Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) remains one of the most influential texts in critical pedagogy. At its core, Freire insists that education is never neutral: it either domesticates people into passive acceptance of existing hierarchies or liberates them by enabling critical reflection and transformative action.
While written in the context of Latin American struggles against authoritarianism, the book’s themes of overcoming dehumanization, education involving meaningful and relevant dialogue and liberation for members of all social and economic classes remain strikingly relevant today.
Indeed, the central messages of Freire’s book become especially compelling in the age of artificial intelligence, as we can now grapple with how this new tool might be incorporated into Freire’s methodology and possibly used as an agent of greater humanization.
Oppression, Humanization and Education
Freire begins with the claim that we live in a situation of dehumanization. Indeed, both the oppressed and their oppressors are diminished in regard to their humanity: the oppressed are denied humane development as servants of the oppressing class, while oppressors do not even seek full humanity as they are trapped in cycles of greed and domination, morally sustained only by something like what Freire calls “false generosity.”
Freire stresses that the oppressed merely taking the place of the oppressor, and becoming an oppressor themselves, is a huge trap that folks have fallen into through revolution in the past. Revolution must change all social relationships and ensure for the development of full humanity for all.
Liberation, then, is not simply the exchange of places between ruler and ruled, but the creation of what Freire calls the “new man,” a human being who is neither oppressor nor oppressed but actively engaged in restoring humanity to all.
Education, Freire argues, is central to this process. Under the prevailing “banking model,” knowledge is deposited into students as though they were empty accounts. This system reproduces passivity, credulity and conformity, training learners to adapt to the world as it is rather than to transform it.
By contrast, a “problem-posing” pedagogy invites students to recognize their own incompleteness, reflect critically on reality and engage in dialogue with teachers and peers. Through praxis, reflection and action in unity, people become capable of naming their world, questioning its contradictions and meaningfully changing it.
Dialogue and Cultural Synthesis
In the latter part of his book, Freire elaborates on dialogue as the foundation of education for liberation. Dialogue invites humility, love and faith in people’s capacity to change. It is not mere conversation but an existential practice in which participants co-create awareness and knowledge by “naming the world.” Naming leads to action and this action requires reflection; to separate the two produces either stale verbalism or ineffective, misdirected activism.
Oppressors maintain domination through “anti-dialogical” means: conquest, manipulation, divide-and-rule and cultural invasion. Education that relies on imposition or prescription of concepts and facts follows this mode. The antidote to these pedagogical uses of force is dialogical action: unity, cooperation, organization and cultural synthesis. Instead of imposing answers from above, educators and revolutionaries must enter into partnership with the people, drawing on their lived experiences to create new cultural forms that advance humanization.
Freire and Contemporary Education
Freire’s insights remain urgently relevant in contemporary classrooms. In a globalized, neoliberal educational landscape, the banking model persists in the form of standardized testing, rigid curricula to be mastered by unquestioning students and a fixation on measurable “outcomes.”
With the “banking system,” students are still treated as objects of instruction instead of subjects capable of self-motivated inquiry. They are still rewarded for memorization and skills valued in academic settings (not necessarily real-world settings) instead of for creativity or critical reflection that might lead to real change. Even allegedly progressive reforms often fall back into “false generosity,” offering surface-level participation while maintaining deeper structural inequities.
Problem-posing pedagogy, by contrast, aligns with educational practices that emphasize project-based learning, dialogue across differences and real-world problem solving. The idea of knowledge as being co-created resonates with today’s growing emphasis on collaboration and interdisciplinarity.
Freire’s critique also helps explain why so many students disengage: without being invited into authentic dialogue about the world they inhabit, they experience education as alienating and irrelevant. Education becomes a game in which students are pressured into winning through extrinsic factors instead of a joyous and self-driven quest to find that which is meaningful and transformative.
Freire and Artificial Intelligence
The rise of AI adds a possible new dimension to Freire’s project. On the one hand, AI technologies risk intensifying the banking model: students may come to rely passively on machine-generated answers and education may devolve into the automation of rote instruction. This would reinforce precisely the passivity and adaptation Freire warned against.
Indeed, the panic about students “cheating” with AI reveals more about the current educational model than about student misconduct. In a system built on the banking model, where knowledge is deposited and reproduced, it is inevitable that students will look for tools to bypass rote tasks that deny their own agency.
The problem is not that students are using AI, but that formal education has often reduced learning to a mechanical transaction in the first place. From a Freirean perspective, the reliance on detection software only deepens this dehumanization, while the real challenge is to transform education into a practice that values students as creators of knowledge.
Thus, AI could also become a resource for liberation, depending on how it is integrated. Used dialogically, AI can act as a partner in problem-posing education: a tool for exploration, questioning and co-creation. For instance, a student might use AI to help brainstorm steps or relevant research related to a community project, opening space for inquiry and dialogue, rather than simply relying on AI to churn out a pre-written essay. AI can become more of a roadmap in the field of education than a report.
The difference lies in whether AI reinforces passive consumption or stimulates active engagement with real-world problems. Students can use AI not simply to “receive” information but to test ideas, challenge assumptions and imagine alternatives. Rather than replacing human dialogue, AI could enrich it, enabling learners to ask better questions and approach problems from new angles.
In this sense, Freire’s pedagogy offers a moral compass for educators navigating AI’s emergence. The crucial question is not whether AI is “good” or “bad,” but whether its use contributes to humanization or dehumanization.
Can AI deepen the learner’s critical awareness instead of dulling it. It can foster dialogue instead of reinforcing authorized standards. If educators approach AI within a Freirean framework, prioritizing reflection, action and cultural synthesis, the technology can become part of the struggle for liberation rather than another tool of domination.
Conclusion
Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is not simply a book about education; it is a vision of what it means to be human in a world of persistent inequality. Its insistence that education must be dialogical, participatory and transformative should resonate deeply today in a troubled world.
At a time when AI challenges traditional notions of knowledge and teaching, Freire reminds us that education’s ultimate purpose is not the transfer of information but the humanization of all participants in a learning process. The task before us is not to resist AI outright or to embrace it uncritically, but to ensure that its use in education remains aligned with Freire’s enduring call: to liberate ourselves by becoming more fully human together.
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