Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Portuguese: Pedagogia do Oprimido) is a book by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, written in Portuguese in 1967-68, but published first in English, in a translation by Myra Bergman Ramos, in 1970 (New York: Herder & Herder). Later that year a Spanish translation was published (Montevideo: Tierra Nuova). The version in Portuguese was published in 1972 in Portugal (Porto: Afrontamento), and finally appeared in Brazil in 1974 (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra). The book is considered one of the foundational texts of critical pedagogy, and proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society. Dedicated to the oppressed and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. In the book, Freire calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model of education" because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggy bank. He argues that pedagogy should instead treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.As of 2000, the book had sold over 750,000 copies worldwide. It is the third most cited book in the social sciences.