Paulo Freire (1921–1997) was a Brazilian philosopher of education whose theory of education as a practice of freedom claimed that to realize their deepest possibilities as human beings, people needed to intentionally shape history and culture even as they were being shaped by that very history and culture. This historicity and the reflective action (praxis), the labor through which it becomes embodied, constitute the primordial capacities for free action. The nurturing of those capacities marks the foundational task of a humanizing or liberatory education.

Freire argued that oppression occurs when social, economic, political, and ideological structures undermine or prevent certain people or groups of people from enacting their basic human need to be free in order to shape the history and culture within which they live. ...