Pedagogy in Process

The Letters to Guinea-Bissau

Paulo Freire

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350190290
• eBook ISBN: 9781350190320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Pedagogy in Process presents a first-hand account of the most comprehensive attempt yet to put into practice Paulo Freire's theory of education within a real societal setting. When Guinea Bissau on the West African coast declared independence in 1973 the rate of illiteracy in its adult population was ninety percent. The new government faced the enormous task of educating its citizens. With Freire as collaborator and advisor the government launched a huge grass-roots literacy campaign and this book is Freire's memoir of that campaign. Those familiar with Freire's work will identify his ongoing insistence on the unity between theory and practice, mental and manual work, and past and present experience. This is essential reading for anyone interested Freire's revolutionary ideas on education and the transformative power they hold when applied to society and the classroom. This edition includes a substantive introduction by Michael Apple who is Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA.

THE LETTERS TO GUINEA-BISSAU

“The struggle for liberation which is the most complex expression of the cultural strength of a people, of their identity and their dignity, enriches the culture and opens new perspectives for its development. Manifestations of the culture take on new content and forms of expression. They become in this way powerful instruments of information and of political formation not only in the struggle for independence but in the larger battle for progress. . . . The dynamics of the struggle require the practice of democracy, of criticism and self-criticism, the growing participation of the people in taking charge of their own lives, literacy, the creation of schools and health services, the formation of ‘cadres’ who come from the midst of the peasants and workers, and many other developments which impel people to set forth upon the road of cultural progress. All of this makes it very clear that the struggle for liberation is not only a cultural fact but also a factor of culture.”

Amilcar Cabral

“The role of culture in the liberation struggle,” speech delivered to a
UNESCO conference in Paris,

July 3–7, 1972

LETTER 1

Geneva

January 26, 1975

Engineer Mario Cabral

Commissioner of State for Education and Culture

Bissau, Republic of Guinea-Bissau

Dear Comrade,

A few days ago, I received a letter from someone connected with Guinea-Bissau who told me of his recent meeting in Bissau with you and the president of the State Council. He mentioned the possibility that a team of which I am a part might make a contribution to the government’s work in adult literacy education. He also suggested that I write you right away in order to initiate a conversation about how such a contribution might be made concrete.

As a man from the Third World and as an educator completely committed to this world, I could have no other reaction—nor could my colleagues— than to offer to the people of Guinea-Bissau whatever small contribution we might make.

Since it is not possible, at the moment, for me to go to Bissau to discuss personally the basis for our participation, I am writing to ask whether you could come to Geneva for two or three days or if, perhaps, one of your assistants could do so.

In such a meeting, for which I would be free beginning the 19th of April, we could discuss not only the way in which our contribution might be made but also the general lines of adult literacy education in Guinea-Bissau. Literacy education for adults, seen in the perspective of liberation, is a creative act. It can never be reduced to a mechanical matter, in which the so-called literacy worker (teacher) deposits his/ her own word in the learners, as though their conscious bodies were simply empty, waiting to be filled by that word. Such a technique is mechanical and relies on memorizing; the learners are made to repeat again and again, with their eyes closed, all together: la, le, li, lo, lu; ba, be, bi, bo, bu; ta, te, ti, to, tu, a monotonous chant which implies above all a false conception of the act of knowing. “Repeat, repeat, in order that you may learn” is one of the principles of this false understanding of the act of knowing.

From a liberation perspective, which is that of Guinea-Bissau and is ours as well, literacy education of adults is, on the contrary, a continuation of the formidable struggle which your people together with their leaders began, now long ago, to conquer THEIR WORD. From such a perspective, literacy education cannot escape from the depths of the people, from their productive activity, from their culture. It will not become hardened in the soulless cold of bureaucratized schools in which primers designed by distant intellectuals—sometimes with the best of intentions—emphasize the mechanical memorizing to which I referred before.

Literacy education of adults, as we understand it, is one dimension of cultural action for liberation. It cannot, for this reason, be thought of in isolation, but always in relation to other aspects of cultural action taken in its totality. To discuss it means to discuss also the social, economic and cultural politics of the country. As a matter of fact it was this perception of the interrelationship of all of the parts of a totality that impressed me so greatly in Amilcar Cabral, as well as his critical comprehension of the role of culture in the struggle for liberation which is, as he emphasized, “a cultural fact and also a factor of culture.”

I realize how difficult it would be for you to be absent from the country even for two or three days. Nevertheless, I take the liberty of urging you to come because of what it would represent in making concrete something that both stimulates and challenges us.

Fraternally,

Paulo Freire

LETTER 2

Geneva

April 1975

Engineer Mario Cabral

Commissioner of State for Education and Culture

Bissau, Republic of Guinea-Bissau

Dear Comrade Mario Cabral,

I have just received your letter confirming the interest of your government in our collaboration.

I do not believe it is necessary for me to tell you with what satisfaction the team of the Institute for Cultural Action (IDAC), of which I am a part, and the Department of Education of the World Council of Churches (WCC), where I work, received this news.

I have already expressed in my first letter the desire of all of us to work with you and to make our contribution, no matter how small, to the search in which you find yourselves involved for both a new practice and a new vision of education responsive to the objectives of Guinea-Bissau, in the process of re-creation.

After the receipt of your letter we began again as a team to think more systematically about our collaboration with you. One conviction stood out, not only in relation to our past experiences but above all because of the political commitment to which we try to be loyal. Our conviction is that we will have nothing to teach there if we do not learn from and with you. For this reason, we go to Guinea-Bissau as comrades, as militants,* curiously and humbly, and not as foreign technicians with a mission. We do not judge ourselves to be the possessors of truth, nor do we carry with us a report of our visit already written or even drawn up in general lines with advice and prescriptions about what to do and how to do it. Such prescriptions could represent only what we had learned in other experiences in the past.

On the contrary, what our past and present experiences teach us is that they cannot ever be simply transplanted.

They can and must be explained, discussed and critically understood by those whose practice is in another context. In that new context they will be valid only to the degree that they are “reinvented.”

In this way, the experience which has happened in context A becomes valuable as an example for context B only if those working there re-create it, thus refusing the temptation to perform a mechanical and alienating transplant. Being completely closed to experiences realized in other contexts is just as wrong as being ingenuously open to them, leading to pure and simple importation. Amilcar Cabral never denied the importance of experience in other contexts but he never accepted its blind imitation.

Thus, whenever we refer to this or that aspect of some other experience in which we have participated or know about, our intention will be to sharpen it as a problem statement or to offer a challenge.

Because this is the basis of our thinking and action, there is no place even for the outline of a project in the field of literacy education for adults in Guinea-Bissau in our reflections as a team. The project will have to be developed there, by you, in a process in which we may be able to collaborate, but only to the degree to which we come to know better the reality of the country.

Of course we can discuss here the complexities of adult literacy education, the impossibility of isolating it as something realizable above and beyond social practice within the society; we can discuss the necessity, for this very reason, for associating it with the overall concept of the society which one is attempting to create and of which the act of production is a fundamental dimension.

We can discuss, also, the political nature of literacy education as of all education, a fact that demands of educators a growing clarity regarding their own political stance, and the coherence of their practice with that stance.

We are thinking of the experience of the people in the older liberated zones of the country under the leadership of PAIGC in the fields of education, production, distribution and health. We are thinking, too, of the inherited colonial education that stands in complete contradiction to the society you are trying to create; it must be radically transformed and not simply reformed. The new educational system that is to come into being cannot be a happy synthesis of the inheritance of the liberation war and of the colonial legacy. It must be a deepening, improving and enriching of all of that—which means something new that results from the transformation of colonial education.

We have also thought of the difficulties such a radical transformation poses since it cannot be the fruit of a purely mechanical act.

We have considered how negative it would be for Guinea-Bissau, in the light of the political, social and cultural objectives that have always directed the practice of PAICG, simply to import an elitist model of education, generally called “higher education”—one that creates intellectualists and technocrats rather than intellectuals and technicians.

And it is true, therefore, that we see ourselves as comrades conversing frankly with comrades. We are ready to begin, with humility, our collaboration with the government of Guinea-Bissau and, above all, with the Commission on Education and Culture.

The concrete basis of this collaboration will be discussed there on the occasion of our first visit. From the dialogue between us, about the reality with which we will have had our first contact, will be born the program which will be carried out with our help.

Before that time comes, however, it is possible that I will be writing you again, reporting on our activities in Geneva.

Fraternally,

Paulo Freire

LETTER 3

Geneva

July 28, 1975

Engineer Mario Cabral

Commissioner of State for Education and Culture

Bissau, Republic of Guinea-Bissau

Dear Comrade:

Ever since last February when I wrote you for the first time about the possibility of a contribution by the Institute for Cultural Action (IDAC) in the field of literacy education for adults, an interest shared by the Department of Education of the WCC, we have been reflecting about this problem.

Since we do not see ourselves as foreign specialists, as I emphasized in my last letter, but rather as persons committed to the cause of Guinea-Bissau, it seems to us not only interesting but necessary to keep our comrade informed regarding some of our reflections. Therefore this letter-report is intended for that purpose and will, we hope, help all of us in the conversations we will have together there in September.

In our meetings in Geneva, our concerns have been around three interrelated areas:

a)A first attempt to become oriented to the reality of Guinea-Bissau by studying whatever materials we could obtain, especially the exceptional work of Amilcar Cabral.

b)Taking a critical distance from the different experiences of literacy education for adults in which we have taken part, directly or indirectly, in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. We have been thinking and rethinking the positive and negative aspects of these experiences. This exercise seemed fruitful to us as a means of learning from it in the face of the work to be done in Guinea-Bissau. We remember, however, what I emphasized in my last letter, that experiences are not transplanted, they are reinvented.

c)Imagining the role that literacy education for adults as cultural action could play in the construction of the new Guinea-Bissau.

Let me say again that this letter-report cannot pretend to touch on all of the points we have thought about and discussed in relation to the three areas noted above. It is more like a conversation between comrades and will actually be far less didactic and systematic than the first page suggests.

The climate that characterizes our study meetings is one of critical curiosity and of search. We challenge ourselves—at times to read a text of Amilcar Cabral, at others to relive different moments from our earlier experiences in the literacy education of adults.

These meetings, so far from Guinea-Bissau, are simply an introduction to our real apprenticeship. Without that apprenticeship our help would not be in the least useful. With our trip there, this apprenticeship will be continued more concretely.

The more we study the theoretical work of Amilcar Cabral the more we realize that we must return again and again to his works. They are an expression of his practical experiences with his people. His analyses of the role of culture in the struggle for liberation cannot be reduced to the historical moment of the war. That struggle—which was, as he said, both “a cultural fact and a factor of culture”—continues now, although in a different form. Yesterday the liberation struggle sought victory against the colonizer by means of the “liberation of the productive forces” from which would result “new perspectives on the cultural processes” of the country. Today, liberation is a continuing process. It signifies not only the consolidation of victory but also makes concrete a model of society already, in a certain sense, designed during the stage of struggle.

This model is, first of all, a political model. It will necessarily involve a total cultural project with education, including literacy education of adults, inherent within it. This is a cultural project which, being faithful to its popular roots without idealizing them, is faithful also to the struggle to increase production in the country.

A cultural action, even at the level of literacy education of adults, can accomplish a great deal. With reference to the struggle for production and committed to the increase of this production, the work of cultural action must go far beyond mechanical processes for literacy education or a purely technical training of peasants and urban workers. It must make a fundamental contribution to the political consciousness of the people. In a capitalist society the technical training of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also Available from Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction by Michael W. Apple
• Foreword by Jonathan Kozol
• Introduction
• The Letters to Guinea-Bissau
• Postscript
• Final Word
• Notes
• Plates Section
• eCopyright