Paulo Freire facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Paulo Freire
Freire in 1977
Born	Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921-09-19)19 September 1921 Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil
Died	2 May 1997(1997-05-02) (aged 75) São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Political party	Workers' Party
Spouse(s)	Elza Freire ​ ​ (m. 1944; died 1986)​ Ana Maria Araújo Freire ​ (m. 1988)​
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Recife
Influences	Zevedei Barbu John Dewey Frantz Fanon Erich Fromm Antonio Gramsci Saul Alinsky Gustavo Gutiérrez G. W. F. Hegel Tan Malaka Herbert Marcuse Jacques Maritain Emmanuel Mounier Karl Marx Sigmund Freud Charles Darwin Friedrich Nietzsche Albert Memmi Álvaro Vieira Pinto Jean-Paul Sartre Anísio Teixeira Miguel de Unamuno Simone Weil
Academic work
Discipline	Pedagogy philosophy
School or tradition	Christian socialism critical pedagogy
Doctoral students	Mario Sergio Cortella
Notable works	Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968)
Notable ideas	Banking model of education critical consciousness
Influenced	Fazle Hasan Abed Marcella Althaus-Reid Stanley Aronowitz Christine Ballengee-Morris Ana Mae Barbosa [es; pt] Steve Biko Augusto Boal Leonardo Boff Francisco Brennand Fernando Cardenal Enrique Martinez Celaya Vicky Colbert James H. Cone Antonia Darder Mestre Ferradura Ramón Flecha Moacir Gadotti [pt] Henry Giroux Cees Hamelink bell hooks Didacus Jules Karen Keifer-Boyd Joe L. Kincheloe James D. Kirylo Jonathan Kozol Khen Lampert Colin Lankshear Allan Luke Donaldo Macedo Ignacio Martín-Baró Peter Mayo Alan McCombes Peter McLaren Jack Mezirow Oscar Mogollon G. Nammalvar Gino Piccio Majid Rahnema Howard Richards Marshall Rosenberg Ira Shor Shirley R. Steinberg Carlos Alberto Torres María Guillermina Valdes Villalva Cornel West

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (19 September 1921 – 2 May 1997) was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy. His influential work Pedagogy of the Oppressed is generally considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement, and was the third most cited book in the social sciences as of 2016^[update] according to Google Scholar.

Biography

Freire was born on 19 September 1921 to a middle-class family in Recife, the capital of the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. He became familiar with poverty and hunger from an early age as a result of the Great Depression. In 1931 his family moved to the more affordable city of Jaboatão dos Guararapes, 18 km west of Recife. His father died on 31 October 1934.

During his childhood and adolescence, Freire ended up four grades behind, and his social life revolved around playing pick-up football with other poor children, from whom he claims to have learned a great deal. These experiences would shape his concerns for the poor and would help 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 between social class and knowledge". Eventually, his family's misfortunes turned around and their prospects improved.

Freire enrolled in 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 practiced law and instead worked as a secondary school Portuguese teacher. In 1944, he married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, a fellow teacher. The two worked together and had five children.

In 1946, Freire was appointed director of the Pernambuco Department of Education and Culture. Working primarily among the illiterate poor, Freire began to develop an educational praxis that would have an influence on the liberation theology movement of the 1970s. In 1940s Brazil, literacy was a requirement for voting in presidential elections.

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, 300 sugarcane harvesters 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.

The 1964 Brazilian coup d'état put an end to Freire's literacy effort, as the ruling military junta did not endorse it. Freire was subsequently 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 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. In 1967, Freire published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom. He followed it up with his most famous work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which was first published in 1968.

After a positive international 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 Spanish and English, vastly expanding its reach. Because of political feuds between Freire, a Christian socialist, and Brazil's successive right-wing authoritarian military governments, the book went unpublished in Brazil until 1974, when, starting with the presidency of Ernesto Geisel, the military junta started a process of slow and controlled political liberalisation.

Following a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, Freire moved to Geneva 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 several former Portuguese colonies in Africa, particularly Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique.

In 1979, he first visited Brazil after more than a decade of exile, eventually moving back in 1980. Freire joined the Workers' Party (PT) in São Paulo and acted as a supervisor for its adult literacy project from 1980 to 1986. When the Workers' Party won the 1988 São Paulo mayoral elections in 1988, Freire was appointed municipal Secretary of Education.

Freire died of heart failure on 2 May 1997, in São Paulo.

Pedagogy

Paulo Freire contributed a philosophy of education which blended classical approaches stemming from Plato and modern Marxist, post-Marxist, and anti-colonialist thinkers. His Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) can be read as an extension of, or reply to, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961), 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 colonizing culture.

In Pedagogy 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.

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".

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 of critical 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.

Criticism of the "banking model" of education

In terms of pedagogy, Freire is best known for his attack on 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." The basic critique was not entirely novel, and paralleled Jean-Jacques Rousseau's conception of children as active learners, as opposed to a tabula rasa view, more akin to the banking model. John Dewey was also strongly critical of the transmission of mere facts as the goal of education. Dewey often described education as a mechanism for social 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". Freire's work revived this view and placed it in context with contemporary theories and practices of education, laying the foundation for what would later be termed critical pedagogy.

Culture of silence

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 a critical consciousness in order to recognize that this culture of silence is created to oppress. 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."

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 a language of critique."

See also

In Spanish: Paulo Freire para niños