Dialogue between Herbert Marcuse and Paulo Freire: A Proposal for Liberation from the Ideology of Technique based on the "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"
Paulo Freire makes a critique of technical education through his critique of the banking conception of education in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. For doing it he went to the critique of industrial society done by Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse shows that the technical reason developed in modernity converts the reflexive character of thought into its instrumentality. When it takes on a universal approach the reason turns on the total control of nature, and also of the social environment. This instrumental way of thinking is quantitative, it takes ontological forms, and abstracting the concrete reality of the historical subject it becomes the dominant way of thinking about reality. In other words, it is the ideological way of thinking about reality. This ideology is exported from the West to be imposed on the consciousness of the oppressed, and the consequence is the denial of humanity and of the participation in the construction of reality by the rags of the earth. With the finality of fighting against this ideology that causes oppression in the societies of emerging third world countries of “third world”, we question how the texts “One Dimensional Man” and “Eros and Civilization” can help us to understand the contradictions of a society in transit that needs to the development of a Pedagogy of the oppressed.