The Pedagogy of Systemic Oppression

By Isabella Cain, UBFSF Media & Marketing Director

Education is often presented as a pathway to opportunity: a means of gaining knowledge, securing employment, entering higher education, or improving one’s economic circumstances. However, education is never simply about acquiring information. It also shapes how people understand themselves and the world around them. It determines which histories are taught, which forms of knowledge are considered legitimate, whose voices are amplified, and whose experiences are left outside the classroom. Education is inherently political and social.

For Paulo Freire, these questions were inseparable from power. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire challenged what he called the “banking” model of education, in which teachers are positioned as authorities who possess knowledge and students as passive recipients expected to absorb it. He argued that this model can reinforce existing hierarchies because students are encouraged to receive the world as it is rather than critically examine how it came to be. In this form, education becomes a mechanism for reproducing the social order rather than questioning and changing it.

Freire proposed an alternative: an education built around dialogue, critical reflection, and the experiences of learners themselves. His approach, often described as problem-posing education, treats students as participants in the production of knowledge rather than empty vessels waiting to be filled. Teachers and students learn from one another while examining the social conditions surrounding them. Education consequently becomes connected to praxis or the process of reflecting on the world and acting to transform it.

More than half a century after Freire developed these ideas, they remain relevant in 2026. We live in an environment saturated with information. Artificial intelligence, social media, search engines, and other digital platforms can make information available within seconds. Yet access to information does not necessarily produce understanding. Students have become worse than sponges, they have forgotten how to critically think for themselves

Education must also teach people how to interrogate information: Who created it? Whose perspective does it represent? What assumptions does it contain? What has been excluded? And who benefits from presenting one version of reality as universal?

Frantz Fanon’s work provides another lens through which to consider these questions. Although Fanon did not develop a formal theory in the same way as Freire, his writing examined how colonial systems shape consciousness, identity, culture, language, and understandings of human worth. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon explored how colonial domination could operate through language and cultural standards, including the pressure placed upon colonized people to adopt the language and cultural norms of the colonizer. His work suggests that oppression does not exist solely through laws or physical force; it can also influence how people understand themselves and how they are taught to understand the world.

This makes education a particularly important site of both oppression and liberation. If institutions consistently privilege certain histories, languages, cultural traditions, and forms of knowledge, students may learn not only academic subjects, but also an implicit hierarchy of whose experiences matter.

These ideas take on particular significance inside American prisons. Prison education exists within institutions characterized by surveillance, restricted movement, and highly structured relationships between authority and incarcerated people. However, the classroom can create a different kind of relationship to authority. Education can provide incarcerated students with opportunities to develop intellectual identities, examine their experiences, engage with ideas beyond the boundaries of the institution, and contribute knowledge rather than simply receive it.

However, prison pedagogy should not be understood only through employment statistics, credentials, or recidivism rates. These outcomes can be important, but they also reduce education to its economic usefulness. Freire’s framework encourages us to consider something broader: education as a means through which people develop the ability to interpret, question, and participate in the world around them. In other words, education as liberation.

A classroom therefore can become a space where identities imposed by institutions are challenged and reconstructed. A person who has been reduced to a criminal record can also be a writer, researcher, student, teacher, historian, artist, or intellectual. The production of knowledge itself can become significant when people who have historically been spoken about are given opportunities to speak, analyze, and create.

This is where the concepts of the pedagogy of the oppressed and prison pedagogy intersect. Both ask us to consider who has the authority to define knowledge and who has the opportunity to participate in creating it. Liberation does not mean that education simply provides an escape from oppression. Rather, it can provide the tools necessary to recognize how oppression operates and to imagine alternatives to it.

In 2026, education as liberation requires us to look beyond access alone. We must ask what people are being taught, whose knowledge is represented, whose experiences are treated as authoritative, and whether learners are encouraged to question the structures around them. Freire reminds us that education can reproduce existing power or become a practice through which people critically engage with their reality. Fanon tells us that systems of domination can shape not only institutions but also language, identity, and consciousness.

Education becomes liberating when learning is not simply about adapting people to the world as it exists, but about giving them the intellectual tools to understand that world, and the possibility that it can be transformed.

Sources:

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1970. Originally published in Portuguese in 1968. Freire’s central concepts include banking education, problem-posing education, dialogue, critical consciousness, and praxis.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 1967; originally published in French in 1952. Fanon’s analysis of language, colonial identity, and internalized systems of racial hierarchy has significantly influenced subsequent educational and decolonial scholarship.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1963; originally published in French in 1961. Fanon’s analysis of colonialism, consciousness, culture, and liberation has informed scholarship examining education as a site of both domination and resistance.

U.S. Department of Education, Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education. Prison Education Programs. Updated information on the federal Prison Education Program and the restoration of Pell Grant access for incarcerated students.