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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Anyone have any recommendations for sci-fi/fantasy that specifically deconstruct the genre’s bent towards restoration fantasy?
These are video games, but Dark Souls and Warframe kind of hit on the sort of notes I’m thinking of. I feel like MOTHER 3 could be read as a critique of restoration fantasy, too, with the self-serving main villain’s attempts at rebuilding the old world by plundering a new world that’s moved on just kind of ruining everything for everyone
The Dark Tower spends a lot of time showcasing just how bad the golden age sucked, but Steven King’s politics are still too moderate for this angle to really fully be born out.
The books set in Bas-Lag by China Meiville fit this and also happen to have based politics (and cactus people)
The Gormenghast books spend a lot of time satirizing fantasy royalty with a ghoulish atmosphere of "decaying hateful weirdos with well-rehearsed manners" over it, and passing attention to the real but impoverished life outside the castle
Malazan has some of what you are after but it deconstructs like every trope throughout its enormous wordcount so I imagine it's too broad
(My book has it too but it's more of a backdrop, likely too distant for what you want)