Episode #210 ... The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Paulo Freire, Education)

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Thank you to everybody who takes the time to support the show on Patreon. I could never do this without you. Patreon.com/philosophize this. I hope you love the show today. So So I wanna tell you about a book today called The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by the philosopher Paulo Freire. Pedagogy as a word means we're talking about education and teaching. Oppressed as a word meaning well, we'll get into that. But But I feel the need to say here at the start that people write to me sometimes and say that part of what I want when I listen to a podcast like this, Stephen West, is if there's a work of philosophy that's so influential it could get brought up by people that aren't even really that into philosophy, then that's something I want covered on the show. I want it broken down in a way where I could explain it to someone at a party, and I won't be the person that people slowly inch away from. Say, interesting, and then they never talk to me again at the party. I don't wanna just explain my philosophy to my stuffed animals for the rest of my life. Well, I heard your request, folks out there, and and I did one thing right today, I think. This book we're talking about, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is by one measurement that was taken the third most cited book in all of the humanities and social sciences. Meaning that when people in academia give citations for what works they took ideas from that inspired their new ideas and they cite it in the bibliography, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire comes in number three of all time. Meaning at the very least, this book that was written in 1968 in Brazil has gone on to change the way that people think about education across the entire world. No doubt if you're listening to this, unless if you're one of our much older listeners, shout out to you folks by the way, thanks for paving the way. But if you're not one of them, you've likely had teachers all throughout your time in school that were inspired by this book by Paulo Freire. So I wanna do what I always do and try to give you the philosophy behind it as it's intended by the philosopher. But in the interest of you not being blindsided when you bring this book up to someone in a party like that, gotta warn you that depending on who you're talking to, some people are in love with this book and some people loathe it entirely. Some people will say this book is a work of genius that's on a level that's so good it's actually difficult to even find issues with. On the other hand, we got people that blame this book and its influence for everything from a recent decline …