Paulo Freire’s Criticism of Educational System

EDUCATION, 24 Nov 2025

Surya Nath Prasad and Suman Shukla – TRANSCEND Media Service

22 Nov 2025 – All of us are crippled – some physically, some vitally, some mentally, some intellectually and some spiritually. We must, therefore, strive cooperatively to create a new world (Illich, 1974). Hence, it is the prime duties of those who are in possession to serve those are in dispossession. Similarly, the dispossessed, too, owe to the possessed. That was why Mahatma Buddha (1975) preached the whole world that taking food without serving the masses is to eat like hot iron grams. Speaking on the education of the masses, Swami Vivekanand (1971) said: “So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every man a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them. Our great national sin is the neglect of the masses and that is the cause of our downfall. No amount of politics would be of any avail until the masses in India are once more well-educated, well-fed, and well-cared-for.” Prasad (1985) suggests that no man should rest peacefully until decent living standards have been established for all mankind everywhere. Governments, employers and workers in 1944 declared that “Poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere” (Evans, 1978). Sen (1985) says that “one man’s freedom from hunger and want is neither a true nor a secure freedom until all men are free from hunger and want.” Illich (1974) says that the basic purpose of public education should be to create a situation in which society obliges each individual to take stock of himself and his poverty. Freire (1974) comprehends that the purpose of education is to make aware the man. Every human being, no matter how ‘ignorant’or submerged in the ‘culture of silence’ he may be, is capable of looking critically at his world in a dialogical encounter with others.

Culture of Silence

The major thrust of Freire’s criticism of the educational system is that the whole educational system is one of the major instruments for the maintenance of the ‘culture of silence.’ He describes the life of poor as the ‘culture of silence’ of the dispossessed (Freire, 1974). In the culture of silence the masses are ‘mute’, that is, they are prohibited from creatively taking part in the transformation of their society (Freire, 1977). Goodman (1973) observes that the schools are loosing the beautiful academic and community functions that by nature they do have. He observes that a major pressing problem of our society is the defective structure of the economy that advantages the upper-middle class and excludes the lower class. Holt (1973) finds that schools and school people, even those who do not dislike poor kids, discriminate against them in another way, more kindly, less contemptuous, but probably more destructive. Further, he says that schools do not have the power of life and death over children. But they do have the power to cause them mental and physical pain, to threaten, frighten and humiliate them and to destroy their future lives. Hence, Reimer (1974) considers school as dead. Most of the children of the world are not in school. While children who never go to school are most deprived, economically and politically, they probably suffer the least psychological pain. Buckman (1975) sees that school perpetuates the social barriers the deprived seek to cross. This is why Illich (1973) wants to de-school the society and abolish compulsory schooling altogether and the monopoly of knowledge by educational institutions and to devote the vast funds thereby released to a true education for every citizen that would last from cradle to grave.

Freire (1974) observes that the educational system maintains and even stimulate the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:

1. The teacher teaches and the students are taught.
2. The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing.
3. The teacher thinks and the students are thought about.
4. The teacher talks and the students listen-meekly.
5. The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined.
6. The teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply.
7. The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher.
8. The teacher chooses the program contents, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it.
9. The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students.
10. The teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

Thus, Freire criticizes all aspects of the existing educational system of the oppressive society. He attacks the aims of education, the device, the method and the language of teaching, the contents of curriculum and the teacher-student relationship.

The goal of the educational system is deposit-making to minimize or anul students’ creative power and stimulates their credulity and to serve the interests of the oppressors who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. Tagore (1970) said: Man, as a knower, is not fully himself, – his mere information does not reveal him. But, as a person, he is the organic man, who has the inherent power to select things from his surrounding in order to make them his own. He has his forces of attraction and repulsion by which he not merely picks up things outside him, but creates himself.

Further, he (Tagore, 1970) tried to draw our attention towards the school system of education and said: We have come to this world to accept it, not merely to know it. We may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy. The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence. But we find that this education of sympathy is not only systematically ignored in schools, but it is severely repressed. From our very childhood habits are formed and knowledge is imparted in such a manner that our life is weaned away from nature and our mind and the world are set in opposition from the beginning of our days. Thus the greatest of educations for which we came prepared is neglected, and we are made to lose our world to find a bagful of information instead. We rob the child of his earth to teach him geography, of language to teach him grammar. His hunger is for the Epic, but he is supplied with chronicles of facts and dates. He was born in the human world, but is banished into the world of living gramophones, to expiate for the original sin of being born in ignorance. Child-nature protects against such calamity with all its power of suffering, subdued at last into silence by punishment.

Libertarian Pedagogy

So Freire (1974, 1977) proposes liberation as the aim of education and the role of the teacher is to liberate, and to be liberated, with the students. The conviction of the oppressed that they must fight for their liberation is the result of their own conscientization (The term conscientization refers to the perception of social, political, and economic contradictions, and taking action against the oppressive elements of reality). Conscientization enrolls men in search for self-affirmation. Francisco Weffort says in the preface of one of the books of Freire that the awakening of critical consciousness leads the way to the expression of social discontents precisely because these discontents are real components of an oppressive situation. This is why Freire (1974) calls his pedagogy of oppressed as a humanist and libertarian pedagogy which has two distinct stages. In the first, the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in which the reality oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes pedagogy of all men in the process of permanent liberation.

When asked by a teacher to speak of teaching, Kahlil Gibran (1976) said:

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.

If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.

The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding.

The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm, nor the voice that echoes it.

And he who is versed in the sciences of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither.

For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.

And even as each one of you stands alone in God’s knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.

Essentiality of Dialogue

Freire (1974) talks of Narration as a mechanical device of teaching. The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend, in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. He says that education is suffering from Narration-Sickness. Narration (with the teacher as the narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated contents.

The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to ‘fill’ the students with the contents of his narration-contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated and alienating verbosity. This is why Rogers (1951) believes that positive human relationships enable people to grow, and, therefore, instruction should be based on the concepts of human relations rather than on the concepts of subject matter, thought processes, or other intellectual sources.

Hence Freire (1974) says that for authentic education not narration but dialogue is essential. Without dialogue there is no communication and without communication there cannot be true education. So dialogue is an existential necessity. Dialogue imposes itself as the way in which men achieve significance as men. Dialogue is the encounter in which the united reflection and action of the dialogues are addressed to the world which is to be transformed and humanized. But dialogue cannot exit without love, humility, faith, hope, and critical thinking. According to Rogers (1951), one of four definite qualities of the best interview atmosphere is that the teacher shows warmth and responsiveness, expressing genuineness in accepting him or her as a person. These attributes are manifested in a special kind of dialogue.

In ancient times in India learning was not by dialogue but by rote. So there was no true education. However, the learned men of that time were not satisfied with the learning. So they used to arrange for dialogue to test their learning and knowledge. But this all autonomy of dialogue was given to the teachers, not to the students. Education (for students) was in the form of instruction and training which a youth received during his student-hood. In Athens, Socrates lost his life for practicing dialogue in his teaching youths, Oppressors fear of being powerless due to the persons who teach through dialogue. So they always try to eliminate such persons, and have hold on education of the masses and dictate their ideology through teaching personnel in schools, colleges and universities, and through the persons outside of campuses.

Freire (1974) feels that through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the one who teaches, but the one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in their turn, while being taught, also teach. This is why Joyce and Weil (1985) say that the relationship between the student and the teacher is best described as a partnership. In Taittiriya Upanishad (1970), in reply to what is education, it is said that in education there is ‘the teacher on one side, the pupil on the other side, knowledge between, discourses joining them’. And in the beginning of this Upanishad (1972), a pupil prays: “May we both (the teacher and the taught) attain fame together”. Rogers (1951) in his Non-directive Teaching Model of Education says that in this role, the teacher helps the students explore new ideas about their lives, their school work and their relations with others. This model assumes that the students are willing to be responsible for their own learning, and its success depends on the willingness of the student and the teacher to share ideas openly and to communicate honestly with one another. According to Freire (1974) the teacher and the students become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process, arrangements based on authority are no longer valid; in order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. An ancient Indian thinker observes that the true teacher is a student to the end of his life. But Freire (1974) observes that no one teaches another, nor is any one self-taught. Men teach each other, by the cognizable objects which in banking- education are ‘owned’ by the teacher.

Problem-posing Method

Freire (1974) gives support to the problem-posing method. His central message is that one can know only to the extent that one ‘problematizes’ the natural, cultural, and historical reality in which he or she is immersed. Problematizing is the antithesis of the technocrat’s ‘problem-solving’ stance. In the later approach, an expert takes some distance from reality, analyses it into component parts, devises means for resolving difficulties in the most efficient way, and then dictates a strategy or policy. Such problem-solving, according to Freire (1974), distorts the reality of human experience by reducing it to those dimensions which are amenable to treatment as mere difficulties to be solved. But to ‘problematize’ in his sense is to associate an entire populace with the task of codifying total reality into symbols which can generate critical consciousness and empower them to alter their relations with nature and social forces.

According to Freire (1974), the problem-posing method affirms men as being in the process of becoming as unfinished, uncompleted being in and with a likewise unfinished reality. UNESCO’s Learning To Be (1973) also observes that man is biologically unfinished… his existence is an unending process of completion and learning. It is essentially his incompleteness that sets him apart from other living beings, the fact that he must draw from his surroundings the techniques for living which nature and instinct fail to give him. He is obliged to learn unceasingly in order to survive and evolve. Georges Lapassade (1963) says that the human being is born ‘prematurely’. He comes into the world with a batch of potentialities which may miscarry, or take their form from the favourable or unfavorable circumstances in which the individual is compelled to evolve. According to Erich Fromm (1973), man can never cease to ‘enter life’, to be born in human form. He says that the individual’s entire life is nothing but a process of giving birth to himself; in truth we are only fully born when we die. Shukla (1947) feels that fullness of human personality lies in the child’s creative activity; assimilation of external influences is valuable only in so far as it incites the child to express himself. A child, who gathers knowledge but does not radiate it or recreate it, cannot be said to have been properly educated. Hadfield (1925) says, “Every organism is compelled towards its own completeness. Fullness of life is the goal of life, the urge to completeness is the most compelling motive of life. There is no motive of life so persistent as this hunger for fulfillment, whether for the needs of our body or for the deepest spiritual satisfaction of our souls, which compels us to be ever moving onward till we find it. Hunger, material or spiritual, is the feeling of incompleteness… So persistent and strong is this law that no organism can rest until it has satisfied its hunger by achieving its complete self”. Freire (1974) says that human beings are aware of their incompleteness. In this incompleteness and this awareness lie the very roots of education as an exclusively human manifestation. The unfinished character of man and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education can be an ongoing activity.

Freire (1974) criticizes the banking method of teaching because this method allows the scope of action to the students, extends only as far as receiving, filling and storing the deposits. Thus, education becomes an act of depositing in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués, and makes ‘deposits’ which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. In the banking method, in the name of ‘preservation of culture and knowledge’ we have a system which achieves neither true knowledge nor true culture. The banking method of education attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness, the problem-posing method strives for the emergence of conscious and critical intervention in reality. The banking method emphasizes permanence and becomes reactionary, the problem-posing method-which accepts neither a ‘well-behaved present nor a predetermined future’- roots itself in the dynamic present and becomes revolutionary. The banking method produces either over-conformists (mentally ills) or reactionaries (deviants). Well-behaved present does not indicate that individual and society are free from defects. But both live with defects. The banking method maintains defects in the individual and society. Erich Fromm (1959) rightly says that if a person fails to attain freedom, spontaneity, a genuine expression of self, he may be considered to have a severe defect, provided that freedom and spontaneity are the objective goals to be attained by every human being. If such a goal is not attained by the majority of numbers of any given society, we deal with the phenomenon of socially patterned defect. The banking method stresses conservation and conformity. But all types of conformity do not indicate personal or social health. This is why Parsons (1965) says, “But by no means all types of conforming to performance-standards can be called health… .”

Still further, Horton (1965) remarks: While some psychological abnormal people have a compelling urge to be bad, other psychologically abnormal people have an equally compelling urge to be good. These disturbed people become over-conformists. The insecure, complex ridden neurotic, who must do his work perfectly, cannot stand disagreements, obeys all the more and finds comfort in meticulously following all the rules and regulations, in fulfilling a neurotic need to conform.

Thus, we can say that this type of ‘con-forming behaviour’ is termed as ‘compulsive conforming (Prasad, 1970).

The problem-posing method has its roots in the dynamic present, because it is based on the belief that individuals are growing and developing beings; they are constantly changing and growing.

Language of the Teacher

About the language of the teacher, Freire (1974) says that often, the educators and the politicians speak and are not understood because their language is not attuned to the concrete situation of the men they address. Accordingly, their task is just alienated and alienating rhetoric. But Amrik Singh (1979) observes that Indian intellectuals are very far from the masses, while Indian politicians are near to the masses through communication. Indian intellectuals communicate through English but the common people do not understand English. The politician operates thro-ugh the language of the masses. Not only does he use that language, he uses that idiom too. Freire (1974, 1977) says that the language of the educator or the politician, like the language of the people, cannot exist without thought; and neither language nor thought can exist without a structure to which they refer. In order to communicate effectively, the educator and the politician must understand the structural conditions in which the thought and the language of the people are dialectically framed.

REFERENCES:

1. Buckman, Peter. Education without Schools. New Delhi: Rupa and Company. 1975
2. Buddha (Mahatma). Quoted in S.N. Prasad, “Revolution in Education: A Social Responsibility”, Acharyakula Monthly Bulletin, No. 6 (July, 1975), p. 11
3. Evans, A. A, “The New Economic World Order”, Transnational Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 3, (1978)
4. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Middlesex (England): Penguin Books Ltd.1974
5. ——- Cultural Action for Freedom. Middlesex: Penguin Books, Ltd. 1977
6. Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1959
7. ——– Quoted in Learning to Be. Paris: UNESCO. 1973, p. 158
8. Gibran, Kahlil. The Prophet. Bombay: Allied Publishers Ltd., 1976
9. Goodman, Paul. Compulsory Mis-education. Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1973
10. Hadfield, J. A. Psychology and Morals. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1925
11. Holt, John. Freedom and Beyond. Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1973
12. Horton, Paul B. Sociology and Mental Sciences. London: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1965
13. Illich, Ivan. De-schooling Society. Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1973
14. ——– Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution. Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1974
15. Joyce, Bruce and Weil, Marsha. Models of Teaching. New Delhi: Prentice Hall of India, 1985
16. Lapassade, Georges, L’ Entree dans la Vie (Essay on Man’s Unfinished State). Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963
17. Parsons, Talcott, Social Structure and Personality. London: The Free Press-Collier Macmillan Ltd, 1965
18. Prasad, S.N. “Mental fitness as Social Deviance”, Indian Journal of Social Research, Vol. XI, No. 2 (August, 1970), p. 276
19. ——– “Food for Peace through Education”, in S.N. Prasad (ed.), Education and World Hunger. New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1985
20. Reimer, Everett. School is Dead. Middlesex Penguin Books Ltd. 1974
21. Rogers, Carl. Client-Centered Therapy Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1951
22. Sen, B.R. quoted in S.N. Prasad (ed.) Education and World Hunger. New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1985
23. Shukla, Lalji Ram. The Principles of Education. Varanasi: Nandkishore & Sons
24. Singh, Amrik. “Intellectuals and Indian Democracy”, Peace Education, Vol II No. 1 (March, 1979)
25. Tagore, Rabindranath. Personally. Madras: Macmillan and Company
26. Taittiriya Upanishad, in The Ten Principal Upanishads. Translated by Purohit Swami and W. B. Yeats, London: Faber and Faber Ltd. 1970
27. Taittiriya Upanishad. In Eight Upanishads. Translated by Swami Gambhiranand, Calcutta: Advait Ashram, 1972
28. UNESCO. Learning to Be. Paris: UNESCO, 1973
29. Vivekanand (Swami). Education. Coimbatore: Sri Ramkrishna Mission Vidyalaya, 1971.

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This article is based on the paper published in Journal of Indian Education, a journal of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), New Delhi, India, Vol. XI, No.2, July 1985

Dr. Prasad, Former President of the International Association of Educators for World Peace (IAEWP), Retired Professor of Education (India), Former Visiting Professor at Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University, Republic of Korea, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Peace Education: An International Journal. dr_suryanathprasad@yahoo.co.in

Dr. Suman Shukla, Retired Associate Professor of Education & Officiating Principal, RTM Nagpur University College of Education, and a Recipient of Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund Award and Dadasaheb Gaikwad Award for her meritorious achievements.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 24 Nov 2025.

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