Freire was born on 19 September 1921 to a middle-class family inRecife, the State Capital ofPernambuco in theBrazilian Northeast. He became familiar with poverty and hunger from an early age partly due to the effects of theGreat Depression. In 1931, Freire moved with his family toJaboatão dos Guararapes, located 18 kilometers south of the Historic Center of Recife. His father died on 31 October 1934.[42]
During his childhood and adolescence, Freire ended up four grades behind, and his social life revolved around playingpick-upfootball with other poor children, from whom he claims to have learned a great deal. These experiences shaped his concerns for the poor and helped to construct his particular educational viewpoint. Freire stated that poverty and hunger severely affected his ability to learn. These experiences influenced his decision to dedicate his life to improving the lives of the poor: "I didn't understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn't dumb. It wasn't lack of interest. My social condition didn't allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship betweensocial class and knowledge".[43] Eventually, his family's misfortunes turned around and their prospects improved.[43]
Freire enrolled inlaw school at theUniversity of Recife in 1943. He also studied philosophy, more specificallyphenomenology, and thepsychology of language. Although admitted to the legal bar, he never practiced law and instead worked as asecondary schoolPortuguese teacher. In 1944, he married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, a fellow teacher. The two worked together and had five children.[44]
In 1946, Freire was appointed director of thePernambuco Department of Education and Culture. Working primarily among the illiterate poor, Freire began to develop an educationalpraxis that had an influence on theliberation theology movement of the 1970s. In 1940s Brazil,literacy was a requirement for voting in presidential elections.[45][46]
Freire in 1963
In 1961, he was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension at the University of Recife. In 1962, he had the first opportunity for large-scale application of his theories, when, in an experiment, 300sugarcane harvesters were taught to read and write in just 45 days. In response to this experiment, theBrazilian government approved the creation of thousands of cultural circles across the country.[47]
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.
— Richard Shaull, introduction to the 13th edition ofPedagogy of the Oppressed
InPedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire, reprising the oppressors–oppressed distinction, applies the distinction to education, championing that education should allow the oppressed to regain their sense of humanity, in turn overcoming their condition. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that for this to occur, the oppressed individual must play a role in their liberation.[citation needed]
No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.[49]
Likewise, oppressors must be willing to rethink their way of life and to examine their own role in oppression if true liberation is to occur: "Those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly".[50]
Freire believed education could not be divorced from politics; the act of teaching and learning are considered political acts in and of themselves. Freire defined this connection as a main tenet ofcritical pedagogy. Teachers and students must be made aware of the politics that surround education. The way students are taught and what they are taught serves a political agenda. Teachers, themselves, have political notions they bring into the classroom.[51] Freire believed that
Education makes sense because women and men learn that through learning they can make and remake themselves, because women and men are able to take responsibility for themselves as beings capable of knowing—of knowing that they know and knowing that they don't.[52]
In terms of pedagogy, Freire is best known for his criticism of what he called the "banking" concept of education, in which students are viewed as empty accounts to be filled by teachers. He notes that "it transforms students into receiving objects [and] attempts to control thinking and action, lead[ing] men and women to adjust to the world, inhibit[ing] their creative power."[53] The basic critique was not entirely novel, and paralleledJean-Jacques Rousseau's conception of children asactive learners, as opposed to atabula rasa view, more akin to the banking model.[54]John Dewey was also strongly critical of the transmission of mere facts as the goal of education. Dewey often described education as a mechanism forsocial change, stating that "education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction".[55] Freire's work revived this view and placed it in context with contemporary theories and practices of education, laying the foundation for what was later termedcritical pedagogy.[citation needed]
According to Freire, unequal social relations create a "culture of silence" that instills the oppressed with a negative, passive and suppressed self-image; learners must, then, develop acritical consciousness in order to recognize that this culture of silence is created to oppress.[56] A culture of silence can also cause the "dominated individuals [to] lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture."[57]
He considers social, race and class dynamics to be interlaced into the conventional education system, through which this culture of silence eliminates the "paths of thought that lead to alanguage of critique."[58]
Since the publication of the English-language edition in 1970,Pedagogy of the Oppressed has had a large impact ineducation andpedagogy worldwide,[59] especially as a defining work ofcritical pedagogy. According to Israeli writer andeducation reform theoristSol Stern, it has "achieved near-iconic status in America's teacher-training programs".[60] Connections have also been made between Freire's non-dualism theory in pedagogy and Eastern philosophical traditions such as theAdvaita Vedanta.[61]
In 1977, the Adult Learning Project, based on Freire's work, was established in theGorgie-Dalry neighborhood ofEdinburgh, Scotland.[62] This project had the participation of approximately 200 people in the first years, and had among its aims to provide affordable and relevant local learning opportunities and to build a network of local tutors.[62] In Scotland, Freire's ideas of popular education influencedactivist movements[63] not only in Edinburgh but also inGlasgow.[64]
In 1999 PAULO, a national training organisation named in honour of Freire, was established in the United Kingdom. This agency was approved by the New Labour Government to represent some 300,000 community-based education practitioners working across the UK. PAULO was given formal responsibility for setting the occupational training standards for people working in this field.[76]
In 2012, Paulo Freire Charter High School opened inNewark, New Jersey. The state closed the school in 2017 due to lagging test scores and lack of "instructional rigor."[81]
Shortly before his death, Freire was working on a book ofecopedagogy, 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 theEarth Charter as well as countless international grassroots campaigns in the spirit of Freirean popular education generally.[82]
Freirean literacy methods have been adopted throughout thedeveloping world. In the Philippines, Catholic "basal Christian communities" adopted Freire's methods incommunity education. Papua New Guinea, Freirean literacy methods were used as part of the World Bank-funded Southern Highlands Rural Development Program's Literacy Campaign. Freirean approaches also lie at the heart of the "Dragon Dreaming" approach to community programs that have spread to 20 countries by 2014.[83]
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King Baudouin International Development Prize 1980: Paulo Freire was the first person to receive this prize. He was nominated by Mathew Zachariah, Professor of Education at the University of Calgary.
Prize for Outstanding Christian Educators, with his wife Elza
Honorary Doctorate, theUniversity of Nebraska at Omaha, 1996, along with Augusto Boal, during their residency at the Second Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference in Omaha.
^abStevens, Christy."Paulo Freire".Critical Pedagogy on the Web. Iowa City,IO: University of Iowa. Archived fromthe original on 6 February 2012. Retrieved20 September 2020.
^"Paulo Freire". Education.miami.edu. Archived fromthe original on 26 March 2013. Retrieved12 November 2012.
^Giroux, Henry A. (2001). "Culture, Power and Transformation in the Work of Paulo Freire". In Schultz, Fred (ed.).Sources: Notable Selections in Education Selections in Education (3rd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Dushkin. p. 80. Cited inCortez, John."Culture, Power and Transformation in the Work of Paulo Freire, by Henry A. Giroux"(PDF). New York: Fordham University. p. 5. Archived fromthe original(PDF) on 24 October 2020. Retrieved18 September 2020.
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