Paulo Freire, born on the 19th of September in 1921, was a Brazilian philosopher and radical pedagogue most known for his 1968 work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. “Language is never neutral.”

Paulo was born in Recife, the capital of the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. Initially affluent, his family experienced hardship during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and Freire’s education suffered due to his own experiences with poverty and hunger.

Freire began working as a schoolteacher in the 1940s, beginning to serve as the director of the Pernambuco Department of Education and Culture in 1946. Due to the 1964 Brazilian coup d’état, where a military dictatorship was put in place with the support of the United States, Paulo Freire was exiled from his home country, an exile that lasted 16 years.

Freire then worked in Chile, until April 1969 when he accepted a temporary position at Harvard University. It was during this period, in 1968, that Freire published his most famous work, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”.

In this text, Freire criticizes what he calls the “banking method” of education, wherein a teacher “deposits” knowledge into an empty vessel, the student, or “bank”. Instead, Freire calls upon teacher to engage in a more dialog-centric or creative education, one in which the suppressed experiences of the oppressed help create knowledge, fostering a social reality in which the marginalized are humanized.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed has since become the third most cited book in the social sciences, according to Elliott D. Green. As of 2000, the book had sold over 750,000 copies worldwide.

“Manipulation, sloganizing, depositing, regimentation, and prescription cannot be components of revolutionary praxis, precisely because they are the components of the praxis of domination.”

Paulo Freire

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  • Philosophosphorous [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    9·
    20 hours ago

    roommates employer (a hotel) has had workers ‘soldering’ in the AC system for the past week, my roommate has asthma and has had to leave work early every day this week, while his boss and fellow employees gaslight him saying they don’t personally smell anything so it must be ok/his individual mental problem, which is maliciously ignorant since solder material has lead in it, and the fumes are very toxic. its not in my roommates head as i can personally smell the fumes on his clothes after he gets home and i don’t have asthma like he does. i’m in the US, is there any grounds to sue here? like i am concerned with the health of all the guests at the hotel, the entire building smells, no shot its good to sleep through that kind of fume exposure.

    edit: also my roommate fell asleep remarkably early today, like right after work, and has been asleep all day. its like an hour past his normal bedtime now. i’ve kind of been panicking worrying he died from some kind of delayed asthma complications or something (we were supposed to get groceries today, but i got no responses via texting so i went alone) but i’m too socially anxious to check for fear of being needlessly obnoxious/waking him up unwantedly. so i guess i’m just going to marinate in existential terror until tomorrow no untimely demises this time, fortunately or unfortunately we both persist in the cycle of samsara for now

    • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      20 hours ago

      I’d give a check. Better safe than sorry. Are far as response goes, report it to whatever workplace safety board there is. Then there is a file and a case worker assigned to it whenever it gets to the top of the pile, which can be a bit. Document how much lost time per day as well as the symptoms. If the workplace isn’t filing any reports about this either then they’re super fucked. If there’s free hethcare your friend should see a doctor immediately after leaving early if it happens again so there is once again a paper trail. If suing does come to pass you want your ducks in a row as best as possible.