I read it in bits, mostly on the bus to work. These points stuck with me.
The oppressors are comfortable. They benefit from a relationship of oppression and have no interest in changing anything. The consciousness of the oppressed people has been colonised (cf. Fanon) so that they are existentially resigned to this situation; the possibility of change, far less any actions that might result in change, lie outside their awareness.
"Banking education" is Freire's phrase for education that aims to dump skills and knowledge into the head of the educated; to make a "deposit" in the head of the subject of material that the educator - or more likely her employer - has decided meets their agenda. It must be avoided because it will never lead to any worthwhile change, either in the consciousness of the educated or their political situation.
(I think that many academics across the world now expend some effort in trying to avoid this sort of sterile experience, for instance at the moment in flipped classroom approaches. They're not usually asking political questions, however, more thinking about how people actually learn and how the teaching process can better enable learning. For Freire this phenomenon of banking education is essentially tied up with the political location of the educational process and the relative status of the educator and the educated.)
So a strategy is described, a procedure that roots the educational process in the situation and priorities of the educated, in which the dichotomy of teacher and students is avoided. This approach still acknowledges that the educator knows things the people don't, but they need to be involved as equal partners in a process that identifies what is important to them, to the point that a syllabus can be constructed and the professional knowledge of the educator can be put to their ends. One aims for a process of conscietisation (I think the Portuguese word conscientização is nicer). The oppressed become conscious of their situation and have enough understanding, of for instance political, historical, economic, legal aspects, to start working for change.
The oppressors are perfectly happy. So, in a way, may be the oppressed; resigned at least. Why should we bother trying to change anything? There are a hundred good reasons, of course, inequality, poverty, health, etc., and Freire is well rooted in the Marxist aims of revolution and liberation, but ultimately because the oppressor/oppressed relationship is a form of violence, in which the oppressed are prevented from fulfilling their human potential. It's not really healthy for the oppressors either, although they may be perfectly happy. It is a life-denying situation; necrophilic in the sense discussed by Fromm. If we deplore a situation of violence, if we care about enabling as many people as possible to grow as humans, to fulfil their potential, in an authentic way, we should want to do something about this. These imperatives could remain even if economic inequalities were somehow eliminated.
I had already heard a little about Freirian pedagogy many years ago. In some ways I found the starting position most interesting: the fundamental wrong lying behind the state of oppression is that of dehumanisation. Now there are many agencies in the world that dehumanise, that colonise consciousness, that bend people to their agenda. The Preface to the English edition by Richard Shaull astutely notes that "Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us..." and suggests that Freire's thinking and approach will remain valuable for many years, far beyond the setting that gave rise to them, hinting at a vision of a society in which "...men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
