Literacy

Reading the Word and the World

Paulo Freire, Donaldo Macedo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135784850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Freire and Macedo analyse the connection between literacy and politics according to whether it produces existing social relations, or introduces a new set of cultural practices that promote democratic and emancipatory change.

1

The Importance of the Act of Reading¹

 

In attempting to write about the importance of reading, I must say something about my preparation for being here today, something about the process of writing this book, which involved a critical understanding of the act of reading. Reading does not consist merely of decoding the written word or language; rather, it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world. Language and reality are dynamically interconnected. The understanding attained by critical reading of a text implies perceiving the relationship between text and context.

As I began writing about the importance of the act of reading, I felt myself drawn enthusiastically to rereading essential moments in my own practice of reading, the memory of which I retained from the most remote experiences of childhood, from adolescence, from young manhood, when a critical understanding of the act of reading took shape in me. In writing this book, I put objective distance between myself and the different moments at which the act of reading occurred in my experience: first, reading the world, the tiny world in which I moved; afterward, reading the word, not always the word-world in the course of my schooling.

Recapturing distant childhood as far back as I can trust my memory, trying to understand my act of reading the particular world in which I moved, was absolutely significant for me. Surrendering myself to this effort, I re-created and relived in the text I was writing the experiences I lived at a time when I did not yet read words.

I see myself then in the average house in Recife, Brazil, where I was born, encircled by trees. Some of the trees were like persons to me, such was the intimacy between us. In their shadow I played, and in those branches low enough for me to reach I experienced the small risks that prepared me for greater risks and adventures. The old house—its bedrooms, hall, attic, terrace (the setting for my mother’s ferns), backyard—all this was my first world. In this world I crawled, gurgled, first stood up, took my first steps, said my first words. Truly, that special world presented itself to me as the arena of my perceptual activity and therefore as the world of my first reading. The texts, the words,the letters of that context were incarnated in a series of things, objects, and signs. In perceiving these I experienced myself, and the more I experienced myself, the more my perceptual capacity increased. I learned to understand things, objects, and signs through using them in relationship to my older brothers and sisters and my parents.

The texts, words, letters of that context were incarnated in the song of the birds— tanager, flycatcher, thrush—in the dance of the boughs blown by the strong winds announcing storms; in the thunder and lightening; in the rainwaters playing with geography, creating lakes, islands, rivers, streams. The texts, words, letters of that context were incarnated as well in the whistle of the wind, the clouds in the sky, the sky’s color, its movement; in the color of foliage, the shape of leaves, the fragrance of flowers (roses, jasmine); in tree trunks; in fruit rinds (the varying color tones of the same fruit at different times—the green of a mango when the fruit is first forming, the green of a mango fully formed, the greenish-yellow of the same mango ripening, the black spots of an overripe mango—the relationship among these colors, the developing fruit, its resistance to our manipulation, and its taste). It was possibly at this time, by doing it myself and seeing others do it, that I learned the meaning of the verb to squash.

Animals were equally part of that context—the same way the family cats rubbed themselves against our legs, their mewing of entreaty or anger; the ill humor of Joli, my father’s old black dog, when one of the cats came too near where he was eating what was his. In such instances, Joli’s mood was completely different from when he rather playfully chased, caught, and killed one of the many opossums responsible for the disappearance of my grandmother’s fat chickens.

Part of the context of my immediate world was also the language universe of my elders, expressing their beliefs, tastes, fears, and values which linked my world to a wider one whose existence I could not even suspect.

In the effort to recapture distant childhood, to understand my act of reading the particular world in which I moved, I re-created, relived the experiences I lived at a time when I did not yet read words. And something emerged that seems relevant to the general context of these reflections: my fear of ghosts. During my childhood, the presence of ghosts was a constant topic of grown-up conversation. Ghosts needed darkness or semidarkness in order to appear in their various forms—wailing the pain of their guilt; laughing in mockery; asking for prayers; indicating where their cask was hidden. Probably I was seven years old, the streets of the neighborhood where I was born were illuminated by gaslight. At nightfall, the elegant lamps gave themselves to the magic wand of the lamplighters. From the door of my house I used to watch the thin figure of my street’s lamplighter as he went from lamp to lamp in a rhythmic gait, the lighting taper over his shoulder. It was a fragile light, more fragile even than the light we had inside the house; the shadows overwhelmed the light more than the light dispelled the shadows.

There was no better environment for ghostly pranks than this. I remember the nights in which, enveloped by my own fears, I waited for time to pass, for the night to end, for dawn’s demilight to arrive, bringing with it the song of the morning birds. In morning’s light my night fears sharpened my percep-tion of numerous noises, which were lost in the brightness and bustle of daytime but mysteriously underscored in the night’s deep silence. As I became familiar with my world, however, as I perceived and understood it better by reading it, my terrors diminished.

It is important to add that reading my world, always basic to me, did not make me grow up prematurely, a rationalist in boy’s clothing. Exercising my boy’s curiosity did not distort it, nor did understanding my world cause me to scorn the enchanting mystery of that world. In this I was aided rather than discouraged by my parents.

My parents introduced me to reading the word at a certain moment in this rich experience of understanding my immediate world. Deciphering the word flowed naturally from reading my particular world; it was not something superimposed on it. I learned to read and write on the ground of the backyard of my house, in the shade of the mango trees, with words from my world rather than from the wider world of my parents. The earth was my blackboard, the sticks my chalk.

When I arrived at Eunice Vascancello’s private school, I was already literate. Here I would like to pay heartfelt tribute to Eunice, whose recent passing profoundly grieved me. Eunice continued and deepened my parents’ work. With her, reading the word, the phrase, and the sentence never entailed a break with reading the world. With her, reading the word meant reading the word-world.

Not long ago, with deep emotion, I visited the home where I was born. I stepped on the same ground on which I first stood up, on which I first walked, began to talk, and learned to read. It was that same world that first presented itself to my understanding through my reading it. There I saw again some of the trees of my childhood. I recognized them without difficulty. I almost embraced their thick trunks—young trunks in my childhood. Then, what I like to call a gentle or well-behaved nostalgia, emanating from the earth, the trees, the house, carefully enveloped me. I left the house content, feeling the joy of someone who has reencountered loved ones.

Continuing the effort of rereading fundamental moments of my childhood experience, of adolescence and young manhood —moments in which a critical understanding of the importance of the act of reading took shape in practice—I would like to go back to a time when I was a secondary school student. There I gained experience in the critical interpretation of texts I read in class with the Portuguese teacher’s help, which I remember to this day. Those moments did not consist of mere exercises, aimed at our simply becoming aware of the existence of the page in front of us, to be scanned, mechanically and monotonously spelled out, instead of truly read. Those moments were not reading lessons in the traditional sense, but rather moments in which texts, including that of the young teacher Jose Pessoa, were offered to us in our restless searching.

Sometime afterward, as a Portuguese teacher in my twenties, I experienced intensely the importance of the act of reading and writing—basically inseparable—with first-year high school students. I never reduced syntactical rules to diagrams for students to swallow, even rules governing prepositions after specific verbs, agreement of gender and number, contractions. On the contrary, all this was proposed to the students’ curiosity in a dynamic and living way, as objects to be discovered within the body of texts, whether the students’ own or those of established writers, and not as something stagnant whose outline I described. The students did not have to memorize the description mechanically, but rather learn its underlying significance. Only by learning the significance could they know how to memorize it, to fix it. Mechanically memorizing the description of an object does not constitute knowing the object. That is why reading a text as pure description of an object (like a syntactical rule), and undertaken to memorize the description, is neither real reading nor does it result in knowledge of the object to which the text refers.

I believe much of teachers’ insistence that students read innumerable books in one semester derives from a misunderstanding we sometimes have about reading. In my wanderings throughout the world there were not a few times when young students spoke to me about their struggles with extensive bibliographies, more to be devoured than truly read or studied, “reading lessons” in the old-fashioned sense, submitted to the students in the name of scientific training, and of which they had to give an account by means of reading summaries. In some bibliographies I even read references to specific pages in this or that chapter from such and such a book, which had to be read: “pages 15–37.”

Insistence on a quantity of reading without internalization of texts proposed for understanding rather than mechanical memorization reveals a magical view of the written word, a view that must be superseded. From another angle, the same view is found in the writer who identifies the potential quality of his work, or lack of it, with the quantity of pages he has written. Yet one of the most important documents we have—Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”—is only two and a half pages long.

To avoid misinterpretation of what I’m saying, it is important to stress that my criticism of the magical view of the word does not mean that I take an irresponsible position on the obligation we all have—teachers and students—to read the classic literature in a given field seriously in order to make the texts our own and to create the intellectual discipline without which our practice as teachers and students is not viable.

But to return to that very rich moment of my experience as a Portuguese teacher: I remember vividly the times I spent analyzing the work of Gilberto Freyre, Lins do Rego, Graciliano Ramos, Jorge Amado. I used to bring the texts from home to read with students, pointing out syntactical aspects strictly linked to the good taste of their language. To that analysis I added commentaries on the essential differences between the Portuguese of Portugal and the Portuguese of Brazil.

I always saw teaching adults to read and write as a political act, an act of knowledge, and therefore a creative act. I would. find it impossible to be engaged in a work of mechanically memorizing vowel sounds, as in the exercise “ba-be-bi-bo-bu, la-le-li-lo-lu.” Nor could I reduce learning to read and write merely to learning words, syllables, or letters, a process of teaching in which the teacher fills the supposedly empty heads of learners with his or her words. On the contrary, the student is the subject of the process of learning to read and write as an act of knowing and of creating. The fact that he or she needs the teacher’s help, as in any pedagogical situation, does not mean that the teacher’s help nullifies the student’s creativity and responsibility for constructing his or her own written language and for reading this language.

When, for instance, a teacher and a learner pick up an object in their hands, as I do now, they both feel the object, perceive the felt object, and are capable of expressing verbally what the felt and perceived object is. Like me, the illiterate person can feel the pen, perceive the pen, and say pen. I can, however, not only feel the pen, perceive the pen, and say pen, but also write pen and, consequently, read pen. Learning to read and write means creating and assembling a written expression for what can be said orally. The teacher cannot put it together for the student; that is the student’s creative task.

I need go no further into what I’ve developed at different times in the complex process of teaching adults to read and write. I would like to return, however, to one point referred to elsewhere in this book because of its significance for the critical understanding of the act of reading and writing, and consequently for the project I am dedicated to—teaching adults to read and write.

Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world. As I suggested earlier, this movement from the word to the world is always present; even the spoken word flows from our reading of the world. In a way, however, we can go further and say that reading the word is not preceded merely by reading the world, but by a certain form of writing it or rewriting it, that is, of transforming it by means of conscious, practical work. For me, this dynamic movement is central to the literacy process.

For this reason I have always insisted that words used in organizing a literacy program come from what I call the “word universe” of people who are learning, expressing their actual language, their anxieties, fears, demands, and dreams. Words should be laden with the meaning of the people’s existential experience, and not of the teacher’s experience. Surveying the word universe thus gives us the people’s words, pregnant with the world, words from the people’s reading of the world. We then give the words back to the people inserted in what I call “codifications,” pictures representing real situations. The word brick, for example, might be inserted in a pictorial representation of a group of bricklayers constructing a house.

Before giving a written form to the popular word, however, we customarily challenge the learners with a group of codified situations, so they will apprehend the word rather than mechanically memorize it. Decodifying or reading the situations pictured leads them to a critical perception of the meaning of culture by leading them to understand how human practice or work transforms the world. Basically, the pictures of concrete situations enable the people to reflect on their former interpretation of the world before going on to read the word. This more critical reading of the prior, less critical reading of the world enables them to understand their indigence differently from the fatalistic way they sometimes view injustice.

In this way, a critical reading of reality, whether it takes place in the literacy process or not, and associated above all with the clearly political practices of mobilization and organization, constitutes an instrument of what Antonio Gramsci calls “counterhegemony.”

To sum up, reading always involves critical perception, interpretation, and rewriting of what is read.

2

Adult Literacy and Popular Libraries

This chapter is adapted from a talk presented at the Eleventh Brazilian Congress of Library Economy and Documentation, held in Joāo Pessoa in January 1982. It was translated by Dale A.Koike.

To speak of adult literacy and popular libraries is to speak of the problems of reading and writing: not reading and writing words in and of themselves, as if the reading and writing of words did not imply another reading, anterior to and simultaneous with the first, the reading itself. ...