The antidote to the obscurantism of power is the double key of conscientização. First, an epistemology of curiosity, as Freire proposed, constantly asking questions and being dissatisfied with the answers, finding nothing that cannot be questioned, employing the candor and simplicity of the child’s gaze to inspect even the most intricate relations and experiences. Second, the epistemology of suspicion, according to Freire and the great French phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur, the suspicion that all human interaction, all human experience, to the extent that it involves power relations, involves relations of domination and therefore must be submitted to systematic criticism. While this is currently applied to the interaction between individual persons (children and their parents, children and their teachers, associations within families), there is an even greater need for it to be applied to the interactions between people and institutions. Thus, it is valid to affirm that this epistemological model of suspicion reveals how the logic of capital and especially the logic of the rights of private property tend to prevail, in practice and the law, over the logic and the rights of people.
Torres, “Taking Heaven by Storm?: A logbook for rethinking conceptual and normative categories in higher education in Latin America”