The victims' perspective in Paulo Freire's pedagogy of freedom

This paper begins by tracing the connections between philosophy and pedagogy. It follows the relationship linking Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history and the thinking of T.W. Adorn with Paulo Freire's pedagogy. Those points where the philosophers' and the pedagogue's perspectives come into contact are emphasized. It is on those aspects of common ground, underlined through a bibliographical review, where the author offers an interpretation of the Brazilian philosopher's pedagogy of freedom that places the emphasis on the memory and suffering of the victims and the oppressed. This solidary sensitivity proves to be the starting point of Freire's pedagogy. A number of suggestions are offered to forestall pedagogy's complicity with the unfair ignorance of the victims. The idea is that pedagogy should assume the inheritance of failure and the pain stored in history to redirect societies towards the fulfilment of its most-Utopian possibilities. All real progress that school pursues in society must also include this failure of ancient generations, in order to revive the hopes of the oppressed. This implies following a less-positivist sort of pedagogy and detecting ideologies in sciences themselves.