Before we begin

This blog is a Class 13 retelling of Chapter One of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, feeling the weight of his questions in the behaviour log, the seating plan, the corridor and the staffroom conversation.

Anyone who has read Pedagogy of the Oppressed will know this relatively slim book is full to the brim with complex thought. Donaldo Macedo, a close friend of Paulo, writes that each time he rereads the book, he gains new insight into the world.

At Class 13, we like to think the book is intentionally cryptic. It forces us to engage with it through the dialogical practice Paulo championed, making education the practice of freedom rather than the process of regurgitation that keeps domination intact.

So read this interpretation in the same spirit.

You will notice that we refer to Freire as Paulo. Firstly, for the same reason bell hooks does not capitalise her name. Enjoy that rabbit hole.

Secondly, because Paulo has been in our training rooms, in our conversations and in our questions. In some strange way, we feel we know him.

Hopefully, by the end of this, you might know him better too.

When the old order learns new words

If humanisation is possible, we have to be honest about what gets in the way.

Many of us are already moving away from language that binds the behaviour to the child. We hear “behaviour that challenges”, “behaviour as communication”, and the familiar shift from “What’s wrong with this child?” to “What happened to this child?”

These reframes move us towards humanisation. They ask us to see more than the incident, more than the disruption.

But change does not happen simply because the language changes. The old order can still haunt the new structure like a spectre.

We can change the language and keep the myth.

The myth that some children cannot earn our trust.

The myth that control is the same as safety.

The myth that exclusion begins with the child, not the system around them.

So yes, it matters that we might no longer say “naughty child” as easily as we once did. But if the behaviour log still tells the same story, and the seating plan still carries the same suspicion, then the old order has not disappeared. It has just learnt new words.

The question schools avoid

This is why we start with a question of possibility.

Humanisation should be a school’s central concern. But because dehumanisation is real, we have to ask whether humanisation is possible within schools at all.

Not because schools are uniquely cruel, but because schools carry a history of harm. They have sorted them, punished them and excluded them. They have taught many of us to understand ourselves through individual failure.

We have written before about the six-year cost of permanent exclusion, and how exclusion is never just a single decision. It is often the end point of smaller records, smaller judgements and smaller harms that schools allowed to gather weight.

So when behaviour becomes difficult, we ask smaller questions:

Is it possible for this child to behave?

Is it possible for them to stop disrupting learning?

But the question we avoid is bigger:

Is it possible to teach young people without harming them?

Our answer has to be yes.

Because accepting harm as inevitable means accepting that education must wound some children in order to function. And when school harms one child, every child watching carries something from that witnessing and learns something about what school is willing to do.

The cycle of rationalised control

Discovering ourselves as people who cause harm can create real anguish. But anguish does not automatically become solidarity. Sometimes it becomes rationalisation.

In schools, that rationalisation often brings us back to the same question:

Is it possible for this child to behave?

But the more honest question is often:

What do I need to do to get this child to behave?

The answers can seem simple.

Increase surveillance: Sit them closer to me.

Isolate them: Move them away from their friends.

Restrict their movement and freedom: Use one-way systems and detentions.

When we reduce choice before a young person gets the chance to make the wrong one, we enter the cycle of rationalised control.

First, adults see the young person as incapable of managing freedom. Then the adult reduces that freedom in the name of support. The young person becomes dependent on adult control because adults give them fewer chances to practise trust, repair, responsibility or independence. Adults then use that dependence as evidence that the control was necessary all along.

This is not solidarity. It is an unjust school system becoming the permanent source of its own “generosity”, nourished by control, isolation and humiliation. It creates the conditions that leave young people distressed, disconnected or labelled as difficult, then praises itself for the support it offers afterwards.

This is why oppression can have a domesticating effect. Domination rarely announces itself as domination. More often, it arrives as protection.

The test of freedom

And that brings us back to the question at the heart of this blog:

Is it possible to teach young people without harming them?

If our answer is yes, then we have to ask something harder of ourselves:

Does this intervention increase the young person’s freedom over time, or does it make their dependence permanent?

It may be calm. It may be consistent. It may even come from good intentions. But paternalistic treatment is not liberation. Holding people in a position of dependence while calling it care does not humanise them.

And it does not humanise us either.

When young people become objects

While many of us are trying to move away from language that turns young people into things, we are still haunted by the old order.

We may no longer call a young person “naughty”, but we can still turn them into “disruptive”, “defiant” or “a behaviour concern”.

Different words. Same danger.

Many of us know what it feels like to be treated as voiceless, thoughtless and feelingless. Objects to be searched. Objects to be moved on. Objects to be suspected. Objects to be spoken about. Objects to be saved. Objects to be punished.

When schools repeat this same logic, we should not be surprised when young people learn it.

Coerced into becoming “sub-oppressors”, many young people may strike out sideways because the wider structure has taught them domination is what you do to gain power. In school, we might see this when young people are “striking out at their peers for the pettiest reasons”, reacting “at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance” as they try to, as Paulo puts it, “defend their personality”. Or, as we might experience it in school, a low tolerance for perceived disrespect from peers.

Trust is the test of a pedagogy of humanisation

This is where trust matters.

Paulo reminds us we do not recognise a real humanist by a thousand actions done for people, but by their “trust in the people”.

Schools are often very good at doing things for young people. Supporting them. Referring them. Saving them. Managing them more gently. Often, the teachers young people “like” are the ones who manage them with less force.

However, an object to be saved is still an object. Just as a young person can be objectified through suspicion, they can also be objectified through rescue.

So young people liking us is not, on its own, evidence of liberation. As professionals, we often recognise unsafe or unhealthy relationships that young people are reluctant to question, because care, attention or familiarity can make harm harder to name. We have to be willing to apply that same honesty to ourselves.

Being the preferred adult in a harmful system does not automatically mean we are interrupting the harm.

A pedagogy of humanisation asks for something harder than kinder management. It asks whether we trust young people enough to let them learn, practise, make mistakes and struggle with us.

And yes, that may ring alarm bells. Before anyone reaches for the S word, safeguarding, we are not suggesting that schools abandon all rules or pretend harm does not happen.

But if a rule is humanising, it should increase freedom over time.

Rules should increase freedom

Take something as simple as lining up. When we introduce lining up to help young people move safely through the school, our aim must be that they learn to navigate the school with greater trust, confidence and responsibility.

But if the rule becomes permanent control, the logic will pull us towards more monitoring, more correction and more punishment.

Trust, in that moment, means we believe young people can learn to navigate the school. The rule exists to move them towards that freedom, not to keep them dependent on adult control forever.

That also means dialogue cannot only mean, “we gave them a voice”. Voice can become another adult-managed process if we are not careful. Before we are in dialogue with young people’s opinions, we have to be in dialogue with their humanity.

This is why Class 13 leans towards affirmation rather than kindness. Kindness can be offered from above. It can still rescue, manage and leave the system intact.

Affirmation starts from the truth that young people are already fully human, whether or not the system has treated them that way.

In practice: two questions before we click save

So what does a pedagogy of humanisation look like in practice? One small place to begin is the moment before we log a behaviour point. Before we click save, we could ask two questions.

Question 1: In what ways have we taught this?

This is not about blaming ourselves for everything young people do. It is about being honest that schools teach far more than the curriculum.

So when we punish a young person for making a comment about another young person’s appearance, we should ask what else the school has taught them.

Do we have policies that comment on young people’s appearance every day? Do we scrutinise skirts, hair, nails, trousers, shoes and bags, then act surprised when young people learn that appearance is something to monitor, judge and control?

The question is not only:

Was the behaviour acceptable?

The question is:

Where did this behaviour learn its language?

Question 2: In what ways did this interaction harm the young person?

This is harder.

Many of us do not want to imagine ourselves as people who cause harm. Especially not in schools. Especially not when we came into this work because we care. But once again, care does not remove the possibility of harm.

A young person may have been publicly corrected. They may have been humiliated or scared. They may have been spoken about as if they were not there.

These questions do not excuse harm. They deepen our understanding of it.

They also change the purpose of the behaviour log. It stops being only a method of managing young people and becomes a way of listening for their consciousness.

We are not simply asking:

How do we get this child to comply?

We are asking:

What does this moment reveal about what this young person has learnt, endured, resisted or tried to protect?

That is dialogue.

Not always direct dialogue with the young person in that exact moment, but dialogue with their humanity. Dialogue with the truth that they think, feel, interpret, remember and make meaning. Dialogue with the part of them the behaviour point cannot hold.

Because if we only record what they did, we may miss what was done to them.

But imagine if we recorded more than behaviour.

The data a humanising school would collect

Imagine if we had data on the ways our “care” had harmed young people. Data on the behaviours schools had taught, normalised or provoked. Data that did not simply ask which young people disrupted learning, but which routines, policies and adult responses kept producing harm.

Not data to surveil young people more closely, but data that forces the institution to look at itself.

That kind of data would not be comfortable.

But it would be useful.

It might help us move towards what Paulo calls a “new being”: no longer oppressor, no longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom.