Quotations
A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle.
Chapter 1
Almost never do they realize that they, too, 'know things' they have learned in their relations with the world.
Chapter 1
As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible.
As the oppressor minority subordinates and dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in power.
Certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation.
Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and its people.
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Encyclopedia
Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and influential theorist of
education.
Life
Born on 19 September 1921 to
middle class parents in
Recife,
Brazil, Freire knew poverty and hunger during the
1929 Great Depression, an experience that would shape his concerns for the poor and would help to construct his particular educational worldview.
Freire entered the University of Recife in 1943, enrolling in the Faculty of Law, but also studying
philosophy and the psychology of language. Following his entrance into the legal bar, he never actually practised law and instead worked as a teacher in secondary schools teaching Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, a fellow teacher: the two would work together for the rest of her life while raising five children.
In 1946, Freire was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the State of
Pernambuco . During this time working, primarily working among illiterate poor, Freire began to embrace a non-orthodox form of what could be considered liberation theology . It's particularly important to note that in Brazil at the 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 widespread 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, and resulted in the imprisonment of Freire 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. In 1967, Freire published his first book,
Education as the Practice of Freedom.
The book was well received, and Freire was offered a visiting professorship at
Harvard University in 1969. The previous year, he wrote his most famous book,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which was published also in
Spanish and
English in 1970. It wasn't published in Brazil until 1974 when
General Ernesto Geisel took control of Brazil and began his process of cultural liberalisation.
After a year in
Cambridge, Freire moved to
Geneva, Switzerland to work as a special education adviser 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 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 1986, Freire was appointed Secretary of Education for São Paulo.
In 1986, his wife Elza died and Freire married Maria Araújo Freire, who continues with her own radical educational work.
In 1991, the Paulo Freire Institute was established in São Paulo to extend and elaborate his theories of popular education. The Institute maintains the Freire archives.
Freire died of heart failure on May 2, 1997.
Awards
- King Balduin Prize for International Development
- Prize for Outstanding Christian Educators with his wife Elza
- UNESCO 1986 Prize for Education for Peace
Theoretical Contributions
Paulo Freire contributes a philosophy of education that comes not only from the more classical approaches stemming from
Plato, but also from modern
Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers. In fact, in many ways his
Pedagogy of the Oppressed may best be read as an extension of or reply to
Frantz Fanon's
The Wretched of the Earth is Frantz Fanon [i]'s best-known work, written during and regarding the Algeria [i] ...
, which laid strong emphasis on the need to provide native populations with an education which was simultaneously new and modern and anti-colonial .
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. Of course, this is not really a new move —
Rousseau's conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from the tabula rasa , and thinkers like
John Dewey and
Alfred North Whitehead were strongly critical of the transmission of mere "facts" as the goal of education. Freire's work is one of the foundations of 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 should be completely abolished. This is hard to imagine in absolute terms , but what Freire suggests is that a deep reciprocity be inserted into our notions of teacher and student. 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.
This is one of the few attempts anywhere to implement something like
democracy as an educational method and not merely a goal of democratic education. Even Dewey, for whom democracy was a touchstone, did not integrate democratic practices fully into his methods. However, in its early, strong form this kind of classroom has sometimes been criticized on the grounds that it can mask rather than overcome the teacher's authority.
See also
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed
- Issues in Freirean pedagogy
- Conscientization
- Reconstructivism
External links
