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.

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."

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the most widely known of Paulo Freire's works. First published is 1970, the book examines the struggle for justice and equity within the educational system and proposes a new pedagogy.

Dedicated "to the oppressed, and to those who suffer with them and fight at their side," Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. Rooted in his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, the book remains most popular among educators in developing countries. According to Donaldo Macedo, a former colleague of Freire and University of Massachusetts professor, the text is still revolutionary, and he cites students living in totalitarian states who have risked punishment to read Pedagogy of the Oppressed as evidence. The book has sold over 750 000 copies worldwide and is one of the foundations of critical pedagogy.

Summary

Translated into several languages, most editions of Pedagogy of the Oppressed contain at least one introduction/foreword, a preface, and four chapters.

The first chapter explores how oppression has been justified and how it is overcome through a mutual process between the "oppressor" and the "oppressed". Examining how the balance of power between the colonizer and the colonized remains relatively stable, he admits that the powerless in society can be frightened of freedom. He writes, "Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion." According to Freire, freedom will be the result of praxis—informed action—when a balance between theory and practice is achieved.

The second chapter examines the "banking" approach to education (a metaphor used by Freire that suggests students are considered empty bank accounts that should remain open to deposits made by the teacher). Freire rejects this approach, claiming it results in the dehumanization of both the students and the teachers. In addition, he argues the banking approach stimulates oppressive attitudes and practices in society. Instead, Freire advocates for a more world-mediated, mutual approach to education that considers people incomplete. According to Freire, this "authentic" approach to education must allow people to be aware of their incompleteness and strive to be more fully human. This attempt to use education as a means of consciously shaping the person and the society is called conscientization, a term first coined by Freire in the book.

The third chapter is devoted to dialogics—"the essence of education as the practice of freedom"—and dialogue. Freire argues that words involve a radical interaction between reflection and action and that true words are transformational. Dialogue requires mutual respect and cooperation to not only develop understanding, but also to change the world. "Authentic" education, according to Freire, will involve dialogue between the teacher and the student, mediated by the broader world context. He warns that the limits imposed upon both the colonizer and the colonized dehumanize everyone involved, thereby removing the ability for dialogue to occur, inevitably barring the possibility of transformation.

The last chapter proposes dialogics as an instrument to free the colonized, through the use of cooperation, unity, organization and cultural synthesis (overcoming problems in society to liberate human beings). This is in contrast to antidialogics which use conquest, the concept of divide and rule, manipulation and cultural invasion. Freire suggests that populist dialogue is a necessity to revolution; that impeding dialogue dehumanizes and supports the status quo. This is but one example of the dichotomies Freire identifies in the book. Others include the student-teacher dichotomy and the colonizer-colonized dichotomy.

More detailed chapter by chapter summaries are available through The Communication Initiative.

Reaction

Since its publication, the book has sparked both praise and criticism. For example, Stanley Aronowitz, from City University of New York, proclaims, the book "meets the single criterion of a classic: it has outlived its own time and its author's. For any teacher who links education to social change, this is required reading." Gail Kidd, from Purdue University writes, Freire "possesses wonderful insight into people's souls. He finds every human worthy of respect, dignity, and trust. It is uplifting to read and understand his empathy for others and their plight." Critics have attacked Freire's book on a number of fronts. Sarah Hendriks, from the University of Toronto, points out that Freire's writing "seems to contradict the very essence of his pedagogy . . . . [since he argues that language changes the world but] does not leave room for the inclusion of popular discourse within the text of his own pedagogy, thereby limiting his text to a specific, academically-oriented audience." Another critic, Diana Coben, from King's College, asserts that Pedagogy of the Oppressed is "...just too simple and indiscriminate to accommodate the multi-faceted and contradictory nature of differential power relationships in terms of gender, class or any other social category." Rich Gibson attacks Freire as a Hegelian "objective idealist," who borrowed heavily from Hegel's "Phenomenology," as "a petrified old-style socialist wherever he wasn't, and a reformer wherever he was; a devout Catholic who never broke out of his mysticism." Others have noted Freire's ultimately idyllic vision of a world without oppression while Feminist reviewers have been critical of Freire's use of gender biased language. To read more criticism of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, see Reviews of Paulo Friere's Books .

Awards

King Balduin Prize for International Development
Prize for Outstanding Christian Educators with his wife Elza
UNESCO 1986 Prize for Education for Peace

Notes

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

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Rich Gibson, The Frozen Dialectics of Paulo Freire, in NeoLiberalism and Education Reform, Hampton Press, 2006

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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