Paulo Freire Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Paulo Freire (1921–1997) was a leading Brazilian educator and theorist. His life’s work is an attempt to liberate the marginalized classes, who constitute a culture of silence in many parts of the developing world. His primary theoretical contribution is the philosophy of popular education that reflects classic Platonic tendencies, enriched by a Marxist, ant colonialist framework. Today, his work serves as the foundation for critical pedagogy and numerous popular and informal education programs around the world.

Born to middle-class parents in Recife, Brazil, Freire grew up knowing poverty and hunger during the Great Depression of 1929. In 1943, he studied law at the University of Recife. After passing the bar, Freire abandoned law and worked as a schoolteacher. In 1946, he was appointed director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the State of Pernambuco. Working primarily with the illiterate poor in this post, Freire began to formulate a means of communicating with the dispossessed that would later develop into his dialogical method for adult education.

In 1961, he was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension at Recife University, where he was afforded the first opportunity for significant application of his theory of education. Freire’s literacy program was an overwhelming success, with three hundred illiterate sugarcane workers learning to read and write in just forty-five days. In response, the government approved the creation of thousands of literacy programs across the country based on Freire’s model.

In 1964, following the overthrow of the Goulart regime in Brazil, Freire was imprisoned for seventy days. After a brief exile in Bolivia, Freire worked in Chile under the Frei government. In 1967, he published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom, and in 1969, he took a visiting professorship at Harvard University.

During this period, Freire wrote his most influential text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), in which he described education as a path to permanent liberation, with two stages. The first stage, conscientization, is a process in which a learner moves toward critical consciousness, an awareness of being an oppressed “object” in a world where only “subjects” have power. This process is the heart of liberator education and stands in contrast to what Freire termed “banking education,” a dehumanizing method of education where learners are conceptualized as passive recipients of preselected knowledge. The second stage, praxis, comprises a dialogical cycle of action reflection-action, in which critically conscious individuals seek to transform the social order.

After leaving Harvard in the early 1970s, Freire served as the assistant secretary of education for the World Council of Churches in Switzerland. In 1979, he was invited by the Brazilian government to return from exile, where he assumed a faculty position at the University of São Paulo. He also 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 Workers’ Party prevailed in municipal elections in 1988, he was appointed minister of education for São Paulo.

Throughout his life, Freire joined in writing more than a dozen books, integrating strands of thinking about educational practice, critical theory, democracy, and liberation. Specifically, his emphases on dialogue, conscientization, praxis, the “naming of oppression,” and the lived experience of participants are the core tenets of his “pedagogy of hope.” Such innovations have had a considerable impact on the development of education practice and theorizing, especially in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Bibliography:

Darder, Antonia. “Teaching as an Act of Love: Reflection on Paulo Freire and His Contributions to Our Lives and Work.” In Critical Pedagogy Reader, edited by Antonia Darder, Marta Baltodano, and Rodolfo Torres, 497–510. New York:Taylor and Francis, 2003.
Gadotti, Moacir. Reading Paulo Freire: His Life and Work. New York: State University of New York Press, 1994.
Smith, Mark K, “Paulo Freire and Information Education,” The Encyclopedia of Informal Education, www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm. Last updated June 18, 2009.