Introducing Freire

A guide for students, teachers and practitioners

Sandra Smidt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317694052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The famous Brazilian educator Paulo Freire has influenced educators, teachers and students in a broad tapestry of contexts and countries, as he challenged conventional thinking on how teachers ought to teach and learners ought to learn. By making his ideas accessible and relevant, this insightful and thought-provoking text draws out the relevance and topicality of Freire's work and applies this to a wide range of educational settings, from adult education, through schools, to early years settings.

Themes covered include:

• the lasting impact of illiteracy;
• the benefits and potential in becoming literate;
• literacy, language and power;
• the differences between banking and dialogic education;
• the social and political nature of learning.
• what kind of teaching and learning do we want?

Using a variety of practical examples and case studies, Introducing Freire is an essential guide to the work of one of the most significant figures in education in the last century. Fascinating and accessible, this book is for anyone interested in teaching and learning, poverty and affluence, power and powerlessness, and society and change.

Chapter 1
The life and times of Paulo Freire

In this chapter we look at the life of Paulo Freire and in doing that examine the events and people who influenced his thinking. Since he spent much of his life in exile we will move from Brazil to Chile to the United States of America to Switzerland and then back to Brazil after roughly seventeen years in exile.

The early years

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire, the youngest of the four children in the family, was born in the port of Recife, the capital of Pernambuco province in the northwest of Brazil in September 1921. His father, Joaquin Temistocles Freire, was an officer serving in the military police; his mother was Edeltrudes Neves Freire (referred to as Tudinha in some texts). She was a seamstress and ten years younger than her husband. The family was educated and described as being middle class. Freire himself said that his parents created a harmonious home atmosphere where it was possible to discuss and argue, show emotions and, as a Catholic family, live a life of religious belief. Paulo was very close to both his parents. His mother is said to have had enormous faith in him and in his intellect. His father would sing him to sleep and read him children’s storybooks. With a real interest in his children’s education he paved the way for Freire’s later success.

Moacir Gadotti, in his idiosyncratic biography of Freire said that ‘his chalk was the twigs of the mango tree in whose shade he learned to read, and his blackboard was the ground. This formation and information was all given informally, before school. It was a living, free, unpretentious pre-school’ (1994: 2). It was in this way that all four children were initiated into the world of reading by both parents: the mother teaching them to read by scratching letters and drawing pictures in the dusty ground of the yard of their house in the Yellow House District and the father telling stories and singing songs.

His first school was small and private and he could already write and copy and say the alphabet when he arrived there. What he never forgot was what he called ‘making sentences’. This involved him in writing two or three words and then talking about them. The teacher clearly believed that hearing the words you have written said aloud and giving their meaning was a tool to becoming able to write expressively. You will see the significance of this later in the book. At this small school he was also introduced to many aspects of grammar which fascinated and intrigued him. His interest in linguistics and the rule-bound nature of language continued to fascinate him throughout his life. Until the year 1928 the family lived this pleasant middle-class life in their old house surrounded by trees and lush vegetation.

During the economic crisis of 1928–32, the Freire parents tried to uphold the standards of their middle-class life, but it became increasingly difficult for them to feed and clothe the family. When Paulo was ten years old they made the decision to move to the neighbouring city of Jaboatão, where life was less expensive. Here the family, like most others, experienced poverty with all its effects. Paulo soon became aware of the nature of the real world around him, encountering and befriending children living in extreme poverty. His own hunger pangs together with the other things he witnessed laid the foundations for his lifelong struggle against poverty and oppression. Tragically, two years after the move Joaquin died. Paulo was only thirteen years old at the time. With the trauma of moving home, experiencing poverty and the loss of his father he effectively lost two years of secondary schooling. But it seems that this was also a formative time. In her notes to Freire’s Pedagogy of Hope, his second wife, Ana Maria, said:

It was in Jaboatão where he lived from the age of eleven to twenty, that Paulo became acquainted with a world of difficulty, in which one lived on scant financial resources. There were difficulties arising from his mother’s untimely widowhood, when society was much less open to a woman working outside the home than it is today. And there were the difficulties he felt personally, ‘skinny, bony little kid’ that he was, in fending off the hostility of a world that had such little sympathy for the weak and impoverished.

But it was also in Jaboatão that he learned to play soccer … swam in the Jaboatão River, where he watched poor women, squatting and washing and beating against the rocks either their own families’ clothes or those of more wealthy families, for whom they worked. It was there, again, that he learned to sing and whistle … and to dialogue in his ‘circle of friends’ … that he learned and assimilated – with a passion! – his studies of both the popular and the cultivated syntax of the Portuguese language. (Ana Maria Araujo Freire in Freire 2009: 195)

It is reported by his few biographers that he was seen, at that time, as a failing student, with some of his teachers thinking that he had long-term developmental problems. In effect his problems with formal learning arose out of the traumas and crises he and his family endured in those years. So it is important here to reflect more deeply on the impact on him of moving from relative comfort and wealth at home to experiencing hunger, deprivation and educational failure. You will almost certainly know that what he is now famous for, throughout the world, is his outrage at how the poor are oppressed and kept silent so that the status quo is maintained. Drawn so directly from his own experience his working life was committed to understanding just what it was within educational establishments – classrooms, schools, universities and colleges – that ensured that the poor were kept ignorant, malleable and passive.

Brazil and beyond: into exile

After the death of her husband, Paulo’s mother travelled daily from Jaboatão to Recife to try and get a scholarship for her beloved son. Early in 1937 she was successful and Paulo was enrolled at the prestigious private school Ginasio Oswaldo Cruz and became a highly successful pupil there. He later returned to the school as a teacher of Portuguese. When the economic crisis abated the family returned to its previous middle-class status. Paulo finished secondary schooling and went on to study law and philosophy at the University of Pernambuco.

You might want to know that Brazil has had, over time, the largest slave population in the world, substantially larger than that of the United States. The Portuguese who settled Brazil needed labour to work the large estates and mines in their new colony. They turned to slavery which became central to the colonial economy. It was particularly important in the mining and sugar cane sectors. It is concerning to note that today many employers in the country still subject employees to slave-like conditions. The government has what they call a “dirty list” – a list of those employers prepared to pay slave wages and impose terrible conditions on workers. The list was started in 2005 and is updated twice a year. There are now something like 294 employers, from big to small who happily uphold this practice. Brazil’s legal category of what constitutes slave-like labour includes cases where a person may be subjected to exhausting hours, or forbidden to leave because of a debt with the employer and earns less than the minimum wage. Many cases of slave-like labour are found in rural areas where sugar cane and other crops are grown. Inspectors have also found workers submitted to slave-like conditions in the textile and clothing sector. It is certain that Freire encountered people living and working in slave-like conditions.

We come now to evidence of some of those who were influencing his thinking. Two of these were the lawyer and philosopher Rui Barbosa and the physician Carneiro Ribeiro, both of whom were celebrated Brazilian intellectuals. Barbosa was a political activist as well as a lawyer and gave his first public speech on the abolition of slavery when he was a mere nineteen-year-old. For the rest of his life he remained an uncompromising defender of civil liberties. Slavery in Brazil was only officially abolished in 1888. Part of Barbosa’s legacy to history is that he authorised the destruction of most government records relating to slavery because he wanted to remove the stain of slavery from the communal memory. Less is known about Carneiro Ribeiro but we do know that he was a physician, a teacher and a linguist and we know that he wrote an important book on the Portuguese language, called Serões Gramaticais, sometimes translated as Fireside Grammar, or Evening Grammar. What is significant for us is that Ribeiro was working in a sociolinguistic framework, analysing how the Portuguese language developed over time and how important historical, social, political, economic and educational influences were and still are. As we will see this formed an essential grounding for what Freire later set out to do. As we look at some of the ways in which Freire worked in the early years to address the issues of illiteracy you will be able to trace his interest in grammatical features like the syllables that make up words to this influence.

Between 1944–5 Freire taught Portuguese language in Brazilian secondary schools: his law degree had qualified him to become a teacher. At the same time he worked as a trade union lawyer and lectured on legal matters to groups of workers in the suburbs of Recife. He married a primary school teacher called Elza Maria Oliveira who was Catholic like him. They had five children, two boys and three girls. In 1959 he completed his doctoral thesis in the field for which he was to become famous – that of adult illiteracy. He accepted a professorship in history and philosophy at the University of Recife, which later made him the director of their literacy outreach programme. After the death of his first wife he had fallen in love with and married another educator and she remained both his partner and a powerful influence throughout her life. Through talking to her he became more and more interested in how people learn and how they should be taught.

He became involved with the state-run trades unions and through this was appointed director of the Department of Education and Culture in the Social Service for Industry (or SESI) in 1954.

The intersection between the work of Paulo Freire and the world of early childhood development

It is here that we find the first overlap between the work for which he is famous – adult literacy – and the learning and development of young children. His time with SESI involved him going into their schools and kindergartens to consider how the earliest years of education operated and it was here that he started to think about and discuss the education of young children. One of the things he tried to do was to involve the students themselves and their parents and family members together talking about educational and social issues. He believed that issues affecting the lives of people like malnutrition or child labour could only be dealt with and possibly resolved with the participation of parents and community members. This is an example of his sociocultural approach. The famous Italian educationalist Loris Malaguzzi qualified as a teacher at the end of the Second World War and, determined to improve life chances for the children of the poor, he soon recognised the importance of inviting parents to participate in the design of educational policies. He realised that it was essential to take account of where the children lived, in what conditions and with access to what facilities. He was face to face with the issues of poverty, illiteracy, alienation and apathy. Malaguzzi was successful in gaining the support of the local authority. By contrast SESI did not want the involvement of students and their families in their facilities. Nor were they prepared to listen to Freire’s words on the importance of dialogue, respect, democratisation, participation and self-government. He resigned, probably within moments of being dismissed.

Back in Recife he started to look at the issue of adult illiteracy among the poor people of that city and as he did so he became more and more politicised. Between 1947 and 1959, his involvement with adult literacy intensified. He became increasingly dissatisfied with the traditional methods for dealing with illiteracy that seemed regularly to operate on the basis of an authoritarian relationship between teacher and pupil (Elias 1994: 3). In effect the die was cast. The work he began when analysing how illiterate adults were taught was the start of his long journey into the world of pedagogy – a journey we will follow in the chapters to come. But now we move on to the story of his life as his time in Brazil came to an ugly end.

Going into exile

On 1 April 1963 there was a military coup in Brazil to remove the leftist President Goulart. He had an affinity for Marxist ideals and was concerned about the plight of the enormous number of destitute people in the countryside and some of the cities. He had started to initiate some social reforms focusing specifically on the poorest people in northeast Brazil. Soon after the coup Freire was arrested and held without charge for seventy-five days. On his release he was offered exile and fearing a life under the extreme right-wing government of the day he made the decision to go. Here is what he said:

No one goes anywhere alone, least of all into exile – even those who arrive physically alone, unaccompanied by family, spouse, children, parent or siblings. No one leaves his or her world without having been transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in a time of misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence possibly now forgotten by the one who said it. (Freire 2009: 23)

This gives you a taste of his writing. It is almost poetic and creates a vivid sense of what he felt he had lost. You will appreciate that he wrote in Portuguese so we always – or nearly always – read him in translation. But perhaps this will give you the flavour of his style and invite you to read some of his books, many of which are wonderful.

He went first to the embassy in La Paz in Bolivia, waiting there for more than a month for the safe-conduct pass without which he could not leave. That first night, before he was overcome with altitude sickness, he longed for home and began to think about how this terrible longing could turn into him remembering, falsely, all that was good and nothing of what he had been fighting for in Brazil. He arrived in Chile in November of 1964, first in Arica and then on to Santiago and so great was his relief at being able to breathe normally and walk with ease after the difficulties he had endured at high altitude that he wrote that he felt human again. In his own words ‘Long live oxygen!’ (2009: 26).

A few days after arriving in Chile he began working as consultant for an economist and it was only in mid January of 1965 that he was reunited with his wife and children. Faced with the enormous task of all of them adapting to a new country and culture he nonetheless wrote that Chile received them ‘in such a way that the foreignness was turning into comradeship, friendship, siblingship. Homesick as we were for Brazil, we had a sudden special place in our hearts for Chile, which taught us Latin America in a way we had never imagined it’ (Freire 2009: 26). Chile, at that time, was a place of hope and optimism. According to Freire, the new Christian Democratic government was a government of neither extreme right nor left. Everyone appeared to have great faith in the armed forces. But their optimism and belief in the army was severely challenged as all who followed the history of the region know. Freire stayed in Santiago until 1969 and during that time he became a consultant to UNESCO. That was the beginning of a long and powerful link in his life.

A digression into the story of the Popular Unity (UP) government

Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity government came to power at the end of 1970. They were a coalition of forces on the left, seeking to put in place what they called an “anti-imperialist” programme of building socialism within a democratic and constitutional framework. Their aims were laudable and had, at their centre, a deep concern for the poor and dispossessed. At the time Chile was in the midst of an economic crisis and it soon became clear...