Paulo Freire learned life from Brazillian peasants, not by choice. Around the age of ten, his family-of-origin slid from the middle of the class heirarchy down to the bottom, and a young Freire was shown that upward mobility was nothing more than a way to hide systemic oppression. Instead of sinking into defeat, Freire developed theories of liberation around pedagogy, hope, and language. Crucially, with every new idea he added to his canon, he ensured it was accessible to - and in direct service of - all oppressed peoples.
It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings.
The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world.
The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as so many of its disciplies have noted, is a book ready to divide its readers' understanding of the world into 'before I read Freire' and 'after'. I'm no exception. If you haven't read it, and aren't quite sure if you want to, let me offer you one more quote to draw you in. "Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to anesthetize the people so they will not think. For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in revolution."
If talk of revolution makes you feel both excited but pessimistic, like you're aligned with the radical thought but resigned to the fact it'll only ever be a (radical) thought experiment, Freire has some more words you might like.
Decades later, in his penultimate book Pedagogy of Freedom , he wrote "One of the basic questions that we need to look at is how to convert merely rebellious attitudes into revolutionary ones in the process of the radical transformation of society. Merely rebellious attitudes or actions are insufficient, though they are an indispensable response to legitimate anger.
It is necessary to go beyond rebellious attitudes to a more radically critical and revolutionary position, which is in fact a position not simply of denouncing injustice but of announcing a new utopia. Transformation of the world implies a dialectic between the two actions: denouncing the process of dehumanization and announcing the dream of a new society. On the basis of this knowledge, namely, “to change things is difficult but possible,” we can plan our political-pedagogical strategy."