Two years ago, I read part of Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire in my Spanish 332 class (Spanish American Civilization and Literature).  My Spanish comprehension skills were just starting to really improve, so I couldn’t fully understand the content of the work.  I mainly focused on vocabulary and how it flowed throughout the translation.  After a little class discussion, I understood some of the material.  Spanish 332 is a class that focuses on the Spanish (and some Portuguese) colonization of Latin America and on the literature that came out of Latin Americans’ search for a cultural identity.  At the time, I understood Pedagogy of the Oppressed to be about the quest for Latin American identities and making sure that no one was denied their identity (since Latin America has a history of the Spanish defining ethnic identities and dehumanizing many of them).  I still think that Freire intended this in his book, but I understand better that he really wanted to improve the way that humans communicate with each other and learn about their differences and similarities, so that everyone feels they can own their identity and feel valuable (and able to make change and to critique) within their respective societies.

            Even after reading only the foreword, introduction, and preface I can already tell that Paulo Freire would be able to find common ground with Kwame Appiah.  Appiah stressed cosmopolitanism as a way to create a more harmonious world in which people of every culture can live peacefully.  Similarly, Beverly Daniel Tatum would appreciate Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed because it deals with educating people about the social construction of poverty and racism (in Freire’s case, the social construction between the oppressor and the oppressed, the teacher and the student). 

            I feel like Freire’s theory about the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, the teacher and the student really incorporates all struggles of humanity because it is applicable to many relationships and social constructs.  His focus, although he discusses the liberation of people in poverty and a new approach to education, encompasses the fight against dehumanization.  I like that he begins by discussing dehumanization and its presence throughout history, but then stresses that dehumanization isn’t a “historical vocation,” it isn’t “a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed” (44).  Freire stresses that in order to make a true difference in oppressed lives we have to be positive and active in reconstructing social order and acknowledging that no one comes from a neutral position.  I’ll blog more about Pedagogy of the Oppressed after our week’s class discussions.