For my business trip this week I grabbed copy of the classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. I have heard of this book, and seen various educational proposals that were purportedly based on it, but up to this point I had only read various quotations and summaries. I got interested in it again as my formation for the deaconate has gotten my thinking again about pedagogy for adult education. I was drawn by his idea that when teaching adults you must educate them as subjects and not as objects. (But this is a matter for another post.)
However, in the opening chapter I ran across the following extensive quote that I think meshes remarkably well with a Christian social analysis.
While both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives [today], only the first is man’s vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation. It is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression and the violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity…..
This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity,” which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. This is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.
True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the “rejects of life,” to extending their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands—whether of individuals or entire peoples—need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work, and working, transform the world. (pp. 28-29, 1970 paperback edition)
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