Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was a Brazilian educational theorist.

Chapter 1: the justification for a pedagogy of the oppressed; the contradiction between the oppressors and the oppressed, and how it is overcome; oppression and the oppressors; oppression and the oppressed; liberation - not a gift, not a self-achievement, but a mutual process. Chapter 2: the "banking concept" of education as an instrument of oppression - its presuppositions - a critique; the problem-posing concept of education as an instrument for liberation - its presuppositions; the "banking" concept and the teacher-student contradiction; the problem- posing concept and the supersedence of the teacher-student contradiction; education - a mutual process, world-mediated; people as uncompleted beings, conscious of their incompletion, and their attempt to be more fully human. Chapter 3: dialogics - the essence of education as the practice of freedom; dialogics and dialogue; dialogue and the search for programme content; the human-world relationship, "generative themes", and the programme content of education as the practice of freedom; the investigation of "generative themes"; the various stages of the investigation. Chapter 4: antidialogics and dialogics as matrices of opposing theories of cultural action - the former as an instrument of oppression and the latter as an instrument of liberation; the theory of anti-dialogical action and its characteristics; conquest, divide and rule, manipulation, and cultural invasion; the theory of dialogical action and its characteristics - cooperation, unity, organization and cultural synthesis.