discussion Sharing Passages from Freire&Working with Thesis Statements with hooks
assignment1: write a paragraph (around 200)+reply at least two class (50words each *2)
assignment2: write a paragraph (around 200)+peer review (50 words)
assignment 1: Sharing Passages from Freire
After reading Paulo Freire’s chapter on education, please select one passage from the text that you found particularly significant, interesting, difficult, or confusing. A “passage” may be only one sentence, and it may be up to about one paragraph, but make sure you select a passage that is “juicy” enough that you’ll have plenty to say about it.
After typing your passage, write a paragraph where you comment on at least two of the following things:
What did you find particularly interesting in this passage?
Why does this passage seem significant in the context of the larger chapter?
What questions do you have about the passage?
Was there anything in the passage that was confusing to you? Why? What have you discovered about it now that you’ve thought about it more?
After posting, please read your classmates’ posts and comment on at least two of them to respond to either their questions or their ideas.
assignment 2: Working with Thesis Statements with hooks
Now that you’ve read bell hooks’ essay, we’re going to spend some time thinking about what she is arguing in it. Have you ever heard someone say “everything is an argument”? The idea means that usually people are not really just telling you something for the sake of talking about it– they are actually trying to convince you of something. Even though hooks’ essay includes a lot of personal anecdotes and reflections, she ultimately is making some differentarguments that she is hoping to convince her readers to agree with by the end of the essay.
For this discussion post, please look back through “Keeping Close to Home” and pick out at least TWO passages where you see hooks stating an argument she wishes to convince us to of. Similar to our previous discussion, type the two passages in a post below and then explain, in your own words, what she is trying to convince us of. By the way, putting her quotes into your own words is called “paraphrasing.” More on that later.
For this assignment, you should respond to ONE peer, letting them know if you can add on to their paraphrase or if you disagree with how they paraphrased it. If so, please let them know how you would paraphrase it to make it more accurate or complete.
PAULO FREIRE
PEDAGOGY
of the
OPPRESSED
;
30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos
With an Introduction by Donaldo Macedo
A continuum
I f N E W Y O R K L O N D O N
2005
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
15 East 26,h Street, New York, NY 10010
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
Copyright 1970, 1993 by Paulo Freire
Introduction 2000 by Donaldo Macedo
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the written permission of
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Freire, Paulo, 1921-
[Pedagogia del oprimido. English]
Pedagogy of the oppressed / Paulo Freire ; translated by Myra
Bergman Ramos ; introduction by Donaldo Macedo.30th anniversary ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8264-1276-9 (alk. paper)
1. Freire, Paulo, 1921- 2. EducationPhilosophy. 3. Popular
educationPhilosophy. 4. Critical pedagogy. I. Title.
LB880.F73 P4313 2000
370.11*5dc21 00-030304
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 nar
rating 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 he 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 a hollow, alien
ated, 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 Pard and what Para means for Brazil.
Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to
7 2 ‘ P A U L O F R E I R E
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 stu-
dents are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead
of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes de-
posits 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. They do, it is true, have the opportunity
to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in
the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away
through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this
(at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the
praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only
through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient,
continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in 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
onto others, a characteristic of the ideology)of oppression, negates
education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher pre-
sents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by consid-
ering their ignorance absolute, he- justifies his own existence. The
students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept
their ignorance as justifying the teachers existencebut, unlike the
slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.
The raison d’etre of libertarian 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.
PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED ‘ 7 3
This 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 listenmeekly;
(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 were 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 oppo
sition 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
students creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the
interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world re
vealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their “humani-
tarianism” to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost
instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates
7 4 – P A U L O F R E I R E
the critical faculties and is not content with a 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 con-
sciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses
them”;1 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 con-
junction with a 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 devi-
ate 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 have “forsaken.”
The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not “marginals,” are
not people living “outside” society. They have always been
“inside”inside the structure which made them “beings for others.”
The solution is not to “integrate” them into the structure of oppres-
sion, but to transform that structure so that they can become “beings
for themselves.” Such transformation, of course, would undermine
the oppressors purposes; hence their utilization of the banking con-
cept of education to avoid the threat of student cpnscientizagdo.
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 upon the importance of learning that, on the
contrary, floger gave green grass to the rabbit. The “humanism” of
the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into
automatonsthe very negation of their ontological vocation to be
more fully human.
1. Simone de Beauvoir, La Pensee de Droite, Aujord’hui (Paris); ST, El Pensami-
ento politico de la Derecha (Buenos Aires, 1963), p. 34.
PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED ‘ 7 5
Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly
(for there are 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 experi
ence that their present way of life is irreconcilable with their voca
tion 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 per
ceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to main
tain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for their
liberation.
But the humanist, revolutionary educator cannot wait for this pos
sibility 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
profqund 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 partnershipand
necessarily so. To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to ex
change 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 Uie 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 spectator,
not re-creator. In this view, the person is not a conscious being
(corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a conscious
ness: an empty “mind” passively open to the reception of deposits
of reality from the world outside. For example, my desk, my books,
my coffee cup, all the objects before meas bits of the world which
surround mewould be “inside” me, exactly as I am inside my
7 6 – P A U L O F R E I R E
study right now. This view makes no distinction between being ac-
cessible to consciousness and entering consciousness. The distinc-
tion, however, is essential: the objects which surround me are simply
accessible to my consciousness, not located within it. I am 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 teachers task is to organise a process which already
occurs spontaneously, to “fill” the students by making deposits of
information which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge.2
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 require-
ments,3 the methods for evaluating “knowledge,” the distance be-
tween 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
2. This concept corresponds to what Sartre calls the “digestive” or “nutritive”
concept of education, in which knowledge is “fed” by the teacher to the students
to “fill them out.” See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Une idee fundamentale de la phenomeno-
logie de Husserl: L’intentionalite,” Situations I (Paris, 1947).
3. For example, some professors specify in their reading lists that a book should
be read from pages 10 to 15and do this to “help” their students!
P E D A G O G Y OF TH E O P P R E S S E D 7 7
co-exist with one’s students. Solidarity requires true communica
tion, and the concept by which such an educator is guided fears and
proscribes< communication.
Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning.
The teachers thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of
the students thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students,
nor can she impose her thought on them. Authentic thinking, think
ing 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 "biophily," but instead produces its opposite:
"necrophily."
While life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional
manner, the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all
that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the
desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach
life mechanically, as if all living persons were things. . . . Mem
ory, rather than experience; having, rather than being, is what
counts. The necrophilous person can relate to an objecta
flower or a persononly 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.4
Oppressionoverwhelming controlis necrophilic; it is nour
ished 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 conscious
ness, 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.
4. Fromm, op. cit.y p. 41.
7 8 - P A U L O F R E I R E
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/'5 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 persons
life, [men have] the illusion of acting, when in reality [they] only
submit to and become a part of those who act.6
Populist manifestations perhaps best exemplify this type of behav
ior by the oppressed, who, by identifying with charismatic leaders,
come to feel that they themselves are active and effective. The rebel
lion they express as they emerge in the historical process is moti
vated 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."7
Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity
of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by edu
cators) 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
5. Ibid., p. 31.
6. Ibid.
1. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York, 1960), p. 130.
P E D A G O G Y OF T H E O P P R E S S E D - 7 9
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 gener
ates the banking concept, and often do not perceive its true signifi
cance or its dehumanizing power. Paradoxically, then, they utilize
this same instrument of alienation in what they consider an effort
to liberate. Indeed, some "revolutionaries" brand as "innocents,"
"dreamers," or even "reactionaries" those who would challenge this
educational practice. But one does not liberate people by alienating
them. Authentic liberationthe process of humanizationis 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, slogansdeposits) in the name of liberation.
Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking con
cept 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-mak
ing and replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings
in their relations with the world. "Problem-posing" education, re
sponding to the essence of consciousnessintentionalityrejects
communiques and embodies communication. It epitomizes the spe
cial 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 actorsteacher 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 to be resolved.
Dialogical relationsindispensable to the capacity of cognitive
8 0 - P A U L O F R E I R E
actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable objectare
otherwise impossible.
Indeed, problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical
patterns characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function
as the practice of freedom only if it can overcome the above contra-
diction. Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the stu-
dents-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-
student with students-teachers. The te&her 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 be-
come 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 every-
thing) distinguishes two stages in the action of the educator. During
the first, he cognizes a cognizable object while he prepares his les-
sons in his study or his 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 to-
wards 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 is not "cognitive" at one point and "narra-
tive" at another. She is always "cognitive," whether preparing a proj-
ect or engaging in dialogue with the students. He does not regard
cognizable objects as his private property, but as the object of re-
flection by himself and the students. In this way, the problem-posing
educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the
P E D A G O G Y OF T H E O P P R E S S E D - 8 1
students. The studentsno longer docile listenersare now critical
co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents
the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers
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
doxa 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 con-
sciousness; 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 comprehen-
sion tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alien-
ated. 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 freedomas opposed to education
as the practice of dominationdenies 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 con-
siders neither abstract man nor the world without people, but peo-
ple in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness
and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the
world nor follows it.
La conscience et le monde sont donnes d'un meme coup: exte-
rieur par essence a la conscience, le monde est, par essence re-
latif a elle.8
8. Sartre; op. cit., p. 32.
8 2 P A U L O F R E I R E
In one of our culture circles in Chile, t h e group was discussing
(based on a codification9) the anthropological concept of culture. In
the midst of t h e discussion, a peasant who by banking standards was
completely ignorant said: “Now I see that without man t h e r e is no
world.” W h e n the educator responded: “Let’s say, for t h e sake of
argument, that all t h e m e n on earth w e r e t o die, b u t that t h e earth
itself remained, together with trees, birds, animals, rivers, seas, t h e
stars . . , wouldn’t all this b e a world?” “Oh no,” the peasant replied
emphatically. “There would b e no one to say: T h i s is a world’.”
T h e peasant wished to express the idea that there would b e lack-
ing the consciousness of the world which necessarily implies the
world of consciousness. 7 cannot exist without a non-I. In turn, t h e
not-I depends on that existence. T h e world which brings conscious-
ness into existence becomes the world of that consciousness. H e n c e ,
the previously cited affirmation of Sartre: “La conscience et le monde
sont donnes dun meme coup.”
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 p h e –
nomena:
In perception properly so-called, as an explicit awareness
[Gewahren], I am turned towards the object, to &e paper, for
instance. I apprehend it as being this here and now; The appre-
hension is a singling out, every object having a background in
experience. Around and about the paper lie books, pencils, ink-
well, and so forth, and these in a certain sense are also “per-
ceived”, 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 second-
ary 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 aware-
ness, if “intuiting” already includes the state of being turned
towards, and this also is a “conscious experience”, or more briefly
9. See chapter 3.Translator’s note.
P E D A G O G Y OF T H E O P P R E S S E D 8 3
a “consciousness of* all indeed that in point of fact lies in the
co-perceived objective background.10
That which had 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 ele
ments are now objects of their consideration, and, as such, objects
of their action and cognition.
In problem-posing education, people develop their power to per
ceive 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 with 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 a function of how they perceive them
selves 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 au
thentic 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 ex
plain the way human beings exist in the world; problem-posing edu
cation sets itself the task of demythologizing. Banking education
resists dialogue; problem-posing education regards dialogue as in
dispensable 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
10. Edmund Husserl, IdeasGeneral Introduction to Pure Phenomenology
(London, 1969), pp. 105-106.
8 4 – P A U L O F R E I R E
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 trans-
formation. In sum: banking theory and practice, as immobilizing
and fixating forces, fail to acknowledge men and women as historical
beings; problem-posing theory and practice take the peoples histo-
ricity as their starting point.
Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in
the process of becomingas unfinished, uncomplet
