Paulo Freire

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The Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire (1921-1997) developed theories that have been used, principally in Third World countries, to bring literacy to the poor and to transform the field of education.

Paulo Freire was born on the northeastern coast of Brazil in the city of Recife in 1921. Raised by his mother who was a devout Catholic and his father who was a middle-class businessman, Freire's early years paralleled those of the Great Depression. Outward symbols, such as his father always wearing a tie and having a German-made piano in their home, pointed to the family's middle-class heritage but stood in contrast to their actual conditions of poverty. Reflecting on their situation, Freire noted, "We shared the hunger, but not the class." After completing secondary school and with gradual improvement in his family's financial situation, he was able to enter Recife University, preparing to become a teacher of Portuguese.

The Direction for his Later Life

The 15 years following World War II proved to be instrumental in giving direction to his later life. He had previously married a fellow teacher, Elza, in 1944. In addition to their shared careers in teaching, they worked together with middle-class friends in the Catholic Action Movement. This work became unsettling as they struggled with the contradictions between the Christian faith and their friends' lifestyles. In particular they faced strong resistance when suggesting that servants should be dealt with as human beings. Later they decided to work solely with "the people," the large population of the poor in Brazil.

A second experience that gave focus to Freire's later life came when he worked as a labor lawyer for the poor and involved a discussion with workers about the theories of Jean Piaget, a prominent psychologist. Evidently Freire's comments were not comprehended by one of the workers, who noted, "You talk from a background of food, comfort, and rest. The reality is that we have one room, no food, and have to make love in front of the children." Through such experiences and further study, Freire began to realize that the poor had a different sense of reality and that to communicate with them he had to use their syntax of meanings. This recognition served as a basis for his doctoral dissertation in 1959 at Recife University, where he was to soon become professor of history and philosophy of education.

Leading the National Literacy Program

In 1962 the mayor of Recife appointed Freire as head of an adult literacy program for the city. In his first experiement, Freire taught 300 adults to read and write in 45 days. This program was so successful that during the following year the President of Brazil appointed him to lead the National Literacy Program. This program was on its way to becoming similarly successful, with expected enrollments to exceed two million students in 1964. Under Brazil's constitution, however, illiterates were not allowed to vote. The O Globe, an influential conservative newspaper, claimed that Freire's method for developing literacy was stirring up the people, causing them to want to change society, and formenting subversion. As a consequence of a military overthrow of the government in 1964, Freire was jailed for 70 days, then exiled briefly to Bolivia and then to Chile for five years.

Providing Literacy in Exile

Freire met with opposition from some Chilian citizens who viewed him as a threat to their society. However, the director of a nationwide program for reducing illiteracy employed him to work in the Chilian Agrarian Reform Corporation. This provided him the opportunity over the next few years to become more involved in research and to write three books, the most noted of which is Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). In 1969 he accepted an invitation to be a visiting professor at Harvard. He quickly found a large audience of growing support in America primarily through the appearance in English of his publications. He left Harvard in 1970 to join the Office of Education at the World Council of Churches in Geneva. In this office his work over the next decade was marked by efforts to increase literacy and liberty in Third World countries through educational programs. Of particular note were his efforts to rethink and apply his theories in the West African country of Guinea-Bissau.

End of Exile

In 1979 Freire's exile status was lifted, allowing him to return home to Brazil where he became secretary of education in Sao Paulo. During the decade of the 1980s he published widely in the areas of education, politics, and literacy. In these writings he developed themes discussed previously and he continued to rethink their practical application to new situations.

Freire believed that poor peoples of the world are dominated and victims of those who possess political power. What the poor need is liberation, an education giving them a critical consciousness, investing them with an agency for changing, and throwing off the oppressive structures of their society. Such an education would not conform and mold people to fit into the roles expected by society, but it would prepare them to realize their own values and reality, reflect and study critically their world, and move into action to transform it. When working with illiterate adults, Freire proposed the selection of words used by the poor in their everyday lives expressing their longings, frustrations, and hopes. From this list of words a shorter list is developed of possibly 16-17 words that contain the basic sounds and syllables of the language. These words are broken down (decoded) into syllables; afterwards, the learners form new words by making different combinations of syllables. In relatively a short period of time (a few days) they are usually writing simple letters to each other. During their studies a second and deeper level of analysis is occurring simultaneously. That is, the teacher using the very same words helps the students also to decode their cultural and social world. This deeper level of activity leads learners to greater awareness of the oppressive forces in their lives and to the realization of their power to transform them.

Freire wrote 25 books which were translated into 35 languages and was an honorary professor of 28 universities around the world. He maintained that he never would have been arrested or criticized had he stuck to teaching ABCs. He fell into disfavor, he said, because of his theory that illiteracy, not any religious reason, made people poor. He said, "Education is freedom." After his death in 1997, there was a three-day mourning in the state of Pernambuco.

Further Reading

There is a biography written by Denis Collins, Paulo Freire: His Life and Thought (1977). An earlier quotational bibliography compiled by Anne Hartung and John Ohliger is in Stanley M. Grabowshi's edited work, Paulo Freire: A Revolutionary Dilemma for the Adult Educator (1972). One of Freire's coauthors, Donaldo Macedo of Boston University, is writing an authorized biography.

The reader will find Freire's books Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau (1978) excellent introductions to his thought. Education for Critical Consciousness (1974) contains concrete and practical examples of his teaching methods. The evolution of his thought and its application to world situation in the last two decades of the 20th century can be found in The Politics of Education: Cultural Power and Liberation (1985) and in Literacy (1987), written jointly with Donaldo Macedo.

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator whose revolutionary pedagogical theory influenced educational and social movements throughout the world and whose philosophical writings influenced academic disciplines that include theology, sociology, anthropology, applied linguistics, pedagogy, and cultural studies. He was born to a middle-class family in Recife, in the state of Pernambuco in the northeast of Brazil. His early work in adult literacy - the most famous being his literacy experiments in the town of Angicos in Rio Grande do Norte - was terminated after the military coup in 1964. That year he went into exile, during which time he lived in Bolivia; then Chile where he worked for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Chilean Institute for Agrarian Reform, and where he wrote his most important work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970); Mexico; the United States where he held a brief appointment at Harvard University's Center for Studies in Development and Social Change; and Switzerland where he worked for the World Council of Churches as the director of their education program. He also served as an adviser for various governments, most notably the government of Guinea-Bissau. In 1980 he returned to Brazil to teach and later to serve as secretary of education for Sāo Paulo. He worked as a consultant for revolutionary governments such as the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and the government of Julius K. Nyerere in Tanzania. From 1985 until his death in 1997, Freire served as the honorary president of the International Council for Adult Education. Freire's conception of education as a deeply political project oriented toward the transformation of society has been crucial to the education of revolutionary societies and societies undergoing civil war, as well as established Western democracies. Freire's work has exercised considerable influence among progressive educators in the West, especially in the context of emerging traditions of critical pedagogy, bilingual education, and multicultural education.

Freire's revolutionary pedagogy starts from a deep love for, and humility before, poor and oppressed people and a respect for their "common sense," which constitutes a knowledge no less important than the scientific knowledge of the professional. This humility makes possible a condition of reciprocal trust and communication between the educator, who also learns, and the student, who also teaches. Thus, education becomes a "communion" between participants in a dialogue characterized by a reflexive, reciprocal, and socially relevant exchange, rather than the unilateral action of one individual agent for the benefit of the other. Nevertheless, this does not amount to a celebration of the untrammeled core of consciousness of the oppressed, in which the educator recedes into the background as a mere facilitator. Freire conceived of authentic teaching as enacting a clear authority, rather than being authoritarian. The teacher, in his conception, is not neutral, but intervenes in the educational situation in order to help the student to overcome those aspects of his or her social constructs that are paralyzing, and to learn to think critically. In a similar fashion, Freire validated and affirmed the experiences of the oppressed without automatically legitimizing or validating their content. All experiences - including those of the teacher - had to be interrogated in order to lay bare their ideological assumptions and presuppositions. The benchmark that Freire used for evaluating experiences grew out of a Christianized Marxist humanism. From this position, Freire urged both students and teachers to unlearn their race, class, and gender privileges and to engage in a dialogue with those whose experiences are very different from their own. Thus, he did not uncritically affirm student or teacher experiences but provided the conceptual tools with which to critically interrogate them so as to minimize their politically domesticating influences.

Conceptual Tools

Banking education. Freire criticized prevailing forms of education as reducing students to the status of passive objects to be acted upon by the teacher. In this traditional form of education it is the job of the teacher to deposit in the minds of the students, considered to be empty in an absolute ignorance, the bits of information that constitute knowledge. Freire called this banking education. The goal of banking education is to immobilize the people within existing frameworks of power by conditioning them to accept that meaning and historical agency are the sole property of the oppressor. Educators within the dominant culture and class fractions often characterize the oppressed as marginal, pathological, and helpless. In the banking model, knowledge is taken to be a gift that is bestowed upon the student by the teacher. Freire viewed this false generosity on the part of the oppressor - which ostensibly aims to incorporate and improve the oppressed - as a crucial means of domination by the capitalist class. The indispensable soil of good teaching consists of creating the pedagogical conditions for genuine dialogue, which maintains that teachers should not impose their views on students, but neither should they camouflage them nor drain them of political and ethical import.

Problem-posing method. Against the banking model, Freire proposed a dialogical problem-posing method of education. In this model, the teacher and student become co-investigators of knowledge and of the world. Instead of suggesting to students that their situation in society has been transcendentally fixed by nature or reason, as the banking model does, Freire's problem-posing education invites the oppressed to explore their reality as a "problem" to be transformed. The content of this education cannot be determined necessarily in advance, through the expertise of the educator, but must instead arise from the lived experiences or reality of the students. It is not the task of the educator to provide the answer to the problems that these situations present, but to help students to achieve a form of critical thinking (or conscientization) that will make possible an awareness of society as mutable and potentially open to transformation. Once they are able to see the world as a transformable situation, rather than an unthinkable and inescapable stasis, it becomes possible for students to imagine a new and different reality.

In order, however, to undertake this process, the oppressed must challenge their own internalization of the oppressor. The oppressed are accustomed to thinking of themselves as "less than." They have been conditioned to view as complete and human only the dominating practices of the oppressor, so that to fully become human means to simulate these practices. Against a "fear of freedom" that protects them from a cataclysmic reorganization of their being, the oppressed in dialogue engage in an existential process of dis-identifying with "the oppressor housed within." This dis-identification allows them to begin the process of imagining a new being and a new life as subjects of their own history.

Culture circle. The concrete basis for Freire's dialogical system of education is the culture circle, in which students and coordinator together discuss generative themes that have significance within the context of students' lives. These themes, which are related to nature, culture, work, and relationships, are discovered through the cooperative research of educators and students. They express, in an open rather than propagandistic fashion, the principle contradictions that confront the students in their world. These themes are then represented in the form of codifications (usually visual representations) that are taken as the basis for dialogue within the circle. As students decode these representations, they recognize them as situations in which they themselves are involved as subjects. The process of critical consciousness formation is initiated when students learn to read the codifications in their situationality, rather than simply experiencing them, and this makes possible the intervention by students in society. As the culture circle comes to recognize the need for print literacy, the visual codifications are accompanied by words to which they correspond. Students learn to read these words in the process of reading the aspects of the world with which they are linked.

Although this system of codifications has been very successful in promoting print literacy among adult students, Freire always emphasized that it should not be approached mechanically, but rather as a process of creation and awakening of consciousness. For Freire, it is a mistake to speak of reading as solely the decoding of text. Rather, reading is a process of apprehending power and causality in society and one's location in it. Awareness of the historicity of social life makes it possible for students to imagine its re-creation. Literacy is thus a "self-transformation producing a stance of intervention" (Freire 1988, p. 404). Literacy programs that appropriate parts of Freire's method while ignoring the essential politicization of the process of reading the world as a limit situation to be overcome distort and subvert the process of literacy education. For Freire, authentic education is always a "practice of freedom" rather than an alienating inculcation of skills.

Philosophy of Education

Freire's philosophy of education is not a simple method but rather an organic political consciousness. The domination of some by others must be overcome, in his view, so that the humanization of all can take place. Authoritarian forms of education, in serving to reinforce the oppressors' view of the world, and their material privilege in it, constitute an obstacle to the liberation of human beings. The means of this liberation is a praxis, or process of action and reflection, which simultaneously names reality and acts to change it. Freire criticized views that emphasized either the objective or subjective aspect of social transformation, and insisted that revolutionary change takes place precisely through the consistency of a critical commitment in both word and deed. This dialectical unity is expressed in his formulation, "To speak a true word is to transform the world" (Freire 1996, p. 68).

Freire's educational project was conceived in solidarity with anticapitalist and anti-imperialist movements throughout the world. It calls upon the more privileged educational and revolutionary leaders to commit "class suicide" and to struggle in partnership with the oppressed. Though this appeal is firmly grounded in a Marxist political analysis, which calls for the reconfiguring of systems of production and distribution, Freire rejected elitist and sectarian versions of socialism in favor of a vision of revolution from "below" based on the work of autonomous popular organizations. Not only does Freire's project involve a material reorganization of society, but a cultural reorganization as well. Given the history of European imperialism, an emancipatory education of the oppressed involves a dismantling of colonial structures and ideologies. The literacy projects he undertook in former Portuguese colonies in Africa included an emphasis on the reaffirmation of the people's indigenous cultures against their negation by the legacy of the metropolitan invaders.

Freire's work constitutes a rejection of voluntarism and idealism as well as determinism and objectivism. The originality of Freire's thought consists in his synthesis of a number of philosophical and political traditions and his application of them to the pedagogical encounter. Thus, the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave informs his vision of liberation from authoritarian forms of education; the existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Buber makes possible his description of the self-transformation of the oppressed into a space of radical intersubjectivity; the historical materialism of Karl Marx influences his conception of the historicity of social relations; his emphasis on love as a necessary precondition of authentic education has an affinity with radical Christian liberation theology; and the anti-imperialist revolutionism of Ernesto Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon undergird his notion of the "oppressor housed within" as well as his commitment to a praxis of militant anticolonialism.

Freire's pedagogy implies an important emphasis on the imagination, though this is not an aspect that has been emphasized enough in writings about him. The transformation of social conditions involves a rethinking of the world as a particular world, capable of being changed. But the reframing proposed here depends upon the power of the imagination to see outside, beyond, and against what is. More than a cognitive or emotional potential, the human imagination, in Freire's view, is capable of a radical and productive envisioning that exceeds the limits of the given. It is in this capacity that everyone's humanity consists, and for this reason it can never be the gift of the teacher to the student. Rather, educator-student and student-educator work together to mobilize the imagination in the service of creating a vision of a new society. It is here that Freire's notion of education as an ontological vocation for bringing about social justice becomes most clear. For Freire, this vocation is an endless struggle because critical awareness itself can only be a necessary precondition for it. Because liberation as a goal is always underburdened of a necessary assurance that critical awareness will propel the subject into the world of concrete praxis, the critical education must constantly be engaged in attempts to undress social structures and formations of oppression within the social universe of capital without a guarantee that such a struggle will bring about the desired results.

Criticism

Since its first enunciation, Freire's educational theory has been criticized from various quarters. Naturally, conservatives who are opposed to the political horizon of what is essentially a revolutionary project of emancipation have been quick to condemn him as demagogic and utopian. Freire has faced criticism from the left as well. Some Marxists have been suspicious of the Christian influences in his work and have accused him of idealism in his view of popular consciousness. Freire has also been criticized by feminists and others for failing to take into account the radical differences between forms of oppression, as well as their complex and contradictory instantiation in subjects. It has been pointed out that Freire's writing suffers from sexism in its language and from a patriarchal notion of revolution and subjecthood, as well as a lack of emphasis on domination based on race and ethnicity. Postmodernists have pointed to the contradiction between Freire's sense of the historicity and contingency of social formations versus his vision of liberation as a universal human vocation.

Freire was always responsive to critics, and in his later work undertook a process of self-criticism in regard to his own sexism. He also sought to develop a more nuanced view of oppression and subjectivity as relational and discursively as well as materially embedded. However, Freire was suspicious of postmodernists who felt that the Marxist legacy of class struggle was obsolete and whose antiracist and antisexist efforts at educational reform did little to alleviate - and often worked to exacerbate - existing divisions of labor based on social relations of capitalist exploitation. Freire's insights continue to be of crucial importance. In the very gesture of his turning from the vaults of official knowledge to the open space of humanity, history, and poetry - the potential space of dialogical problem-posing education - Freire points the way for teachers and others who would refuse their determination by the increasingly enveloping inhuman social order. To believe in that space when it is persistently obscured, erased, or repudiated remains the duty of truly progressive educators. Freire's work continues to be indispensable for liberatory education, and his insights remain of value to all who are committed to the struggle against oppression.

Bibliography

Darder, Antonia. 2002. Reinventing Paulo Freire. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Freire, Paulo. 1973. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Seabury.

Freire, Paulo. 1978. Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bisseau. New York: Seabury.

Freire, Paulo. 1988. "The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom and Education and Conscientizacao." In Perspectives on Literacy, ed. Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose, pp. 398 - 409. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Freire, Paulo. 1993. Pedagogy of the City. New York: Continuum.

Freire, Paulo. 1994. Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Continuum.

Freire, Paulo. 1996. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). New York: Continuum.

HOOKS, BELL. 1994. Teaching to Transgress. New York: Routledge.

Mayo, Peter. 1999. Gramsci, Freire, and Adult Education: Possibilities for Transformative Action. London: Zed Books.

McLaren, Peter. 2000. Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.

— PETER MCLAREN, NOAH DE LISSOVOY

Paulo Freire
Born	September 19, 1921(1921-09-19) Recife, Brazil
Died	May 2, 1997 (aged 75) São Paulo, Brazil
Nationality	Brazilian
Occupation	Educator, author
Known for	Theories of education

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (Recife, Brazil September 19, 1921 – São Paulo, Brazil May 2, 1997) was a Brazilian educator and influential theorist of critical pedagogy.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Recognition 3 Theoretical contributions 4 Global impact 5 Notes 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 Paulo Freire Institutes around the world 10 External links

Biography

Freire was born September 19, 1921 to a middle class family in Recife, Brazil. Freire became familiar with poverty and hunger during the 1929 Great Depression. In 1931 the family moved to the less expensive city of Jaboatão dos Guararapes, and in 1933 the father passed away. In school was became some four grades behind and his social life revolved around playing pick up football with poorer kids, from whom he learned a great deal. These experiences would shape his concerns for the poor and would help to construct his particular educational viewpoint. Eventually his family's misfortunes turned about, and their prospects improved.

Freire enrolled at Law School at the University of Recife in 1943. He also studied philosophy, more specifically phenomenology, and the psychology of language. Although admitted to the legal bar, he never actually practiced law but 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 their lives 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. He followed this with his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in Portuguese in 1968.

On the strength of reception of his work, Freire was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard University in 1969. The next year, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in both Spanish and English, vastly expanding its reach. Because of the political feud between Freire, a Christian socialist, and the successive authoritarian military dictatorships, it wasn't published in his own country of Brazil until 1974, when General Ernesto Geisel became the then dictator president beginning the process of a slow and controlled political liberalisation.

After a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, Freire moved to Geneva, Switzerland to work as a special education advisor 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. Freire married Maria Araújo Freire, who continues with her own educational work.

Freire died of heart failure on May 2, 1997.

Recognition

• King Baudouin International Development Prize 1980. Paulo Freire was the very first person to receive this prize. He was nominated for the prize by Dr. Mathew Zachariah, Professor of Education at the University of Calgary.
• Prize for Outstanding Christian Educators with his wife Elza
• UNESCO 1986 Prize for Education for Peace
• Honorary Doctorate, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1996, along with Augusto Boal, during their residency at the Second Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference in Omaha.

Theoretical contributions

"There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."

—Jane Thompson, drawing on Paulo Freire, ^[2]

Paulo Freire contributed a philosophy of education that came 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 be best 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. The basic critique was not new — 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 were strongly critical of the transmission of mere "facts" as the goal of education. Freire's work, however, updated the concept and placed it in context with current theories and practices of education, laying the foundation for what is now called 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. Freire however insists that educator and student, though sharing democratic social relations of education, are not on an equal footing, but the educator must be humble enough to be disposed to relearn that which he/she already thinks she knows, through interaction with the learner. The authority which the educator enjoys must not be allowed to degenerate into authoritarianism.

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's work has also been subject to criticism. Rich Gibson^[3] 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 V. Taylor, in his "Texts of Paulo Freire," comes close to calling Freire a plagiarist, while Gibson notes Freire borrows heavily from Hegel's "Phenomenology." Gibson's dissertation which examines Freire's theory, practice, and history in a Marxist context is the sharpest critique of Freire to date.

Global impact

Freire's major exponents in North America are Peter McLaren, Donaldo Macedo, Joe L. Kincheloe, Ira Shor, and Henry Giroux. One of McLaren's edited texts, Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, expounds upon Freire's impact in the field of critical education. McLaren has also provided a comparative study concerning Paulo Freire and the Argentinian revolutionary icon, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, a book which has recently also been translated into Italian.

In 1991, the Paulo Freire Institute was established in São Paulo to extend and elaborate upon his theories of popular education. The Institute now has projects in many countries and is currently headquartered at UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies where it actively maintains the Freire archives. The director is Dr. Carlos Torres, a UCLA professor and author of Freirean books including La praxis educativa de Paulo Freire (1978).

The Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference is held each spring and is guided by the theory and practice of these two liberatory practitioners. The Conference networks a wide variety of people with interests in Freire and Augusto Boal—liberatory education and theatre, community organizing, community-based analysis, TIE, race/gender/class/sexual orientation/geography analysis, performance/performance art, comparative education models, etc.

The Paulo and Nita Freire Project for International Critical Pedagogy has been founded at McGill University. Here Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg have worked to create a dialogical forum for critical scholars around the world to promote research and re-create a Freirean pedagogy in a multinational domain.

Paulo Freire's work also had a profound impact on Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa^{[citation needed]}.

At his death, Freire was working on a book of Ecopedagogy, a platform of work carried on by many of the Freire Institutes and Freirean Associations around the world today. It has been influential in helping to develop planetary education projects such as the Earth Charter as well as countless international grassroots campaigns per the spirit of Freirean popular education generally.

Notes

1. ^ Peter Lownd, "Freire's Life and Work", Paulo Freire Institute.
2. ^ Gramsci, Freire, and Adult Education: Possibilities for Transformative Action, by Peter Mayo, Macmillan, 1999, ISBN 1856496147, pg 5
3. ^ Rich Gibson, "Education Page For a Democratic Society"

See also

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Paulo Freire

• Adult literacy
• Adult education
• Conscientization
• Critical consciousness
• Critical pedagogy
• Ecopedagogy
• Marxist Humanism
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Popular education
• Praxis
• Praxis intervention
• Raya Dunayevskaya
• Social Reconstructionism
• Teaching for social justice
• Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed
• Steve Biko
• Frantz Fanon
• Lewis Gordon
• Mahatma Gandhi
• Nigel Gibson

References

• Mann, Bernhard, The Pedagogical and Political Concepts of Mahatma Gandhi and Paulo Freire. In: Claußen, B. (Ed.) International Studies in Political Socialization and Education. Bd. 8. Hamburg 1996. ISBN 3-926952-97-0
• Aronowitz, Stanley (1993). Paulo Freire's radical democratic humanism. In P. McLaren & P. Leonard. (Eds.), Paulo Freire: A critical encounter (pp. 9-)
• Kincheloe, Joe L. (2008). Critical Pedagogy. 2nd Ed. New York: Peter Lang.

Further reading

• Allman, Paula (1999), Revolutionary Social Transformation. Democratic Hopes, Political Possibilities and Critical Education, Westport, Connecticut and London: Bergin and Garvey.
• Coben, Diana (1998), Radical heroes. Gramsci, Freire and the Politics of Adult Education, New York: Garland Press.
• Darder, Antonia (2002), Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, Boulder: Westview.
• Elias, John (1994), Paulo Freire: Pedagogue of Liberation, Florida: Krieger.
• Gadotti, Moacir (1994), Reading Paulo Freire. His Life and Work, Albany: SUNY Press.
• McLaren, Peter (2000) Che Guevara, Paulo Freire and the Pedagogy of Revolution, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
• McLaren, Peter and Leonard, Peter (eds.) (1993), Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, London and New York: Routledge.
• McLaren, Peter and Lankshear, Colin (eds.) (1994), Politics of Liberation. Paths from Freire, London and New York: Routledge.
• Mayo, Peter (1999), Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education. Possibilities for Transformative Action, London and New York: Zed Books.
• Mayo,Peter (2004, 2008), Liberating Praxis. Paulo Freire's Legacy for Radical Education and Politics, Westport, Connecticut: Praeger; Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense.
• Morrow, Raymond A. and Torres, Carlos .A. (2002), Reading Freire and Habermas. Critical pedagogy and Transformative Social Change, New York and London: Teachers College Press.
• O’Cadiz, Maria del Pilar, Wong, Pia L. and Torres, Carlos A. (1997), Education and Democracy. Paulo Freire, Social Movements and Educational Reform in São Paulo, Boulder: Westview Press.
• Roberts, Peter (2000), Education, Literacy, and Humanization Exploring the Work of Paulo Freire, Westport, Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey.
• Rossatto, Cesar A. (2005), Engaging Paulo Freire's Pedagogy Of Possibility: From Blind To Transformative Optimism, Lanham: Rowman & Littleield.
• Taylor, Paul V. (1993), The Texts of Paulo Freire, Buckingham: Open University Press.
• Torres, Carlos A and Noguera, Pedro (eds.) (2008), Social Justice Education For Teachers. Paulo Freire and the Possible Dream, Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense.

Paulo Freire Institutes around the world

• The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy
• The Paulo Freire Institute at UCLA
• The Paulo Freire Institute of South Africa
• Instituto Paulo Freire of Spain
• Instituto Paulo Freire, Brasil
• Paulo Freire Institute, Malta
• Paulo Freire Research Center, Finland

External links

• Digital Library Paulo Freire(Pt-Br)
• Pedagogy of the Oppressor, City Journal, Spring 2009
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
• PopEd Toolkit - Exercises/Links Inspired by Freire's Work
• Interview with Maria Araújo Freire on her marriage to Paulo Freire
• Interview excerpt with Paulo Freire on liberation theology and Marx (YouTube, subtitled in English)
• A dialogue with Paulo Freire and Ira Shor (1988) [1]

v • d • e Issues in Freirian Pedagogy Anti-oppressive education • Banking • Conscientization • Critical consciousness • Critical pedagogy • Pedagogy of the Oppressed • Popular education • Praxis • Teaching for social justice • Youth empowerment

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