won control of that city administration in 1989.

For Paulo, throughout his life and work, the essential questions of this famous book remained: "What kind of world do we live in? Why is it like that? What kind of world do we want? How do we get there from here?"

April 2017, New York, USA.

Interviews with Contemporary Scholars

Marina Aparicio Barbarán, Paulo Freire Institute, Spain

"Please tell us about your background and current areas of expertise."

"I'm a political scientist with an undergraduate degree from Pompeu Fabra University, and I specialize in public and social policy analysis and evaluation, with two master's degrees from UPF, Johns Hopkins, and Valencia (UVEG). My research areas are policy analysis, political and electoral behavior, and political and parliamentary elites analysis."

"How did you come to read Freire's *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* for the first time?"

"My first time reading *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* was in 2006. I was a participant and collaborative member of the Centro de Recursos..."

e education continua crec de potassium de Valencia directed by pep aparicio guadas, 1999-2013.

In the center, I conducted publishing tasks and took on organizational and educational functions related to my training and field. At the same time, I continued with my studies in political science, as well as various activities within social movements. Previously, I'd read some of Freire's other works, but I think it is important to note how this book enticed me: the analysis, the words, and the way Freire articulates the different realities in which we are all immersed. His concretion, his ideas, his clairvoyance, his coherence. We could say that books like *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*, *Pedagogy of the Question*, or *Pedagogy of Hope* have been the key in shaping a perspective or dynamic of reading the world, and also writing the world and the word, and in putting this perspective into action.

What do you think Paulo Freire would say about how his theories are used today?

From my perspective, Freire would have mixed feelings. On the one hand, the joy of seeing his Utopia, practices, and theories, his way of living and doing, having mushroomed in the world and society at the hands of women and men involved in processes of subjectivity and/or awareness. On the other hand, Freire would have a certain desolation to see the fallacious use of many of these concepts in practical domestication in universities, governments, and social movements. He also would have a certain perplexity seeing how much of the analysis and how many of the arguments he included in *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* could be used in the present time.

What do you think of a Freirean University? What would it look like today?

A Freirean University would have at its core the methodological action or theoretical and practical intervention, which would lead to an awakened practice and promote a participatory or collaborative culture at the University. That is, we would be at a university where the process of awareness through dialogue and continued questioning between peers would lead to the construction of a process of liberation. Thus, we would be able to de-apprehend those dynamics, actions, procedures that we all have internalized in order to move toward a democratic, flexible, open, common society where we could overcome the sectarianism we are involved in as a subject and become thinking men, women, and children, and not oppressed subjects.

If students took just one thing away from reading *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*, what would you hope it would be?

I cannot be limited to picking just one thing. I would choose the dialogic method and emancipation method; the problem conception of politics, ethics, and education; I would choose critical analysis of specific realities; but above all, I would choose the proposal that reading the world precedes reading the word, and both the world and the word are in constant transformation, and we are always main characters in these actions.

Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Please tell us about your background and current areas of expertise.

Linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy.

What do you think Paulo Freire would say about how his theories are used today?

I think he would be generally appalled by the current teach-to-test doctrines.

What do you think of a Freirean University? What would it look like today?

Instructions should reject the notion of education as pouring water into a vessel, in a phrase used in the Enlightenment. Freire's banking model, in favor of engaging students in an active quest for understanding in a faculty-student cooperative environment. To a significant extent, something like that is true of science teaching at its best, sometimes elsewhere.

If students took just one thing away from reading *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*, what would you hope it would be?

They should recognize that education should be a process of self-discovery, of developing one's own capacities and pursuing interests and concerns with an open and independent mind, all in cooperation with others.

Gustavo E. Fishman, Arizona State University, USA. Please tell us about your background and current areas of expertise.

I'm a professor of educational policy and director of EdExchange, the knowledge mobilization initiative at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. I started to work in education as a popular educator in the early 1980s in Argentina without any formal training in either pedagogy or research. Popular education at that time was closely related to Freirean ideals and was oriented to work in a non-authoritarian but guided pedagogical approach with the goal of social liberation.

How did you come to read Freire's *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* for the first time?

The first time I heard anything about *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* was not an invitation to read it, but in order to ignore it. In 1977, I was a 16-year-old studying industrial chemistry in a vocational school in Buenos Aires. I was not particularly politicized, but like everyone else in the country, I was acutely aware that we were living under a brutal dictatorship. It still makes me angry recalling how baffled I felt when the principal at my high school posted notes following the guidelines of the Ministry of Education announcing that the simple possession of any of the books on the list of immoral and dangerous readings was evidence of terrorist sympathies and reason enough to be expelled from the school. I remember that I became very curious that a book about education made it into this long list of dangerous books.

Seven years later, and in September 1984, I was a member of a popular education group volunteering in Ashanti Town in Buenos Aires for an adult literacy project when my partner told me the International Council of Adult Education (ICAE) was looking for volunteers to organize their 1985 annual meeting. The keynote speaker was Paulo Freire, who was returning to Argentina for the first time since his books were banned in the country. I immediately volunteered to be part of the team that was organizing the meeting, and I got a used copy of *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* and began my informal education of all things Freirean.

What do you think a Freirean University would look like today?

Following Freire's dictum of being simple without being simplistic, a Freirean University should have three key defining characteristics. First, it should be structured to implement a pedagogy of liberation, committed to the principles of freedom, equity, inclusivity, and solidarity. A pedagogy of liberation will engage in curious, rigorous, and usable teaching, service, and research agendas. Second, the students, faculty, and administration should be as diverse as their societies, diversity in two different but related senses: serving diverse sectors and all social groups of a society, as well as diversity of ideas and orientations. Third, a Freirean University will be organized as a laboratory of democratic, participatory governing.

Can you describe how and to what extent do you think Freire's work has had an impact on pedagogy?

I think the biggest impact of Freire's work is that it has demonstrated how even short-lived experiences of democratic schooling in a single classroom, in or outside schools, with children or adults, are worth pursuing. These experiences teach us to not only expect more from ourselves as educators and learners but also link individual and social actions with the goals of equality and solidarity.

Ramon Fletcher, University of Barcelona, Spain. Please tell us about your background and current areas of expertise.

I am devoted to scientific research in search of both intellectual and human excellence, focusing on the identification of actions that tackle inequalities in different social fields: ethnic and minority groups, gender issues, especially in the field of masculinity studies, education, and economy, specifically focusing on organizations that are successful in overcoming income inequalities, etc. In other words, I've never been interested in the analysis of inequality by itself because I think such analysis benefits only the people who develop it. Rather, I'm interested in the analysis of human actions that are actively overcoming inequalities, something that Freire appreciated very much.

What do you think Paulo Freire would say about how his theories are used today?

I do not know what Freire would think, but what I can say is that Freire had a great intuition and was always ahead of his time. In 1969, with *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*, he had already developed a theory of dialogic action, which did not arrive in the social sciences until 1981, 12 years later, with Habermas's theory of communicative action. What Freire defined as dialogic action or dialogic perspective is the current trend in social sciences in the field of economics, sociology, anthropology, and political science. I think Freire would be satisfied to see how the social sciences today are in line with the dialogic perspective that he foresaw in the 1960s.

Can you describe how and to what extent do you think Freire's work has had an impact on research?

I think the impact of Freire's work on research has been extremely positive. The dialogic perspective helped show that it is necessary to open a dialogue with the people who are the object of study. What happens is that the meaning of this dialogue, what dialogue meant to Freire, has often not been well understood. Research should be truly dialogic with the end users of a given study. Although the subject may be a person working eight hours a day in domestic cleaning, the researchers being paid to read and study the scientific knowledge. Unfortunately, some people have understood only the "go and dialogue with the subject's part" without doing the rest of their job, without working hard like Freire did, without reading the applicable social sciences literature so that they can use that knowledge in the dialogue with the end users.

Can you describe how and to what extent do you think Freire's work has an impact on pedagogy?

Honestly, Freire's work has had an impressive impact worldwide. He is possibly the most influential scholar in education. The problem is that this influence has not always reached educational practice. For example, in universities, many people declare themselves as being Freirean, but they are not helping transform the actual conditions of the schools or the educational practices to be in line with Freirean guidelines.

If students took just one thing away from reading *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*, what would you hope it would be?

I especially wish students would prioritize something that is forgotten in most educational systems, which is the right to education for all children. Very often, decisions are made based on reasons that are very far from the improvement of educational outcomes for all children. It is critical that students in education embrace this ethical and human commitment. This will be their real professional task.

Ronald David Glass, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. Please tell us about your background and current areas of expertise.

I'm a radical philosopher of education whose work emanates from and within struggles for justice. I direct the UC Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California, and we partner with aggrieved communities to address issues in the economy, employment, education, housing, food systems, public health, and the environment. I also had a project that investigates the ethical issues in social science research.

What do you think Paulo Freire would say about how his theories are used today?

I had the great good fortune and honor of working in depth with Paulo Freire in 1984 when he lived with me for a month and collaborated in the social justice movement-building activities of the adult education development project. We discussed at length how his theory was being taken up in different sectors, in different countries. He agreed with me that much of the critical pedagogy that takes place in U.S. schools and claims Freire's theory as its basis is, in truth, a domestication of the radical foundation of his ideas, even as it establishes a more humane form of schooling. Education is a practice of freedom, is necessarily geared into actual efforts and struggles to transform the world and to transform our own inner selves as well, since the oppressions of the world reside in us as well as in the structures and processes of daily life. But Freire was not a purist in terms of either theory or practice. He was committed to doing whatever could be done in whatever open spaces could be created. So he would be happy that people the world over have found his theory useful in their own ways, in their own particular context, to move the struggle for justice forward.

What do you think of a Freirean University? What would it look like today?

A university based in Freire's theory would be organized to address the most pressing social, economic, and political inequities. It would take direction for its research agenda from the needs of the most aggrieved communities. It would recognize the ethical and political dimensions of knowledge claims and knowledge production. It would honor multiple modalities of knowing. It would acknowledge that scholars and their disciplines and universities are themselves tainted by histories and ideologies of oppression and exploitation. It would be less concerned with credentialing experts than it would be concerned with animating curiosity, habits of disciplined critical inquiry, and a lifetime commitment to the struggle for justice.

Can you describe how and to what extent do you think Freire's work has had an impact on pedagogy?

I think in the United States, Freire's work has had limited impact on pedagogy in schools. I see his theory primarily invoked as an ethical or political marker, as an indication of a teacher's intent to honor the background experiences of students. This is usually done through an often somewhat superficial engagement with chapter 2 of *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* and its famous contrast between banking and dialogical or problem-posing education. This domesticated critical pedagogy certainly is more humane, provides more space for student voice and interests, and offers a counterposition to the dominant discourse and practice of pedagogy in public schools. However, this is a very limited embodiment of the theory. It is the case that some teachers, such as those organized in Teachers for Social Justice, have developed more robust embodiments of the theory and are looking for ways to link classroom learning to larger movements seeking to affect change in the community. Freire's theory has been used pedagogically within movement building, and here it has found much stronger forms of expression, particularly in Latin America.

Valerie Kinloch, University of Pittsburgh, USA. Please tell us about your background and current areas of expertise.

I'm the Renee and Richard Goldman Dean of the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh, where I collaborate with colleagues on important local, national, and global educational initiatives. Before being named Dean, I was professor of literacy studies and associate dean at Ohio State University, where I facilitated initiatives on diversity and inclusion in education, international education partnerships, and school and community engagement. My research examines the literacies and community engagements of young people and adults inside and outside schools. I'm the author of publications on race, place, literacy, and diversity, and I'm currently working on related research and engagement initiatives.

How did you come to read Freire's *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* for the first time?

I discovered Freire's *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* when I was an undergraduate student majoring in English at Johnson C. Smith University. I recall having countless conversations with my friends and some of my professors about Black literature, Black lives, oppression, and the power of language and literacy, and I was moved to continue on my journey to read various texts by Black authors and scholars. In one of those texts, the idea of reading the word and the world was presented to me, and when I searched for the meaning of the phrase, Paulo Freire's name and book came up. So I read *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* and fell in love with these discussions of critical consciousness and connections that should happen among teachers, students, and the world.

What do you think a Freirean University would look like today?

I think it would include open spaces for people to engage with others, to analyze events going on in the world, to examine ways to combat oppression and inequity, to dismantle racism, classism, sexism, inequality, and capitalism. It would be free, open to everyone. It would be guided by the need to create and enhance our stances, dispositions, and ideologies related to critical consciousness, collaborating with others, working for necessary sociopolitical change, and thinking beyond the self. It would be a humanizing, culturally rich academic space.

Can you describe how and to what extent do you think Freire's work has had an impact on research?

To this day, Freire continues to push scholars to consider the complicated ways identities and locations need to be nuanced in discussions about education. He encourages us to take a critical perspective, especially when collaborating with other people in community contexts as we attempt to address pervasive questions about inequality. He also situates research within the reach of the everyday: the everyday realities, lives lived, conditions, struggles, and hope of people to make research accessible to who we are working with and writing with and about in our research. Thus, research is not singularly about publishing articles and books, but about writing new ways of being into existence that can fundamentally change the world for the better.

If students took just one thing away from reading *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*, what would you hope it would be?

I hope it would be this: Freire's 1971 insistence that we work to eradicate systems of oppression so that students can become beings for themselves, as opposed to students being forced to integrate into the structure of oppression (page 55). I believe his focus on transforming systems of oppression points to all systems—schools, universities, and political systems—that we live under in our specific contexts. It also speaks to the need for us to work in solidarity to revolutionize and transform the world.

Peter Mayo, University of Malta, Malta. Please tell us about your background and current areas of expertise.

I was brought up in Malta, where I worked as a part-time journalist for a few years, then took up teaching and eventually the academic life. After having pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Alberta and OISE, University of Toronto, in Canada, I specialize in sociology of education with a focus on adult education. I have also been involved in university outreach, developing projects that have their basis in issues and commemorations that capture community members' imagination and are therefore rooted in popular consciousness.

How did you come to read Freire's *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* for the first time?

The occasion for reading *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* presented itself at the start of my graduate studies in Edmonton, Alberta, and the book certainly proved a revelation to me. It seemed to contain many of the insights and elements necessary for me to understand the context in which my previous teaching in Malta had taken place. These included sub-alternative colonial legacies, relative poverty, class issues, including language issues, and issues concerning racism. There were African Maltese students in our school at a time when Maltese society was nowhere near the multi-ethnic society it has become in recent times.

What do you think a Freirean University would look like today?

It would be one where the institution and the education it provides are conceived of as public goods, not consumption goods. It would be one where engagement with the community would be given central importance. It would be one where the starting point for learning is the student's existential situation, with knowledge deriving from thematic complexes researched within and emerging from the community. It would be one in which the transmission model of lecturing is replaced by co-investigation, involving lecturers, students, and community members debating issues which are raised in a manner that arouses epistemological curiosity and becomes the object of collective inquiry.

Can you describe how and to what extent do you think Freire's work has had an impact on research?

The greatest Freirean impact on research can be felt in the approach known as participatory action research, a collective form of research where community members are assisted in researching issues that affect their own and surrounding lives. I would argue that Freire has a lot to tell us about the ethics of research and the extent to which those whose lives and issues are being examined are genuinely involved in determining the research agenda and research process. They would benefit from co-ownership of the entire research process and its outcomes. This research process and outcome should serve to improve their ways of life. It is a value-committed effort which affirms the choice and purposes of research in line with a view that knowledge and research are not neutral. In short, it is research geared not simply to interpret the world, but primarily to contribute toward changing it.

Can you describe how and to what extent do you think Freire's work has had an impact on pedagogy?

Freire has inspired many to move away from a hierarchical, magisterial mode of teaching and learning to a more democratic approach, an approach built on the teacher's democratic authority, which does not degenerate into authoritarianism. He has also inspired educators to recognize the politics of education, to eschew any pretense of neutrality, and most important of all, he has emphasized the collective dimensions of learning and the need to start from the learner's existential situations with all their differences and move to higher orders of learning and knowledge.

Peter McLaren, Chapman University, USA. Please tell us about your background and current areas of expertise.

I served as an elementary school teacher in Toronto's Jane Finch Corridor, a public housing district in Canada known for its high rate of crime. I earned a hard-won reputation for successfully teaching working-class immigrants. I subsequently applied for and was accepted into a PhD program in education at the University of Toronto, during which time I published the diary I'd kept as an elementary school teacher. I called it *Cries from the Corridor*, and it became a Canadian best-seller in 1980. After I'd finished a grueling national book tour, I was already growing self-critical about the fact that *Cries from the Corridor* was woefully absent of a theoretical framework that could help readers understand the violence and alienation experienced by students in my classroom. Progressive and radical educators alike had for decades, with gut-churning unison, at the tellingly restrained efforts to take seriously education reform throughout the country, establishing a bog-standard evasion for challenging seriously the role that education plays in the reproduction of the asymmetrical relations of power and privilege of the capitalist state. And I fear that my book was not sufficiently helpful in deepening an understanding of capitalist schooling. To remedy both the calculated indifference of educational officials as well as my insufficiently developed theoretical center of gravity, I began to read across disciplines, shifting my early interest in Chaucer, Beowulf, Shakespeare, and Blake towards an incorporation of the sociology of knowledge, anthropology, critical theory, and semiotics. I took the time to audit courses with Michel Foucault, Umberto Eco, Ernesto Laclau, and other visiting intellectuals. I finally graduated with my doctorate in 1984, still feeling that there was so much to learn. My doctoral dissertation was published as a book, *Schooling as a Ritual Performance*, and to my great excitement, Professor Paulo Freire agreed to write the preface. Freire became a mentor to me and invited me to join him at Miami University of Ohio as a fellow professor. Freire introduced me to one of his best friends, Donaldo Macedo, from whom I learned a great deal about Paulo Freire and his work. Freire arranged for me to meet Paulo in 1985, and I was surprised, no, shocked, to learn that Paulo was already familiar with my work. In fact, he would refer to me as his "intellectual cousin" and a part of his "pedagogical family." In the ensuing years, he was gracious enough to write prefaces for two of my books and an endorsement for a third. In subsequent years, until his death, he exhibited a soulful kindness toward me and my ongoing project of developing critical pedagogy in North America and later, primarily, Latin America and Asian contexts.

How did you come to read Freire's *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* for the first time?

I read *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* while a doctoral student in Toronto. It was not on any required reading lists in my classes, but friends of mine on the left pronounced it as a must-read work, so I read it in conjunction with other educators and social and political theorists that I was reading at the time. Paulo's work stood out for its relevance to my own life experiences, both as a student and as an educator, dramatically so. It helped to sharpen my understanding of praxis and the necessity for engaging in social struggles and then returning to theoretical and philosophical works for clarification and for deepening my understanding of those experiences.

What do you think Paulo Freire would say about how his theories are used today?

I think Paulo, in all of his great humility, would be appreciative that his work has made such a powerful impact on so many fields and that it has become such a powerful antidote to prevailing forms of social and political amnesia and to the motivated forgetfulness that surrounds the foundational violence of all societies. But I also believe he would be critical of approaches in education that claimed to be Freirean but which domesticated his work, leeching from its foundations a radical politics that was critical of capitalism and which could certainly be called socialist.

What do you think of a Freirean University? What would it look like today?

A Freirean University in the North American context would be centered around the elimination of economic inequality and social relations of oppression related to sexuality, age, species, gender, white supremacy, and the coloniality of power, all of which are related in different ways to the unequal ownership of capital and to capitalist value production itself and the exploitation, alienation, and logic of abstraction that accompanies it. The unequal ownership of capital cannot be remedied by higher growth rates within the conceptual models of neoclassical economics, but only by transcending capitalism through a socialist alternative. The Freirean University will be about rebuilding public sectors, democratizing the workplace, establishing communal councils that are committed to models of participatory and direct democracy, eliminating race, class, and gender antagonisms, creating a revolutionary critical humanism that transcends private property and that is committed to creating communities of engaged learners and freely associated laborers dedicated to working in the interests of a truly global commons.

Can you describe how and to what extent do you think Freire's work has had an impact on research?

Freire's work has had a strikingly significant impact on the genesis and ongoing development of the field of critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy is constituted by a body of theory associated with Freire's work and critical social theory more generally that emphasizes praxis. The field of critical pedagogy has recently expanded its purview to include revolutionary critical pedagogy, an attempt to reclaim Freire's Marxist epistemological roots through the development of a philosophy of praxis driven primarily by the work of Marx, Hegel, and humanist philosophers. Freire's research has been felt in the fields of theology, literacy, composition studies, literary studies, applied linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and political philosophy. That his work has cross-fertilized so many areas of research is a testament to its transdisciplinary reach in the service of a truly decolonial pedagogy of hope and self and social transformation.

If students took just one thing away from reading *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*, what would you hope it would be?

It would be that they would never just take one thing away from reading Paulo Freire, but realize that their everyday lives always have pedagogical dimensions to them, and those pedagogical dimensions are, in turn and at one and the same time, political dimensions that challenge our obligation to the poor, the emasculated, and the dispossessed; that sharpen our ontological and epistemological clarity; and challenge our commitment to building a better world free from unnecessary alienation and human suffering.

Margot Akazawa-Ray, San Francisco State University, USA and Fielding Graduate University, USA. Please tell us about your background and current areas of expertise.

My primary areas of work, teaching, research, and activism focus on militarism, armed conflict, and violence against women. I've examined the connections between militarism, economic globalization, and impacts on local and migrant women in South Korea who live and work around U.S. military bases. I've conducted feminist activist research methodology training sessions with women activists in the Niger Delta Region, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. I use popular education in community settings to conduct anti-racist and multicultural workshops, and in my undergraduate and graduate courses.

How did you come to read Freire's *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* for the first time?

In the late 1970s, a small group of feminist activists in Boston, USA, began to read and learn from *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* together, striving to understand and create radical methodologies for living, understanding, and teaching. The feminist slogan "the personal is political"—what better way than through ideas we learned from Freire? We did not realize before that the feminist consciousness-raising groups were based on, or at least unknowingly related to, his work. The writing was detergent, and we were sometimes challenged by masculinist language of "he," "him," and "men." Nonetheless, we carried on to our enormous benefit.

What do you think Paulo Freire would say about how his theories are used today?

I had the honor of meeting Freire in person in the 1980s and was struck by his unpretentiousness, his simplicity. So I believe he would be surprised, pleasantly, by the extensive use of his work by a range of educators around the world. He also would be seriously concerned and dismayed by the distortion and debasement of key ideas like "starting from students' experiences," "reading the world to read the word," to technocratic concepts like "learner-centered" that have come to mean "you students can have some say in what you learn, but we teachers still control the curriculum." Perhaps more important, the liberatory purpose of education that Freire so consistently articulated and re-articulated has been left to one side on the way to increasingly mechanized learning and teaching contexts in public education for primary, secondary, and tertiary students. Freire would delight, truly, at the uptake of his work in places similar to where he began, in rural areas of the world, including in developed countries like the United States, where peasants and working-class folk, with and without literacy skills, are learning to analyze, understand, and change the conditions that oppress and marginalize them.

What do you think a Freirean University would look like today?

A Freirean University would be an oxymoron today. The forces of neoliberalism and conservatism that have engulfed most universities would result in the same harm being inflicted currently, irrespective of a name change. The most radical educational settings that could faithfully apply and advance Freire's work would be in informal settings, what I refer to as "free spaces," including activist movements, and with informal settings like universities where we could learn and teach together as we face material and social conditions that are so heavily and horrifically shaping our lives and recognize our shared destinies—oppressed and oppressor, dominant and subordinate, the vocal and the silent and silenced.

Can you describe how and to what extent do you think Freire's work has had an impact on research?

Liberatory methodologies that I'm most familiar with—feminist and decolonizing—are rooted in Freirean, feminist, and Indigenous epistemologies and research methods. I've experienced how Paulo Freire's theories have been applied creatively and convincingly in both forward to the original English edition, 1970.

Richard Shaw: Over the years, the thought and work of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire had spread from the Northeast of Brazil to an entire continent and have made a profound impact not only in the field of education but also in the overall struggle for national development. At the precise moment when the disinherited masses in Latin America are awakening from their traditional lethargy and are anxious to participate as subjects in the development of their countries, Paulo Freire has perfected a method of teaching illiterates that has contributed in an extraordinary way to that process. In fact, those who, in learning to read and write, come to a new awareness of selfhood and begin to look critically at the social situation in which they find themselves, often take the initiative in acting to transform the society that has denied them. From this opportunity of participation, education is once again a subversive force. In this country, we are gradually becoming aware of the work of Paulo Freire, but thus far, we have thought of it primarily in terms of its contribution to the education of illiterate adults in the Third World. If, however, we take a closer look, we may discover that his methodology, as well as his educational philosophy, are as important for us as for the dispossessed in Latin America. Their struggle to become free subjects and to participate in the transformation of their society is similar in many ways to the struggle not only of Blacks and Mexican Americans but also of middle-class young people in this country. And the sharpness and intensity of that struggle in the developing world may well provide us with new insight, new models, and a new hope as we face our own situation. For this reason, I consider the publication of *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* in an English edition to be something of an event.

Paulo Freire's thought represents the response of a creative mind and sensitive conscience to the extraordinary misery and suffering of the oppressed around him. Born in 1921 in Recife, the center of one of the most extreme situations of poverty and underdevelopment in the Third World, he was soon forced to experience that reality directly. As the economic crisis in 1929 in the United States began to affect Brazil, the precarious stability of Freire's middle-class family gave way, and he found himself sharing the plight of the wretched of the earth. This had a profound influence on his life, as he came to know the gnawing pangs of hunger and fell behind in school because of the listlessness it produced. It also led him to make a vow at age 11 to dedicate his life to the struggle against hunger so that other children would not have to know the agony he was then experiencing. His early sharing of the life of the poor also led him to the discovery of what he describes as the "culture of silence" of the dispossessed. He came to realize that their ignorance and lethargy were the direct product of the whole situation of economic, social, and political domination and of the paternalism of which they were victims. Rather than being encouraged and equipped to know and respond to the concrete realities of their world, they were kept submerged in a situation in which such critical awareness and response were practically impossible. And it became clear to him that the whole educational system was one of the major instruments for the maintenance of this culture of silence.

Confronted by this problem in a very existential way, Freire turned his attention to the field of education and began to work on it. Over the years, he has engaged in the process of study and reflection that has produced something quite new and creative in educational philosophy. From a situation of direct engagement in the struggle to liberate men and women for the creation of a new world, he has reached out to the thought and experience of those in many different situations and of diverse philosophical positions. In his words, to Sartre, Fromm, and Althusser, Ortega y Gasset and Mao, Martin Luther King and Che Guevara, Anouilh and Marcuse, he has made use of the insights of these men to develop a perspective on education which is authentically his own and which seeks to respond to the concrete realities of Latin America. His thought on the philosophy of education was first expressed in 1959 in his doctoral dissertation at the University of Recife and later in his work as professor of the history and philosophy of education in the same university, as well as in his early experiments with the teaching of illiterates in that same city. The methodology he developed was widely used by Catholics and others in literacy campaigns throughout the Northeast of Brazil and was considered such a threat to the old order that Freire was jailed immediately after the military coup in 1964. Released 70 days later and encouraged to leave the country, Freire went to Chile, where he spent five years working with UNESCO and the Chilean Institute for Agrarian Reform in programs of adult education. He then acted as a consultant at Harvard University's School of Education and worked in close association with a number of groups engaged in new educational experiments in rural and urban areas. He's presently serving as special consultant to the Office of Education of the World Council of Churches in Geneva.

Freire has written many articles in Portuguese and Spanish, and his first book was published in Brazil in 1967. His latest and most complete work, *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*, is the first of his writings to be published in this country. In this brief introduction, there is no point in attempting to sum up in a few paragraphs what the author develops in a number of pages; that would be an offense to the richness, depth, and complexity of his thought. But perhaps a word of witness has its place here—a personal witness as to why I find a dialogue with the thought of Paulo Freire an exciting adventure, fed up as I am with the abstractness and sterility of so much intellectual work in academic circles today. I'm excited by a process of reflection which is set in a thoroughly historical context, which is carried on in the midst of a struggle to create a new social order, and thus represents a new unity of theory and practice. I'm encouraged when a man of the stature of Paulo Freire incarnates a rediscovery of the humanizing vocation of the intellectual and demonstrates the power of thought to negate accepted limits and open the way to a new future. He is able to do this because he operates on one basic assumption: that man's ontological vocation, as he calls it, is to be a subject who acts upon and transforms his world, and in doing so, moves toward ever new possibilities—a fuller and richer life, individually and collectively. This world to which he relates is not a static and closed order, a given reality which man must accept and to which he must adjust; rather, it is a problem to be worked on and solved. It is the material used by man to create history, a task which he performs as he overcomes that which is dehumanizing at any particular time and place and dares to create the qualitatively new.

For Freire, the resources of that task at the present time are provided by the advanced technology of our Western world, but the social vision which impels us to negate the present order and demonstrate that history is not ended comes primarily from the suffering and struggle of the people of the Third World. Coupled with this is Freire's conviction, now supported by a wide background of experience, that every human being, no matter how ignorant or submerged in the culture of silence he or she may be, is capable of looking critically at the world in a dialogical encounter with others. Provided with the proper tools for such encounter, the individual can gradually perceive personal and social reality, as well as the contradictions in it; become conscious of his or her own perception of that reality; and deal critically with it. In this process, the old paternalistic teacher-student relationship is overcome. A peasant can facilitate this process for a neighbor more effectively than a teacher brought in from outside. People educate each other through the mediation of the world. As this happens, the word takes on new power. It is no longer an abstraction or magic, but a means by which people discover themselves and their potential as they give names to things around them. As Freire puts it, "each individual wins back the right to say his or her own word—to name the world."

When an illiterate peasant participates in this sort of educational experience, he or she comes to a new awareness of self, has a new sense of dignity, and is stirred by a new hope. Time and again, peasants have expressed these discoveries in striking ways: "After a few hours of class, I now realize I am a person, an educated person. We were blind, now our eyes have been opened. Before this, words meant nothing to me; now they speak to me, and I can make them speak. Now we will no longer be a dead weight on the cooperative farm." When this happens, in the process of learning to read, men and women discover that they are creators of culture and that all their work can be creative. "I work, and working, I transform the world." And as those who have been completely marginalized are so radically transformed, they are no longer willing to be mere objects responding to changes occurring around them. They are more likely to decide to take upon themselves the struggle to change the structures of society which until now have served to oppress them. For this reason, a distinguished Brazilian student of national development recently affirmed that this type of educational work among the people represents a new factor in social change and development, a new instrument of conduct for the Third World by which it can overcome traditional structures and enter the modern world.

At first sight, Paulo Freire's method of teaching illiterates in Latin America seems to belong to a different world from that in which we find ourselves in this country. Certainly, it would be absurd to claim that it should be copied here, but there are certain parallels in the two situations that should not be overlooked. Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system. To the degree that this happens, we're also becoming submerged in a new culture of silence. The paradox is that the same technology that does this to us also creates a new sensitivity to what is happening, especially among young people. The new media, together with the erosion of old concepts of authority, open the way to acute awareness of this new bondage. The young perceive that their right to say their own word has been stolen from them, and that few things are more important than the struggle to win it back. They also realize that the educational system today, from kindergarten to university, is their enemy. There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the practice of freedom—the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. The development of an educational methodology that facilitates this process will inevitably lead to tension and conflict within our society, but it could also contribute to the formation of a new man and mark the beginning of a new era in Western history. For those who are committed to that task and are searching for concepts and tools for experimentation, Paulo Freire's thought will make a significant contribution in the years ahead.

This concludes *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* by Paulo Freire. Narrated by Dennis Kleinman. Copyright 1970, 1993 by Paulo Freire. Copyright 2018 by Paulo Freire and contributors. Copyright introduction 2018 by Donald Macedo. Copyright afterward 2018 by Iris Shaw. This unabridged audiobook is published by arrangement with Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, UK, and was produced in the year 2018 by Tanto Media Incorporated, a division of Recorded Books, which holds the copyright thereto. Please visit tanto.com for more information on our growing library of unabridged audiobooks.