Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West, this is philosophers this.

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Patreon.com slash philosophers this. I hope you love the show today.

So I want to tell you about a book today called

the pedagogy of the oppressed by the philosopher Paulo Frery. Pedagogy as a

word means we're talking about education and teaching. Oppressed as a word meaning, well we'll get into that. But I feel the need to say here at the start that people write to me sometimes and say that part of what I want when I listen to a podcast like this Stephen West is if there's a work of philosophy that's so influential it could get brought up by people that aren't even really that into philosophy

Then that's something I want covered on the show. I want it broken down in a way where I could explain it to someone at a party, and I won't be the person that people slowly inch away from, say,

hmm, interesting, and then they never talked to me again at the party.

I don't want to just explain my philosophy to my stuffed animals for the rest of my life.

Well I heard your request folks out there and I did one thing right today I think.

This book we're talking about, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is by one measurement that was taken,

the third most cited book in all of the humanities and social sciences

meaning that when people in academia give citations for what works they took ideas from that inspired their new ideas and they cite it in the

bibliography. The pedagogy of the oppressed by Apollo Frery comes in number three

of all time. Meaning at the very least this book that was written in 1968 in

Brazil has gone on to change the way that people think about education across the entire world.

No doubt if you're listening to this, unless if you're one of our much older listeners,

shout out to you folks by the way, thanks for paving the way.

But if you're not one of them, you've likely had teachers all throughout your time in school that

were inspired by this book by Apollo Frery.

So I want to do what I always do, and try to give you the philosophy behind it as it's intended by the philosopher

...