From Word To Word

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Friere is concerned with articulating a means for education to bring about revolutionary action by oppressed peoples against their oppressors.  To do so, he undermines the traditional separation between the roles of the teacher and student, through what he calls dialogic education.  He does not, however, similarly problematize the categories of oppressor and oppressed to any great degree.  Though he acknowledges that the oppressed begin to resemble their oppressors, and though he acknowledges also that the oppressors can willingly choose to identify themselves with the oppressed, he maintains a sharp distinction between oppressors and oppressed, despite the fact that it functions similarly to the distinction between teacher and student that he is so determined to subvert.

Freire’s central argument is that it is necessary to have a dialogic approach to revolutionary action and to education, as opposed to an approach that employs the techniques of the oppressors themselves, and as opposed to techniques that acquiesce entirely to the felt needs of particular oppressed persons or communities.  Dialogism, as Friere understands it, is the practice of engaging in education and other activities in a way that permits the right to dialogue if not absolute equality to all the participants.  This process involves all parties coming to recognize that they are both teachers and learners simultaneously, even if people occupy certain roles during a particular dialogue.  Some people, for example, may be facilitators of a dialogue, and some people may be appointed to fulfil other tasks, and some people may have knowledge or expertise that is particularly relevant, but this does not imply that these people solely occupy the role of teacher in opposition to the others who solely occupy the role of learners.  In this way, dialogic education recognizes the provisionality and limitedness of teacher and learner roles, seeking to turn the attention of the participants away from these roles toward the particular social, political, or educational issues that they are currently addressing.

Friere does not, however, make a similar move when he addresses the distinction between oppressor and oppressed, maintaining this opposition in every case.  Yet these roles are as susceptible to subversion as those of teacher and student, the role of the teacher even being implicated in a kind of oppression in many cases.  Maintaining these roles as absolutes only draws attention to the roles themselves and distracts concern from the issues in which both oppressed and oppressors are implicated.  This does not mean, of course, that oppression should be ignored, or that the perpetrators of oppression are not responsible for their actions.  It is only to recognize that the roles of oppressor and oppressed are not absolute, that they often shift from one context to another, and that they are always more complicated than these labels are capable of expressing.  It is to recognize that any lasting solution to oppression will need to put its attention, not on maintaining the distinction between oppressor and oppressed, but in erasing this distinction as much as it is able.