Liberatory pedagogy refers to a way of teaching that emerged out of the work of Paulo Freire in the late sixties. Freire is a Brazilian educator who taught Brazilian peasants how to read and write and subsequently use these tools of literacy as a way of opposing the repressive military junta in Brazil. On a local level, literacy gave the peasants a way of empowering themselves to work against the landowners, whose interests the Brazilian junta represented. Understanding the revolutionary effects of widespread literacy, the junta imprisoned Freire and subsequently exiled him for twenty years. Freire described his method and political purpose of educating the peasants in Pedagogy of the Oppressed .
Critical pedagogy is in opposition to the banking model of education.
Knowledge in this model is considered inert, an object, a thing that can be transferred and reproduced. The liberatory model assumes that knowledge is active, something that comes alive in the dialogic relationship between teachers and students. The teachers learn about their students' ways of life and the students learn about the teachers'. It is in the intersections between those two worlds that education occurs. The family will have a child who will be a student in high school.