Paulo Friere

1) His Biography and Main Works:

Freire was born on September 19, 1921, in Recife, Pernambuco, to a middle-class family. As a result of the Great Depression, he was exposed to poverty and hunger at a young age. His family relocated to the more affordable city of Jaboato dos Guararapes, 18 kilometres west of Recife, in 1931. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Freire fell four grades behind, and his social life revolved around playing pick-up football with other poor children, from whom he claims to have learned a lot. These experiences shaped his concerns for the poor and aided in the formation of his specific educational viewpoint. According to Freire, poverty and hunger had a negative impact on his ability to learn. These experiences influenced his decision to devote his life to improving the lives of the poor. “My social situation didn’t allow me to get an education,” he says. “Experience once again demonstrated the link between social class and knowledge.” His family’s misfortunes eventually turned around, and their prospects improved.

In 1943, Freire enrolled in law school at the University of Recife. He also studied philosophy, specifically phenomenology, and language psychology. He was admitted to the bar but never practised law, instead working as a secondary school Portuguese teacher. He married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, a fellow teacher, in 1944. They had five children and worked together. Freire was named director of the Pernambuco Department of Education and Culture in 1946. Working primarily with the illiterate poor, Freire began to develop an educational praxis that would influence the 1970s liberation theology movement. Literacy was required to vote in presidential elections in 1940s Brazil. He was named director of the Department of Cultural Extension at the University of Recife in 1961. In 1962, he had his first opportunity to test his theories on a large scale, when 300 sugarcane harvesters were taught to read and write in 45 days in an experiment. As a result of this experiment, the Brazilian government approved the establishment of thousands of cultural circles throughout the country.

Because the ruling military junta in Brazil did not support Freire’s literacy campaign, it was put on hold in 1964. Freire was then imprisoned for 70 days as a traitor. After a brief exile in Bolivia, Freire worked for the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Chile for five years. Freire’s first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom, was published in 1967. He then published his most famous work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in 1968. In 1969, following a positive international response to his work, Freire was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard University. The next year, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in Spanish and English, vastly expanding its reach.

After a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Freire moved to Geneva to work for the World Council of Churches as a special education advisor. During this time, Freire served as an education reform advisor in several former Portuguese colonies in Africa, most notably Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. After more than a decade in exile, he returned to Brazil for the first time in 1979, eventually relocating there in 1980. From 1980 to 1986, Freire worked as a supervisor for the Workers’ Party (PT) literacy project in Sao Paulo. Freire was appointed municipal Secretary of Education after the Workers’ Party won the 1988 Sao Paulo mayoral elections. Freire died of heart failure on 2 May 1997, in Sao Paulo.

2) Main Themes in Educational Philosophy:

Paulo Freire contributed a philosophy of education that combined Plato’s classical approaches with modern Marxist, post-Marxist, and anti-colonialist thinkers. His Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) can be read as an extension of, or response to, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which emphasised the need to provide native populations with education that was new and modern, rather than traditional, and anti-colonial – not simply an extension of the colonising culture. Freire saw the contemporaneous Chinese Cultural Revolution as an example of cultural action and praised Mao Zedong’s contributions to Marxist theory and practise. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire applies the oppressors–oppressed distinction to education, arguing that education should allow the oppressed to regain their sense of humanity, allowing them to overcome their condition. Nonetheless, he recognises that in order for this to happen, the oppressed individual must play a role in their liberation.

In terms of pedagogy, Freire is best known for his critique of the “banking” concept of education, which views students as empty accounts to be filled by teachers. He observes that it transforms students into receiving objects and attempts to control thinking and action, causing men and women to adjust to their surroundings and stifle their creative power. Freire’s work revived this viewpoint and contextualised it with contemporary educational theories and practises, laying the groundwork for what would later be known as critical pedagogy.

Freire believed that education could not be separated from politics, and that the acts of teaching and learning are political in and of themselves. This connection was defined by Freire as a central tenet of critical pedagogy. Teachers and students must be educated on the politics of education. The manner in which students are taught and what they are taught serve a political purpose. Teachers bring their own political beliefs into the classroom.

According to Freire, unequal social relations create a “culture of silence” that instils in the oppressed a negative, passive, and suppressed self-image, and learners must then develop a critical consciousness in order to recognise that this culture of silence is designed to oppress. A culture of silence can also cause dominated individuals to lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that a dominant culture forces on them. He believed that social, racial, and class dynamics are intertwined with the traditional education system, and that this culture of silence eliminates paths of thought that lead to a language of critique.

3) His Influence:

Since its English-language publication in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has had a significant impact on education and pedagogy around the world, particularly as a defining work of critical pedagogy. It has “achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programmes,” according to Israeli writer and education reform theorist Sol Stern. The Adult Learning Project, based on Freire’s work, was founded in the Gorgie-Dalry neighbourhood of Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1977. Approximately 200 people participated in the first years of this project, which aimed to provide affordable and relevant local learning opportunities as well as to build a network of local tutors. Freire’s ideas about popular education influenced activist movements not only in Edinburgh but also in Glasgow in Scotland.

Freire’s ideas and methods were central to the 1970s Black Consciousness Movement, which was often associated with Steve Biko, as well as the trade union movement in the 1970s and 1980s, and the United Democratic Front in the 1980s in South Africa. The University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg has a Paulo Freire Project. The Paulo Freire Institute was founded in Sao Paulo in 1991 to further and elaborate on his theories of popular education. The institute has projects in many countries and is headquartered at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, where the Freire archives are actively maintained. PAULO, a national training organisation named after Freire, was founded in the United Kingdom in 1999.

The New Labour Government authorised this organisation to represent approximately 300,000 community-based education practitioners working throughout the United Kingdom. PAULO was formally charged with developing occupational training standards for those working in this field. McGill University established the Paulo and Nita Freire Project for International Critical Pedagogy. Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg collaborated on this project to create a dialogical forum for critical scholars from around the world to promote research and re-create a Freirean pedagogy in a multinational domain.

A group of educators in Western Massachusetts, USA, received permission to name a public school after Freire in 2012. The Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter School in Holyoke, Massachusetts, opened in September 2013. Shortly before his death, Freire was working on an ecopedagogy book, which is still being worked on by many of the Freire Institutes and Freirean Associations today. It has aided in the development of planetary education projects such as the Earth Charter, as well as countless international grassroots campaigns in the spirit of Freirean popular education in general.

Literacy methods based on Freire have spread throughout the developing world. In the Philippines, Catholic basal Christian communities used Freire’s community education methods. Freirean literacy methods were used in Papua New Guinea as part of the World Bank-funded Southern Highlands Rural Development Program’s Literacy Campaign. Freirean approaches are also central to the “Dragon Dreaming” approach to community programmes, which had spread to 20 countries by 2014.