Paulo Freire

The Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire (1921-1997) developed theories that have been used, principally in Third World countries, to bring literacy to the poor and to transform the field of education.

Paulo Freire was born on the northeastern coast of Brazil in the city of Recife in 1921. Raised by his mother who was a devout Catholic and his father who was a middle-class businessman, Freire's early years paralleled those of the Great Depression. Outward symbols, such as his father always wearing a tie and having a German-made piano in their home, pointed to the family's middle-class heritage but stood in contrast to their actual conditions of poverty. Reflecting on their situation, Freire noted, "We shared the hunger, but not the class." After completing secondary school and with gradual improvement in his family's financial situation, he was able to enter Recife University, preparing to become a teacher of Portuguese.

The Direction for his Later Life

The 15 years following World War II proved to be instrumental in giving direction to his later life. He had previously married a fellow teacher, Elza, in 1944. In addition to their shared careers in teaching, they worked together with middle-class friends in the Catholic Action Movement. This work became unsettling as they struggled with the contradictions between the Christian faith and their friends' lifestyles. In particular they faced strong resistance when suggesting that servants should be dealt with as human beings. Later they decided to work solely with "the people," the large population of the poor in Brazil.

A second experience that gave focus to Freire's later life came when he worked as a labor lawyer for the poor and involved a discussion with workers about the theories of Jean Piaget, a prominent psychologist. Evidently Freire's comments were not comprehended by one of the workers, who noted, "You talk from a background of food, comfort, and rest. The reality is that we have one room, no food, and have to make love in front of the children." Through such experiences and further study, Freire began to realize that the poor had a different sense of reality and that to communicate with them he had to use their syntax of meanings. This recognition served as a basis for his doctoral dissertation in 1959 at Recife University, where he was to soon become professor of history and philosophy of education.

Leading the National Literacy Program

In 1962 the mayor of Recife appointed Freire as head of an adult literacy program for the city. In his first experiement, Freire taught 300 adults to read and write in 45 days. This program was so successful that during the following year the President of Brazil appointed him to lead the National Literacy Program. This program was on its way to becoming similarly successful, with expected enrollments to exceed two million students in 1964. Under Brazil's constitution, however, illiterates were not allowed to vote. The O Globe, an influential conservative newspaper, claimed that Freire's method for developing literacy was stirring up the people, causing them to want to change society, and formenting subversion. As a consequence of a military overthrow of the government in 1964, Freire was jailed for 70 days, then exiled briefly to Bolivia and then to Chile for five years.

Providing Literacy in Exile

Freire met with opposition from some Chilian citizens who viewed him as a threat to their society. However, the director of a nationwide program for reducing illiteracy employed him to work in the Chilian Agrarian Reform Corporation. This provided him the opportunity over the next few years to become more involved in research and to write three books, the most noted of which is Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). In 1969 he accepted an invitation to be a visiting professor at Harvard. He quickly found a large audience of growing support in America primarily through the appearance in English of his publications. He left Harvard in 1970 to join the Office of Education at the World Council of Churches in Geneva. In this office his work over the next decade was marked by efforts to increase literacy and liberty in Third World countries through educational programs. Of particular note were his efforts to rethink and apply his theories in the West African country of Guinea-Bissau.

End of Exile

In 1979 Freire's exile status was lifted, allowing him to return home to Brazil where he became secretary of education in Sao Paulo. During the decade of the 1980s he published widely in the areas of education, politics, and literacy. In these writings he developed themes discussed previously and he continued to rethink their practical application to new situations.

Freire believed that poor peoples of the world are dominated and victims of those who possess political power. What the poor need is liberation, an education giving them a critical consciousness, investing them with an agency for changing, and throwing off the oppressive structures of their society. Such an education would not conform and mold people to fit into the roles expected by society, but it would prepare them to realize their own values and reality, reflect and study critically their world, and move into action to transform it. When working with illiterate adults, Freire proposed the selection of words used by the poor in their everyday lives expressing their longings, frustrations, and hopes. From this list of words a shorter list is developed of possibly 16-17 words that contain the basic sounds and syllables of the language. These words are broken down (decoded) into syllables; afterwards, the learners form new words by making different combinations of syllables. In relatively a short period of time (a few days) they are usually writing simple letters to each other. During their studies a second and deeper level of analysis is occurring simultaneously. That is, the teacher using the very same words helps the students also to decode their cultural and social world. This deeper level of activity leads learners to greater awareness of the oppressive forces in their lives and to the realization of their power to transform them.

Freire wrote 25 books which were translated into 35 languages and was an honorary professor of 28 universities around the world. He maintained that he never would have been arrested or criticized had he stuck to teaching ABCs. He fell into disfavor, he said, because of his theory that illiteracy, not any religious reason, made people poor. He said, "Education is freedom." After his death in 1997, there was a three-day mourning in the state of Pernambuco.

Further Reading

There is a biography written by Denis Collins, Paulo Freire: His Life and Thought (1977). An earlier quotational bibliography compiled by Anne Hartung and John Ohliger is in Stanley M. Grabowshi's edited work, Paulo Freire: A Revolutionary Dilemma for the Adult Educator (1972). One of Freire's coauthors, Donaldo Macedo of Boston University, is writing an authorized biography.

The reader will find Freire's books Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau (1978) excellent introductions to his thought. Education for Critical Consciousness (1974) contains concrete and practical examples of his teaching methods. The evolution of his thought and its application to world situation in the last two decades of the 20th century can be found in The Politics of Education: Cultural Power and Liberation (1985) and in Literacy (1987), written jointly with Donaldo Macedo. □

Freire, Paulo 1921-1997

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Until his death from a heart attack on May 2, 1997, Paulo Freire devoted his life and work to a philosophy and practice of education committed to the empowerment and social transformation of communities marginalized by poverty, colonialism, and political repression. Freire worked extensively in Brazil, Chile, and West Africa, where he developed a method for teaching literacy to poor, working class, and indigenous people. The development of Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed” cannot be viewed in isolation from his experience of life in Brazil during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in 1921 in Recife, a port town in the northeast province of Pernambuco, Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was raised in a middle class family that experienced severe poverty during the Great Depression. Poverty and hunger during Freire’s youth caused several setbacks in his formal schooling, an experience that shaped the later development of his educational philosophy. Freire studied law at the University of Recife, but gave up his career as a lawyer after his first case to teach Portuguese in secondary schools (Gadotti 1994). Freire married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveria, a primary school teacher, in 1944. Throughout their marriage, Elza encouraged and inspired Freire to devote himself to his work in the field of adult education.

Northeast Brazil in the early 1960s was a region of acute social polarization and economic suffering. It was during this time that Freire began to elaborate a model of politically engaged pedagogy against the prevailing “culture of silence” under which the illiterate poor labored. He emphasized the dialectic relationship between theory and practice, which is expressed through three generative themes in his work: concientization, dialogic learning, and his critique of the banking approach to education. Underpinning these three generative themes is a student-centered system of learning that challenges how knowledge is constructed in the formal education system and in society at large. Freire’s student-centered approach stands in stark contrast to conventional educational practice, which he referred to as the “banking approach” to education. He argued that conventional learning was the tool of the elite because it treated students as objects upon which knowledge is “deposited.” Genuine learning, for Freire, could only be achieved through lived experience, critical reflection, and praxis (Aronowitz 1993, p. 9).

The idea that “experiences are lived and not transplanted” is a central tenet of Freire’s philosophy (Gadotti 1994, p. 46). Concientization is the key process by which students develop a critical awareness of the world based on the concrete experience of their everyday lives. The development of critical awareness through concientization alters power relations between students and teachers, the colonized and the colonizer, thereby transforming objects of knowledge into historical subjects (Freire 1997). Freire proposed that a dialogical theory of action based on communication and cooperation was necessary not only for understanding the mediating role of historical, colonial, and class relations (concientization), but also for the active work of changing them. Dialogic action challenges mediating social realities by posing them as problems that can be analyzed critically by those who have direct experience of them. Dialogue becomes a form of collective praxis directly concerned with unveiling inequitable conditions obscured by the ruling classes.

The success of Freire’s method for teaching literacy to Brazil’s impoverished citizens, coupled with his efforts to affect social and political change among the landless poor, led to his imprisonment after a reactionary military coup in 1964. He spent a total of seventy days in jail. After his imprisonment in Brazil, Freire was exiled to Chile, where he remained for five years before taking up posts at Harvard University and in Switzerland. He did not return to Brazil until 1980. Freire’s most famous book is Pedagogy of the Oppressed, originally published in 1970. Other key works include Cultural Action for Freedom (1972), Education: The Practice of Freedom (1976), and Pedagogy of the Heart (1997). Thirty years on from his most influential work, the commitment to education as a pathway to liberation that Freire helped inspire remains a vibrant part of the social justice campaigns of grassroots activists, social policymakers, educators, and scholars (see McLaren 2000).

SEE ALSO Education, USA; Ideology; Liberation; Liberation Movements; Pedagogy; Schooling; Tracking in Schools

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Cultural Action for Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review.

Freire, Paulo. 1974. Education: The Practice of Freedom. London: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-operative.

Freire, Paulo. 1997. Pedagogy of the Heart. Trans. Donaldo Macedo and Alexandre Oliveira. New York: Continuum.

Freire, Paulo. 1997. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Rev. ed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum. (Orig. pub. 1970).

SECONDARY WORKS

Aronowitz, Stanley. 1993. Paulo Freire’s Radical Democratic Humanism. In Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, eds. Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard, 8–24. London: Routledge.

Gadotti, Moacir. 1994. Reading Paulo Freire: His Life and Work. Trans. John Milton. Albany: State University of New York

Press. McLaren, Peter. 2000. Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Donna Houston

FREIRE, PAULO 1921-

Educational philosopher

Militant Literacy

Paulo Freire came to the United States as a highly controversial educator from Latin America, best-known for his development of methodology for teaching reading to illiterate peasants. Born in Brazil, Freire was imprisoned there in 1964 when a military junta, which objected in the strongest possible terms to Freire's teaching of Brazilian peasants, seized control of the country. Upon release he was urged to leave the country, and he did so, working for five years in Chile developing adult-literacy programs. He came to the United States as a fellow of the Center for Study of Development and Social Change at Harvard, where his theories were welcomed, especially in the changing political climate of the early 1970s.

Freire's Philosophy

Freire believes that becoming literate involves far more than learning to decode the written representations of a sound system; that it is, instead, truly an act of knowing through which a person is able to look critically at the culture which has shaped him and to move with reflection and positive action upon his world. Freire rejects the digestive concept of adult education or the belief that illiterates are undernourished, and he strongly objects to terms such as eradication of illiteracy. The "culture of silence" in which the oppressed live is a product, he believed, of their acceptance of someone else's definition of the world. But each man has a right to "say his own word" and "to name the world" in his own way. Through the written word one may develop a radical new consciousness of political and economic contradictions and the will to do something about them. Thus learning to read, according to Freire, is not a mere technical problem but a process of learning how to redefine one's position in the world and to take action against one's oppressors.

Freire's Influence

Freire's work exerted influence all over the world, especially among many radical critics of education. The writings he did while at Harvard include his best known work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972), a fully developed abstract explanation of his philosophy of literacy. This work established Freire as the voice on adult literacy among many radical theorists who had been searching for a politically relevant philosophy of education. His insistence that the pedagogy of the oppressed be forged with learners and not for learners, along with his demands that teachers open a "dialogue between equals" with their students, won over those who wanted to politicize education. Ironically, Freire's next work, The Letters to Guinea-Bissau, in which he attempts to put his philosophical concepts into actual practice, demonstrates that it is not always possible to dialogue with those who are culturally depressed. The letters of the title are only Freire's letters; none from oppressed peoples is included. And even though Freire goes on record as opposing primers ("Literacy education as cultural action, as I have said so often, cannot use traditional primers"), the notebooks he describes in these letters are essentially primers—complete with the advice that one should teach words "through synthesis of sound-syllabic methods, in which recognizable letters and sounds are formed into different word and syllable combinations." However, despite some operational difficulties in turning philosophy into practice, Freire was highly acclaimed during the 1970s, so much so that the United Nations Nations Education, Scientific,; and Cultural Organization Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization based its Experimental World Campaign for Universal Literacy upon his work.

Sources:

Paulo Freire, The Letters to Guinea-Bissau (New York: Seabury Press, 1978);

Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder &, Herder, 1972);

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, The School Book (New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1973).

Paulo Freire , 1921–97, Brazilian educator. After his exile from Brazil following the military coup in 1964, Freire taught in Chile and was a consultant to UNESCO. He later taught at Harvard and was a consultant to the World Council of Churches before returning to Brazil in 1981. He is best known for his controversial approach to teaching illiterates, employing visual materials to teach them about self-perception and community problems. His writings include Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and The Politics of Education (1985).

Bibliography: See A. J. Kirkendall, Paolo Freire and the Cold War Politics of Literacy (2010).