Just as the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were distorted so that their advocacy of violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat was ignored by social democrats who advocated a peaceful transition to socialism through a combination of reform demands and elections, so too have bourgeois educational theorists around the world ignored and sidestepped the communist message contained in Paolo Freire’s book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  
The word pedagogy means the theory and practice of education. It literally means to walk around teaching people, and it comes from the practice of the Greek philosopher Socrates who walked around the city of Athens gathering students around him and questioning the legitimacy of the government by use of the dialectical method of questioning. Socrates was forced by the Athenian ruling class to commit suicide, which he did rather than renounce the truths that he and his students had discovered.
Marx famously proclaimed that the purpose of philosophy is not merely to understand the world but to change it. It logically follows that the purpose of education is not merely to understand the world but to change the world by means of revealing the oppressive nature of capitalism, then taking action by mass revolutionary violence led by the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to establish the dictatorship of the working class.
This is the program which is also supported by Paolo Freire, but which has been ignored by his bourgeois academic “interpreters.” To gain a further understanding of Freire’s educational theories, which were first proposed a little over 50  years ago, let us first examine Paolo Freire’s life and the historical times in which he lived and practiced education of workers and peasants.
Dialectical and historical
materialism in Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paolo Freire was born into a “middle-class” family in Brazil in the 1930’s but his family lost everything during the great crisis of capitalism that enveloped the world at that time, and which led to the rise of fascism. His family moved into the most neglected and working-class neighborhood  in Recife, Brazil, where Freire experienced the extremes of poverty, hunger and oppression first-hand. His playmates were other working-class children.  He managed to obtain an education in the bourgeois sense, but he never forgot the lessons that experience taught him about  the violence of capitalism against workers.  Coming of intellectual age in the 1950’s Freire was influenced by the writings of Marx, Engels and Vladimir Lenin. He was also influenced by the writings of the existentialist philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Simone De Beauvoir and Erich Fromm who were capitalist critics acceptable to the bosses. In 1964 Freire was imprisoned by the fascist government of Brazil, and ultimately went into exile in the U.S.
Freire’s writings can be used in a reformist way, or in a revolutionary way, and a reading of his book shows that his main intent was revolutionary, communist, and in support of a mass movement to overthrow capitalist oppression, as we shall now discuss.
The revolutionary aspect of Freire’s theory of education
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed does not explicitly call for the organization of a vanguard revolutionary communist party to violently overthrow capitalism and establish the dictatorship of the working class. But the book, over the course of four chapters does, in fact, advocate these Marxist-Leninist precepts. Further, Freire cites by name, usually in footnotes, the revolutionaries from whom he derives these educational theories. He quotes from Marx, Engles, Lenin, Che Guevara, and Mao Tse Tung whenever he makes a critical main point in a theory. He endorses base building, the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the workers, and the need for what he describes as “revolutionary leaders.”
Freire advocates a dialogue, a dialectical conversation, between revolutionary leaders and the masses. This must be a discussion among comrades, where there is a dual aspect involved. The teacher is a student of the people, and the people are students of the teacher. Teachers/Revolutionary Leaders and students reciprocally learn and teach. Freire is critical of the bourgeois “banking” concept of education in which students passively memorize and repeat back to the teacher what the teacher authority tells them. Naturally, it is somewhat clear that in the public and private schools of any capitalist country that information is conveyed laden with a poisonous dose of ruling class ideology. Thus, Freire warned teachers, at that time many of whom were volunteers in literacy programs in Latin America, that teaching workers  to read was not enough.
The students had to be taught to think for themselves by means of mastering critical thinking which Freire expressly states is to master the philosophy of dialectical materialism. The combination of learning to read with dialectical materialism, then putting this combination into practice to overthrow the oppressor is the core of Freire’s educational philosophy.  Further, by emphasizing that revolutionary leaders and workers are comrades, Freire offers a method to avoid revisionism by empowering millions to understand and apply dialectical materialism to the experience of class oppression. This jibes with the Progressive Labor Party’s theory of the need for a mass party of millions of workers internationally to make revolution.
Bourgeois academicians, anarchists, and phony liberals talk about how great the book is and how it influenced them, but, in the end, they are all opportunists and apologists for capitalism. Not one calls for communist revolution, which is the real intent of the book.
When Jean Paul Sartre renounced existentialism, the philosophy he had developed over 40  years (and advocated communism), the bosses stopped teaching it. New ruling-class theories such as structuralism, semiotics, identity politics, and so forth came into vogue. Freire’s theories are far to the left of these, but the fact that Freire’s advocacy of communism is subtle means that he can easily be misinterpreted and used by the intellectual lackeys of the bosses in fake attacks on the status quo. Nevertheless, because Freire has a class analysis and advocates dialectical materialism, he can still be useful in ideological struggles in a university setting by PLP members in discussions with students and teachers who are seeking the truth in good faith.

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Existentialism: a dead-end
capitalist ideology
Many of the existentialists that influenced Freire had been part of the anti-fascist, underground movement, especially in France. However, primarily due to their own individualism they did not join the communist parties of their countries, but rather viewed themselves as friendly critics of communism. The existentialists, who influenced Freire, were viewed by the bosses as dangerous on one level because of their critique of bourgeois ideology, but ultimately as a “safer” third route  between communism and capitalism, because the alienated middle class intellectuals to whom they appealed would not necessarily join an organized communist party because of their individualist response to capitalist culture and its lies.
However, just as many of the Bohemian students in 1848 and 1871 in France became ardent revolutionaries and joined left wing parties and groups, so too by the revolutionary year of 1968, many Bohemian students around the world, decided to join communist parties, such as the PLP, and to participate in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the U.S., and in the French Worker Student Revolt of 1968.
Jean Paul Sartre, the primary philosopher of SDS, went from being a university teacher in the 1930’s, to an underground activist in the 1940’s, to a pro-communist critic in the 1950’s, to a street vendor of a Maoist newspaper in 1968. At the end of his life Sartre pronounced that existentialism was ultimately a dead end, and that only communist revolution could liberate society. Interestingly, Sartre sent a letter of support for the PLP during the Harlem rebellion. Yet, it is not believed that Sartre ever joined a communist party. And it is not known whether or not Freire ever joined a communist party.