Paulo Freire

Daniel Schugurensky, Richard Bailey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781472518859
• eBook ISBN: 9781441174901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Paulo Freire is one of the most influential thinkers in education. This text is a thoughtful and thorough introduction to Freire's work, situating this in the context of his life, intellectual journey and the reception of his thinking around the world.

Daniel Schugurensky's text offers a coherent and accessible account of Freire's educational thought, looking at its contribution to educational theory and practice and exploring the legacy of Freire for contemporary education and the relevance of his thought for today's students.

Chapter 1

Intellectual Biography

Introduction: “Scratch a theory, you will find a biography”

As sociologist Troy Duster likes to say, “If you scratch a theory, you will find a biography.”1 This dictum applies particularly well to Paulo Freire, a twentieth-century educator, writer, philosopher, public intellectual, and political activist. He was born on September 19, 1921, in Recife, the capital of the state of Pernambuco, in northeast Brazil, under the official name of Paulo Regulus Neves Freire and died of heart failure on May 2, 1997, in the city of Sao Paulo. Paul Taylor (1981:1), writing when Freire had only produced a small portion of his published work, already noted that he had been called “the greatest living educator, a master and a teacher, first among a dying class of modern revolutionaries who fight for social justice and transformation.” Others have called Freire “the Messiah of Geneva” (Kleinman 1978), “a myth in his own lifetime” (Furter 1985:301), “the most widely known educational theorist now living” (Weiler 1996:353), “the exemplary organic intellectual of our time” (West 1993:viii), “the Rousseau of the 20th century” (Bhattacharya 2008:101), “the John Dewey of the present era” (Kanpol 1997:13, Guilherme 2002:31), “the most important educator of the second half of the 20th century” (Elias 1994:151, Carnoy 2004:7), “one of the most heralded educators of the 20th century” (Mayo 2004), “the most original educational thinker of the last half of the 20th century” (Siddhartha 1999), and “a radical hero of adult education” (Coben 1998:148). Like wise, Roberts (2000:1) claimed that “few educational thinkers have been more widely influential than Paulo Freire,” Gronholm (1999:161) argued that Freire was “the most important educationalist of the twentieth century”; and Darder (2002:149) stated that “more than any other educator of the twentieth century, Paulo Freire left an indelible mark upon the lives of progressive educators.” C. A. Torres (1998a:ix) referred to Freire as a “wonderful and spiritual man who inspired a whole generation of critical educators” and as “one of the most vibrant educators and philosophers of education.” Hall (1998:95) stated that by the 1970s and 1980s, Paulo Freire had already become the world’s best-known intellectual voice supporting a socially transformative vision of adult education, and Gadotti (1994:141) argued that because Freire’s educational proposals have been connected to so many settings and movements around the world, the universal extension of his thought “has no parallels in the history of pedagogical ideas.”

If these claims seem exaggerated, it is beyond doubt that, at least in the subfields of critical pedagogy and popular education,2 no other educator had the worldwide impact of Paulo Freire. Both the Critical Pedagogy Reader (Darder, Baltodano, and Torres 2003) and the Critical Pedagogy Primer (Kincheloe 2008) acknowledged Freire as the most influential philosopher in the development of critical pedagogy. Likewise, Giroux (1994:141 and 2010:1) recognized Freire as one of the main founders of critical pedagogy and noted that in some quarters his name has become synonymous with the very concept and the practice of critical pedagogy, and thus anyone who would like to engage with critical pedagogy has to begin with Freire, whether they like him or not. Along the same lines, McLaren (1989, 2000a) called Freire “the inaugural philosopher of critical pedagogy” because he was one of the first internationally recognized educational thinkers who fully appreciated the relationship among education, politics, imperialism, and liberation. Guilherme (2002:31) went one step further, identifying Freire as “the founder” of critical pedagogy. With regard to popular education, Freire is not only the most prominent name associated with this movement in Latin America, but is also recognized as its main guide and inspiration (Kane 2001, Nuñez 2007). For instance, the Consejo de Educación de Adultos de América Latina, the umbrella organization of popular education organizations in that region, has Freire as its first honorary president, and its website highlights prominently pictures and quotes of Freire. The stature of Paulo Freire in the popular education movement is not only limited to Latin America though. His contributions to this field have been highly influential in all continents (Gadotti 2001b, Mayo 2004, C. A. Torres 2008). Like most influential thinkers, Freire has his detractors. As we will see in Chapter 3, he has been criticized for different reasons, ranging from his particular writing style to issues related to perceived flaws in his theoretical analysis. Regardless of the different opinions on his work, his contributions can be better understood when they are situated within the specific sociopolitical and economic contexts in which they were formed. Indeed, Freire’s intellectual biography was influenced in different ways by diverse political, economic, cultural, and social dynamics that took place around him throughout his life. Although Freire’s life began and ended in Brazil, in between he lived and worked in many countries. For this reason, I have organized his intellectual biography into three distinct moments: “Early Brazil” (1921–64), “Exile” (1964–80), and “Late Brazil” (1980–97).

Early Brazil: From the mango tree to a prison cell

Paulo Freire was born into a middle-class family, the youngest of four children, in northeast Brazil, one of the most impoverished and unequal regions of that country. His mother, Edeltrudis Neves Freire, was a church-oriented Catholic. His father, Joaquim Temistocles Freire, was a military police official and a Spiritist, although not religiously affiliated. Freire adopted his mother’s religion from childhood. His father not only respected that decision, but also attended Paulo’s Communion ceremony. In examining his past, Freire said that with this and other similar gestures, his father taught him the importance of respecting the ideas of others even if he did not agree with them. He also noted that from his father he learned to distinguish between legitimate authority and authoritarianism, an issue that he would later address in his writings when analyzing power dynamics in pedagogical relations. Through conversations with his father, the young Paulo was introduced to information about social injustices and political struggles in Brazil. From his mother, he learned to embrace Catholicism, a belief that would influence his future worldview. At the same time, whereas his upbringing was deeply framed in religious values, it was not tarnished by an uncritical acceptance of reality. As he said, recalling the financial hardships faced by his family: “I never accepted our precarious situation as an expression of God’s wishes” (Freire 1996:14). Through early family socialization practices, Freire also acquired a disposition toward dialogue and its attendant skills. He carried this competency into adulthood to the point where dialogue became central to his educational approach. He also learned from his parents to read and write at an early age, before attending school, in fact. Interestingly, they taught him literacy skills in a playful way: as a game, writing words on the earth with a stick under a mango tree. Freire (1983) recalled that his own literacy learning was pleasurable, largely because it started with concepts and sentences related to his own experience as a young child.

Freire noted that, seemingly unconsciously, the method used by his parents would inspire him later on to develop his famous approach to adult literacy, which starts from the vocabulary used by the learners in their daily lives and not with the words chosen by curriculum developers (Freire and Guimarães 1984). In a dialogue with Canadian adult educators Roby Kidd and Alan Thomas, Freire discussed his relationship with his parents and their influence on his attitudes toward adult education. At one point during the conversation, Freire said that he learned how to read and write under the shadow of a tree, writing in the earth with a stick: “The words that my parents used to introduce me to the literacy process were my words. It is very interesting to note that many years after that, when I started working in adult literacy, I started precisely with the words of the illiterates and not with my own words.”3

Freire’s initial educational experience at home found continuity at the local elementary school. His first teacher was a teenager named Eunice Vasconcelos. Freire remembered her with fondness, noting that she was particularly caring and constantly stimulated students’ curiosity for learning. Moreover, Eunice’s method of teaching writing skills was consistent with Freire’s parents’ approach to teaching reading skills. Eunice asked first-grade children to write in a piece of paper as many words as they knew, and then asked them to write sentences using those words. Finally, she discussed with each student the meaning and context of each sentence (Freire 1994a). This early school experience also contributed to developing Freire’s approach to literacy teaching, particularly reliance on the vocabulary of the learners as the departure point for sentence making and for connecting sentence making to meaning making through dialogue and discussion.

Although Freire’s family’s social status could be characterized as middle class, its purchasing power declined drastically during the economic depression of the 1930s: the stock market crash of 1929 had a severe impact on the Brazilian economy, causing the price of coffee to fall dramatically, and affecting large sectors of the population. At that time, his father became very ill and his family struggled to make ends meet, and when Freire was 10 years old he endured hunger for the first time in his life. In 1932, the family had to move to nearby Jaboatão dos Guararapes, where the cost of living was lower than in Recife. Moving away from the house where he was born was a traumatic moment for Freire: “More than anything else, I felt like I was being expelled, thrown out of my sense of security. I experienced a fear that I had not felt before. It was as if I had died a little” (Freire 1996:36). In Jaboatão, Paulo spent the last part of his childhood and his adolescence. There, many of his friends lived in extreme poverty. As in many middle-class families that become suddenly impoverished, there was a disconnection in his house between cultural environment and concrete material conditions, illustrated by the juxtaposition of a German piano—a symbol of a better past and a sign of middle-class identity—and an empty fridge: “The piano in our home was like the tie around my father’s neck. In spite of all difficulties, we did not get rid of the piano, nor did my father do away with his necktie” (Freire 1996:21).

The experience of living in poverty among poor rural families and laborers helped Freire to become familiar with the language and grammar of the people, something that would be important later on in his work as a popular educator. It also helped him to become more aware of the social world around him: “In Jaboatão, when I was ten, I began to think that there were a lot of things in the world that were not going well” (Freire 1978:10). He also learned to empathize with the oppressed, with whom he shared the difficulties of attending school on an empty stomach: “I didn’t understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn’t dumb. It wasn’t lack of interest. My social condition didn’t allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge” (cited in Gadotti 1994:5). Moreover, in Letters to Cristina, Freire recalled how his experiences in Jaboatão marked his life with a deep sense of solidarity and human respect and helped to develop a critical and humanistic perception of the world. Toward the end of his life, he reminisced that he was a “connective child” in the sense that he was able to establish meaningful relations with people from different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds. Gadotti (2001a:29) argued that this ability to connect with others would help Freire to link different fields, disciplines, and categories (“epistemological connectivity”). The finances of the Freire family became even more desperate in 1934 when his father passed away. The psychological impact of the death of his father, together with the consequences of the move and of financial difficulties, exacted a toll on Freire’s academic performance. He received low grades, and some of his teachers diagnosed him with a developmental disability (Facundo 1984, Elias 1994). Because he had problems being admitted to a secondary school, he had to remain out of school for 2 years.

At that time, in the midst of an economic crisis, Freire was bound to never complete secondary school. Two fortuitous events made a crucial difference to his educational future. The first was that Freire’s mother was able to persuade Aluizio Pessoa de Araujo,4 the director of the private high school Oswaldo Cruz, to accept Paulo as a student and to waive his fees. Surrounded by upper-class boys, it took some time to adapt to the new milieu, but eventually Paulo managed to find his place. The second was that his eldest brother got a job and started to make an economic contribution to the family, which helped Freire to enhance his academic performance: “the eldest in my family began to work and help our condition, and I began to eat more. To the extent I began to eat better, I began to better understand what I was reading” (Shor and Freire 1987:29). By the late 1930s, Paulo’s other brothers were also working, and the economic situation of the family further improved. In these favorable circumstances, Freire made remarkable intellectual progress. Whereas up to the age of 15, he used to spell “rat” with two r’s, a few years later he mastered Portuguese language so well that he became a teacher of grammar and syntax while still in high school and for several years after. As a young teacher, he asked his students to pay attention to the rules of language but, at the same time, he nurtured the role of creativity and recognized that creativity requires freedom. This early insight was key because creativity and freedom would become important principles in his educational philosophy and in his political approach: “As a young teacher, I changed my teaching and gave greater value to creativity. This was also a basis for me to understand later that creativity in teaching is linked to creativity in politics” (Freire and Shor 1987:20).

In his early twenties Freire started to study philosophy and sociology of language, and in 1943 was admitted to the law school at the University of Pernambuco. Soon thereafter he would discover that teaching was his true vocation. Paulo was invited to teach part-time at the same high school where he had studied (Oswaldo Cruz), and through his teaching he met adult workers and also Elza Maia Costa Oliveira, a primary school teacher who was preparing for an exam to qualify for the position of school principal. Freire became her tutor for the syntax part of her preparation. They fell in love, were married in 1944, and subsequently raised five children (María Madalena, María Cristina, María de Fátima, Joaquim, and Lutgardes). Throughout her life, Elza provided Paulo enormous emotional and intellectual support, and as a fellow educator she helped him to elaborate many of his innovative proposals and worked with him on several projects around the world.5 Her experience teaching literacy to children played an important role in helping him develop and refine his adult literacy method.

During the 1940s, Elza constantly motivated Freire to continue his university studies. After passing the bar exam and becoming a lawyer, Freire defended his first client, who would also be his last: a young dentist unable to pay back a loan that he used to set up his dental office. Freire recalled that moment...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Intellectual Biography
• 2 Critical Exposition of Freire’s Work
• 3 The Reception and Influence of Freire’s Work
• 4 The Relevance of Freire Today
• References
• Index
• Copyright