Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire (Recife, Brazil September 19, 1921 - São Paulo, Brazil May 2, 1997) 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 worked together for the rest of her life 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, the Brazilian state of which Recife is the capital. Working primarily among the illiterate poor, Freire began to embrace a non-orthodox form of what could be considered ^[1]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.

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. Because of the political feud between the successive authoritarian military dictatorships and the Christian socialist Freire, 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 (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 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.

↑ Lownd, Peter. http://www.paulofreireinstitute.org/PF-life_and_work_by_Peter.html

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, 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).

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 tabula rasa (which is basically the same as the "banking concept"), 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, 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. 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, though this was in part a function of Dewey's attitudes toward individuality. In its strongest early form this kind of classroom has been criticized on the grounds that it can mask rather than overcome the teacher's authority.

Freire has come into criticism. Rich Gibson has critiqued his work as a cul-de-sac, a combination of old-style socialism (wherever Freire was not) and liberal reformism (wherever Freire was). Paul Taylor, in his "Texts of Paulo Freire," comes close to calling Freire for plagiarism, while Gibson notes Freire borrows very, very heavily from Hegel's "Phenomenology."

External links

Credits

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[1] Lownd, Peter. http://www.paulofreireinstitute.org/PF-life_and_work_by_Peter.html

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