Why Freire is so important to liberation

Paolo Freire (1970) says in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed: "In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. This perception is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for liberation; it must become the motivating force for liberating action. Nor does the discovery by the oppressed that they exist in dialectical relationship with the oppressor, as his antithesis --that without them the oppressor could not exist--in itself constitute liberation. The oppressed can overcome the contradiction in which they are caught only when this perception enlists them in the struggle to free themselves.

...The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stopes regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived off their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor--when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love" Paulo Freire (1970). in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. p. 35.

I read this in 1990. (Taught it between 1994-2017.) Finally someone acknowledging the situation in which public education was embedded and served. Finally. And then reminding us that to see it, to talk about it, was not enough. That only collective sustained action would be enough.

And finally more and more people are seeing forms of oppression, usually the ways they personally are oppressed, rarely how many others are oppressed and even rarer so, how the beneficiaries of our collective compromise as we are pitted against each other, receive no real attention, acknowledgement, collective resistance ... all of which are required steps.

These are REQUIRED! So the struggle is on to see not only the forms of oppression that we all enact to each other but the MAIN FOCUS MUST BE to see the puppeteer, the beneficiaries behind the curtain...