Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (…) was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy. He is best known for his influential work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, generally considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement. . . . According to Freire, inequal social relations create a 'culture of silence' that instill a negative, passive and suppressed self-image onto the oppressed, and learners must, then, develop a critical consciousness in order to recognize that this culture of silence is created to oppress. A culture of silence can also cause the "dominated individuals [to] lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture." [Wikipedia]