Paulo Freire – 1921-1997
Biographical Profile
Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed is
currently one of the most quoted educational texts (especially in Latin
America, Africa and Asia). Freire was able to draw upon, and weave together,
a number of strands of! thinking about educational practice and liberation.
He was born on September 19, 1921 in Recife, a port city of northeastern Brazil. Freire said of his parents that it was they who taught him at an early age to prize dialogue and to respect the choices of others-key elements in his understanding of adult education. His parents were middle class but suffered financial reverses so severe during the Great Depression that Freire learned what it is to go hungry. It was in childhood that he determined to dedicate his life to the struggle against poverty and class oppression.
In 1944, Freire married Elza Maia Costa Oliveira of Recife, a grade school teacher who eventually bore three daughters and two sons. As a parent, Paulo's interest in theories of education began to grow, leading him to do more extensive reading in education, philosophy, and the sociology of education than in law. In fact after passing the bar he quickly abandoned law as a means of earning a living in order to go to work as welfare official and later as director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the State of Pernambuco.
His experiences during those years of public service brought him into direct contact with the ur! ban poor. The educational and organizational assignments he undertook there led him to begin to formulate a means of communicating with the dispossessed that would later develop into his dialogical method for adult education. His involvement in adult education also included directing seminars and teaching courses in the history and philosophy of education at the University of Recife, where he was awarded a doctoral degree in 1959.
The secret of this success is found in the resistance of Freire and his co-workers to merely teaching the instrumental and decontextualized skills of reading and writing (“banking education”), but rather by presenting participation!
in the political process through knowledge of reading and writing as a desirable and attainable goal for all Brazilians.
Freire won the attention of the poor and awakened their hope that they could start to have a say in the day-to-day decisions that affected their lives in the Brazilian countryside. Peasant passivity and fatalism waned as literacy became attainable and valued. Freire's methods were incontestably politicizing and, in the eyes of the Brazilian military and land-owners anxious to stave off land reform, radical.Eventually, the military overthrew the reform-minded Goulart regime in Brazil in April of 1964. All progressive movements were suppressed and Freire was thrown into jail for his "subversive" activities. He spent a total of seventy days there where he was repeatedly questioned and accused. In prison he began his first major educational !
work, Education as the Practice of Freedom. This book, an an!
alysis of Paulo's failure to effect change in Brazil, had to be completed in Chile, because Freire was sent into exile.
After his expulsion from Brazil, Freire worked in Chile for five years with the adult education programs of the Eduardo Frei government headed by Waldemar Cortes who attracted international attention and UNESCO acknowledgment that Chile was one of the five nations of the world which had best succeeded in overcoming illiteracy.The mid-to-late 1960s were a period of broad social change in the United States when opposition to the country's involvement in Southeast Asia brought police and militias onto university campuses. Racial unrest had, since 1965, flared into violence on the streets of American cities. Minority spokespersons and war protesters were publishing and teaching, and they influenced Freire profoundly. His reading of the America!
n scene was an awakening to him because he found that repression and exclusion of the powerless from economic and political life was not limited to third world countries and cultures of dependence. He extended his definition of the third world from a geographical concern to a political concept, and the theme of violence became a greater preoccupation in his writings from that time on.
Toward the end of the 1960's, Freire's work brought him into contact with a new culture that changed his thought significantly. In 1969, at the invitation of Harvard University Freire left Latin America to come to the United States where he taught as Visiting Professor at Harvard's Center for Studies in Education and Development and was also Fellow at the Center for the Study of Development and Social Change. It is during this period that Freire wrote his famous work, Pedagogy of t!
he Oppressed, which was first published in 1972!
. Education is to be the path to permanent liberation.
