“NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Nurse Education Today Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Nurse Education Today 34 (7) September 2014 Big Ideas Paulo Friere’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’. First published in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has sold over 750,000 copies and contained within it, a message thought to be so threatening to the established order that he was forced to leave his country, Brazil, before returning 20 years later. The book can be wrien off as the utopian dreamings of a marxist educator talking about the educaon and liberaon of the peasant class in South America, and as such has nothing to say to nurse educaon in the 21 st century in the United Kingdom, or elsewhere for that maer. This would be a mistake, for within it are ideas that should stop and make modern educators think again about both the process and product of nurse educaon and ask: ‘What is educaon for?’ The emphasis in this work is on the fundamentally polical nature of pedagogical processes. Friere’s first premise concerns a humanisc value base, upon which a pedagogy should be constructed. Educaon in this sense is for humanity rather than the mere transmission of knowledge, skills and values for the corporate, or other employment, sphere. The process of educaon is as important, if not more important, than the end product. However, this is the issue for nurse educaon – to what degree is the product more important than the process? Do certain professional values, regulaon and the needs for an NHS workforce outweigh the experience of a crical pedagogy? If so, are we construcng the student as passive object, who also self governs, rendering them unable to engage with countervailing voices against an increasing one dimensional polical and cultural hegemony in which the ‘market is king’? As Mooney and Nolan suggest (2006) “ the applicaon of (Friere’s) theory to nursing educaon can be challenging because of constraints imposed by the system in which nurse educaon takes place” (p240). Friere argued that the human being is a ‘subject’, rather than an ‘object’ ready for construcon by oppressive forces. Our ‘ontological vocaon’ is towards ‘humanizaon’; to be able to engage in ‘conscienzacao’, which is learning to perceive social, polical and economic contradicons and to take acon against the oppressive elements of reality . Students, through educaonal processes, should come to a new version of their selood, to crique their social situaon, to break out of their ‘culture of silence’ and to transform the society that engages in dehumanising pracces . He aacks the banking concept of educaon, and proposes instead the noon of students as co-creators of knowledge engaging in ‘dialogics’ – a form of communicaon between students and teacher which encourages crical thought through encouraging ‘epistemological curiosity’. 1