Freire was born September 19, 1921 to a middle class family in Recife, Pernambuco. Freire became familiar with poverty and hunger during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1931 the family moved to the less expensive city of Jaboatão dos Guararapes, and in 1933 his father died. In school he ended up four grades behind, and his social life revolved around playing pick up football with other poor children, from whom he learned a great deal. These experiences would shape his concerns for the poor and would help to construct his particular educational viewpoint. Freire stated that poverty and hunger severely affected his ability to learn. This influenced his decision to dedicate his life to improving the lives of the poor: “I didn't understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn't dumb. It wasn't lack of interest. My social condition didn't allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge" (Freire as qtd in Stevens, 2002) .[1]
Eventually his family's misfortunes turned around and their prospects improved.
Freire enrolled at Law School at the University of Recife in 1943. He also studied philosophy, more specifically phenomenology, and the psychology of language. Although admitted to the legal bar, he never actually practiced law but instead worked as a teacher in secondary schools teaching Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, a fellow teacher. The two worked together for the rest of their lives and had five children.
In 1946, Freire was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the State of Pernambuco. Working primarily among the illiterate poor, Freire began to embrace a non-orthodox form of what could be considered[2]liberation theology. In Brazil at that time, literacy was a requirement for voting in presidential elections.
In 1961, he was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension of Recife University, and in 1962 he had the first opportunity for significant application of his theories, when 300 sugarcane workers were taught to read and write in just 45 days. In response to this experiment, the Brazilian government approved the creation of thousands of cultural circles across the country.
In 1964, a military coup put an end to that effort. Freire was imprisoned as a traitor for 70 days. After a brief exile in Bolivia, Freire worked in Chile for five years for the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In 1967, Freire published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom. He followed this with his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in Portuguese in 1968.
On the strength of reception of his work, Freire was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard University in 1969. The next year, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in both Spanish and English, vastly expanding its reach. Because of political feuds between Freire, a Christian socialist, and successive authoritarian military dictatorships, the book wasn't published in Brazil until 1974, when General Ernesto Geisel became the then dictator president beginning the process of a slow and controlled political liberalisation.
After a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, Freire moved to Geneva, Switzerland to work as a special education advisor to the World Council of Churches. During this time Freire acted as an advisor on education reform in former Portuguese colonies in Africa, particularly Guinea Bissau and Mozambique.
In 1979, he was able to return to Brazil, and moved back in 1980. Freire joined the Workers' Party (PT) in the city of São Paulo, and acted as a supervisor for its adult literacy project from 1980 to 1986. When the PT prevailed in the municipal elections in 1988, Freire was appointed Secretary of Education for São Paulo.
In 1986, his wife Elza died. Freire married Maria Araújo Freire, who continues with her own educational work.
Freire died of heart failure on May 2, 1997 in São Paulo.
Recognition
King Baudouin International Development Prize 1980. Paulo Freire was the very first person to receive this prize. He was nominated for the prize by Dr. Mathew Zachariah, Professor of Education at the University of Calgary.
Prize for Outstanding Christian Educators with his wife Elza
UNESCO 1986 Prize for Education for Peace
Honorary Doctorate, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1996, along with Augusto Boal, during their residency at the Second Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference in Omaha.
Plato, but also from modern Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers. In fact, in many ways his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) may be best read as an extension of, or reply to, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which emphasized the need to provide native populations with an education which was simultaneously new and modern (rather than traditional) and anti-colonial (not simply an extension of the culture of the colonizer).
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Freire, reprising the oppressors-oppressed distinction, differentiates between the two positions in an unjust society, the oppressor and the oppressed. Freire makes no direct reference to his most direct influence for the distinction, which stems back at least as far as Hegel in 1802, and has since been reprised by many authors including Engels, Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Simone Weil and others.
Freire advocates that education should allow the oppressed to regain their humanity and overcome their condition. However, he acknowledges that in order for this to take effect, the oppressed have to play a role in their own liberation. As he states:
No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption (Freire, 1970, p. 54).[4]
Likewise, the oppressors must also be willing to rethink their way of life and to examine their own role in the oppression if true liberation is to occur; "those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly" (Freire, 1970, p. 60).
Freire believed education to be a political act that could not be divorced from pedagogy. Freire defined this as a main tenet of critical pedagogy. Teachers and students must be made aware of the "politics" that surround education. The way students are taught and what they are taught serves a political agenda. Teachers, themselves, have political notions they bring into the classroom (Kincheloe, 2008).[5] Freire believed that "education makes sense because women and men learn that through learning they can make and remake themselves, because women and men are able to take responsibility for themselves as beings capable of knowing — of knowing that they know and knowing that they don't" (Freire, 2004, p. 15)[6]
Banking model of education
In terms of actual pedagogy, Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the "banking" concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. He notes that "it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power" (Freire, 1970, p. 77). The basic critique was not new — Rousseau’s conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from tabula rasa (which is basically the same as the “banking concept”). In addition, thinkers like John Dewey were strongly critical of the transmission of mere facts as the goal of education. Dewey often described education as a mechanism for social change, explaining that “education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction” (1897, p. 16).[7] Freire’s work, however, updated the concept and placed it in context with current theories and practices of education, laying the foundation for what is now called critical pedagogy.
More challenging is Freire's strong aversion to the teacher-student dichotomy. This dichotomy is admitted in Rousseau and constrained in Dewey, but Freire comes close to insisting that it be completely abolished. This is hard to imagine in absolute terms, since there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship, but what Freire suggests is that a deep reciprocity be inserted into our notions of teacher and student. He goes so far as to say that “Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously students and teachers” (Freire, 1970, p. 72). Freire wants us to think in terms of teacher-student and student-teacher – that is, a teacher who learns and a learner who teaches – as the basic roles of classroom participation. Freire however insists that educator and student, though sharing democratic social relations of education, are not on an equal footing, but the educator must be humble enough to be disposed to relearn that which s/he already thinks s/he knows, through interaction with the learner. The authority which the educator enjoys must not be allowed to degenerate into authoritarianism; teachers must recognize that "their fundamental objective is to fight alongside the people for the recovery of the people's stolen humanity", not to "win the people over" to their side (Freire, 1970, p. 95).
Culture of silence
According to Freire, the system of dominant social relations create a culture of silence that instills a negative, silenced and suppressed self-image into the oppressed. The learner must develop a critical consciousness in order to recognize that this culture of silence is created to oppress.[8] Also, a culture of silence can 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."[9] Social domination of race and class are interleaved into the conventional educational system, through which the “culture of silence” eliminates the "paths of thought that lead to a language of critique”[10]
Global impact
Freire's major exponents in North America are Peter McLaren, Donaldo Macedo, Joe L. Kincheloe, Ira Shor, and Henry Giroux. One of McLaren's edited texts, Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, expounds upon Freire's impact in the field of critical education. McLaren has also provided a comparative study concerning Paulo Freire and the Argentinian revolutionary icon Che Guevara.
In 1991, the Paulo Freire Institute was established in São Paulo to extend and elaborate upon his theories of popular education. The Institute now has projects in many countries and is currently headquartered at UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies where it actively maintains the Freire archives. The director is Dr. Carlos Torres, a UCLA professor and author of Freirean books including La praxis educativa de Paulo Freire (1978).
Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs, according to Sol Stern, a social commentator critical of the entry of Freire's Marxist-inspired teachings into the mainstream curriculum.
The Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference is held each spring and is guided by the theory and practice of these two liberatory practitioners. The Conference networks a wide variety of people with interests in Freire and Augusto Boal—liberatory education and theatre, community organizing, community-based analysis, TIE, race/gender/class/sexual orientation/geography analysis, performance/performance art, comparative education models, etc.
The Paulo and Nita Freire Project for International Critical Pedagogy has been founded at McGill University. Here Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg have worked to create a dialogical forum for critical scholars around the world to promote research and re-create a Freirean pedagogy in a multinational domain.
At his death, Freire was working on a book of Ecopedagogy, a platform of work carried on by many of the Freire Institutes and Freirean Associations around the world today. It has been influential in helping to develop planetary education projects such as the Earth Charter as well as countless international grassroots campaigns per the spirit of Freirean popular education generally.
Mann, Bernhard, The Pedagogical and Political Concepts of Mahatma Gandhi and Paulo Freire. In: Claußen, B. (Ed.) International Studies in Political Socialization and ion. Bd. 8. Hamburg 1996. ISBN 3-926952-97-0
Kincheloe, Joe L. (2008). Critical Pedagogy. 2nd Ed. New York: Peter Lang.
Further reading
Coben, Diana (1998), Radical heroes. Gramsci, Freire and the Politics of Adult Education, New York: Garland Press.
Darder, Antonia (2002), Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, Boulder: Westview.
Elias, John (1994), Paulo Freire: Pedagogue of Liberation, Florida: Krieger.
Freire, Paulo (1997) "Mentoring the mentor: a critical dialogue with Paulo Freire," Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education, Vol 60, 1997, ISBN 0820437980
Gadotti, Moacir (1994), Reading Paulo Freire. His Life and Work, Albany: SUNY Press.
McLaren, Peter (2000) Che Guevara, Paulo Freire and the Pedagogy of Revolution, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
McLaren, Peter and Leonard, Peter (eds.) (1993), Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, London and New York: Routledge.
McLaren, Peter and Lankshear, Colin (eds.) (1994), Politics of Liberation. Paths from Freire, London and New York: Routledge.
Mayo,Peter (1999), Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education. Possibilities for Transformative Action, London and New York: Zed Books.
Mayo,Peter (2004, 2008), Liberating Praxis. Paulo Freire's Legacy for Radical Education and Politics, Westport, Connecticut: Praeger; Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense.
Morrow, Raymond A. and Torres, Carlos .A. (2002), Reading Freire and Habermas. Critical pedagogy and Transformative Social Change, New York and London: Teachers College Press.
O’Cadiz, Maria del Pilar, Wong, Pia L. and Torres, Carlos A. (1997), Education and Democracy. Paulo Freire, Social Movements and Educational Reform in São Paulo, Boulder: Westview Press.
Roberts, Peter (2000), Education, Literacy, and Humanization Exploring the Work of Paulo Freire, Westport, Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey.
Rossatto, Cesar A. (2005), Engaging Paulo Freire's Pedagogy Of Possibility: From Blind To Transformative Optimism, Lanham: Rowman & Littleield.
Taylor, Paul V. (1993), The Texts of Paulo Freire, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Torres, Carlos A and Noguera, Pedro (eds.) (2008), Social Justice Education For Teachers. Paulo Freire and the Possible Dream, Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense.
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