Paulo Freire

Born: Recife, Brazil - 19 September, 1921
Died: São Paulo, Brazil - 2 May 1997

One of the most significant educators in the world during the last part of the 20th century.  His work, however, is not central to the curricula of many schools of education whose responsibility is to prepare the next generation of teachers. 

Friere believed the true nature of dialogue to be a process of learning and knowing.  To participate rigorously in a dialogue as a process of learning and knowing, students must be able to transform their lived experiences into knowledge and to use the already acquired knowledge as a process to unveil new knowledge.

"We need to say no to the neoliberal fatalism that we are witnessing at the end of this century, informed by the ethics of the market, an ethics in which a minority makes most profits against the lives of the majority.  In other words, those who cannot compete, die.  This is a perverse ethics that, in fact, lacks ethics.  I insist on saying that I continue to be human... I would then remain the last educator in the world to say no:  I do not accept... history as determinism.  I embrace history as possibility [where] we can demystify the evil in this perverse fatalism that characterizes the neoliberal discourse in the end of this century."

Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Ideology Matters.

The term "pedagogy" has Greek roots, meaning "to lead a child" (from pais: child and ago: lead).  Thus the term "pedagogy" illustrates, education is inherently directive and must always be transformative.

Donaldo Macedo, Introduction to Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed deals with significant questions of cultural identity.  It provides language to critically understand the tensions, contradictions, fears, doubts, hopes, and "deferred" dream that are part and parcel of living a borrowed and colonized cultural existence.  Donald Macedo says in the introduction that it "gave me the inner strength to begin the arduous process of transcending a colonial existence that is almost culturally schizophrenic: being present and yet not visible, being visible and yet not present".

 

The Banking Concept of Education

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 vessel to be filled by the teacher. He notes that "it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power" (Freire, 1970, p. 77).  This led to Freire's democratic proposals of problem-posing education where "men and women develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation."

Subordination through an imposed assimilation policy. 

In our so-called open societies his work suffers from a more sophisticated form of censorship: omission.

Until his death, Freire courageously denounced the neoliberal position that promotes the false notion of the end of history and the end of class.  He argued that although one cannot reduce everything to class, class remains an important factor in our understanding of multiple forms of oppression.  Freire recounted how a family in Northeast Brazil scavenged a landfill and take "pieces of an amputated human breast with which they prepared their Sunday lunch."

Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Ideology Matters.

Paulo Freire - A Curious Being

Seeing Through Paulo's Glasses: Political Clarity, Courage and Humility

Noam Chomsky (2013) Pedagogy of the Oppressed