Pedagogy of Hope

Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Paulo Freire

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350190221
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education Theory & Practice

With the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire established himself as one of the most important and radical educational thinkers of his time. In Pedagogy of Hope, Freire revisits the themes of his masterpiece, the real world contexts that inspired them and their impact in that very world. Freire's abiding concern for social justice and education in the developing world remains as timely and as inspiring as ever, and is shaped by both his rigorous intellect and his boundless compassion. Pedagogy of Hope is a testimonial to the inner vitality of generations denied prosperity and to the often-silent, generous strength of millions throughout the world who refuse to let hope be extinguished. This edition includes a substantial new introduction by Henry A. Giroux, University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest and the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy at McMaster University, Canada. Translated by Robert R. Barr.

Chapter 1

In 1947 I was teaching Portuguese at Colégio Oswaldo Cruz,¹ the same school where I had completed my secondary education and, also, as a special favor of the school’s director, Dr. Aluizio Pessoa de Araújo,² my preparatory course for law school.³ It was at that time that I received the invitation to become part of the recently created Industrial Social Service, SESI, the Regional Department of Pernambuco, set up by the National Industrial Confederation and given legal status by presidential decree.⁴

The invitation was transmitted through a great friend of mine and fellow alumnus of Colégio Oswaldo Cruz, a person to whom I am bound by close ties of friendship, which our political disagreements have never disturbed, to this very day. Our disagreements had to be. They expressed our diverging views of the world, and our understanding of life itself. We have got through some of the most difficult moments of our lives tempering our disagreements, thereby defending our right and our duty to preserve mutual love by ensuring that it will rise above our political options and ideological positions. Without our knowing it, at the time, we were already—each in his or her own way—postmodern! In fact, in our mutual respect, we were actually experiencing the rock-bottom foundation of politics.

His name is Paulo Rangel Moreira. Today he is an attorney of renown, and professor of law at the Federal University of Pernambuco.⁵ One bright afternoon in Recife, he came to our house in the Casa Forte district, 224 Rita de Souza Street, and told us—Elza, my first wife, and me—of SESI’s existence and what it could mean for us. He had already accepted the invitation extended to him by the young president of the organization, engineer and industrialist Cid Sampaio, to coordinate its social service projects. Every indication was that he would soon move to the legal department of the organization—his dream—to work in the field of his own expertise.

I listened, we listened—silent, curious, reticent, challenged—to Paulo Rangel’s optimistic discourse. We were a little afraid, too, Elza and I. Afraid of the new, perhaps. But there was also within us a willingness and a taste for risk, for adventure.

Night was “falling.” Night had “fallen.” In Recife, night “arrives” suddenly. The sun is “surprised” to find itself still shining, and makes a run for it, as if there were no time to lose.

Elza flicked on the light. “And what will Paul do in this organization?” she asked. “What will it be able to offer Paul besides the salary he needs? How will he be able to exercise his curiosity, what creative work will he be able to devote himself to so that he won’t die of sadness and longing for the teaching job he likes so much?”

We were in our last year of law school, in the middle of the school year. Something had already happened, right about the time of the invitation, that was to become very important in my life. I have already referred to it in interviews, and it has been mentioned in biographical notes in books and periodicals. It had made Elza laugh with satisfaction at seeing something happen that she had almost guessed would happen—something she had counted on happening since the beginning of our life together. At the same time, her laugh was a pleasant one, without anything like “I told you so” about it, but just full-to-the-brim of gladness.

I had come home at the end of the day with the tasty sensation of someone correcting a mistake he or she has been making. Opening the door, Elza asked me a question that, on so many people’s lips, is not much more than a kind of bureaucratic formality, but which when asked by Elza was always a genuine question, never a rote formula. It expressed lively curiosity, and betokened true investigation. She asked, “Everything all right at the office today?”

And I told her about the experience that had put an end to my brand-new career as a lawyer. I really needed to talk. I needed to recite, word for word, what I had just told the young dentist I had sitting in front of me in my very new office. Shy, frightened, nervous, his hands moving as if suddenly unhooked from his mind, detached from his conscious body, and become autonomous, and yet unable to do anything “on their own,” do anything with themselves, or connect with the words that tumbled out of his mouth (God knows how)—the young dentist had said something to me that I needed to speak with Elza about at once. I needed to talk with Elza at that special moment, just as in other, equally special moments in the course of our life. I needed to speak of the spoken, of the said and the not said, of the heard, of the listened to. To speak of the said is not only to resay the said, but to relive the living experience that has generated the saying that now, at the time of the resaying, is said once more. Thus, to resay, to speak of the said, implies hearing once again what has been said by someone else about or because of the saying that we ourselves have done.

“Something very exciting happened to me this afternoon—just a few minutes ago,” I said to Elza. “You know what? I’m not going to be a lawyer. It’s not that I see nothing special, nothing captivating, about law. Law is a a basic need. It’s a job that has to be done, and just as much as anything else, it has to be based on ethics, and competence, and seriousness, and respect for people. But law isn’t what I want.” Then I spoke of what had been, of things experienced, of words, of meaningful silences, of the said, of the heard. Of the young dentist before me whom I had invited to come talk with me as his creditor’s attorney. The young man had set up his dental office, at least partially, and had not paid his debts.

“I made a mistake,” he said. “I guess I was overoptimistic. I took out a loan I can’t pay back. But I’m legally required to have certain instruments in order to practice dentistry. So, well, sir, . . . you can take our furniture, in the dining room, the living room . . .” And then, laughing a shy laugh, without the trace of a sneer—with as much humor as irony—he finished up: “. . . Only you can’t have my eighteen-month-old baby girl.”

I had listened in silence. I was thinking. Then I said to him, “I think you and your wife and your little girl and your dining room and your living room are going to sit in a kind of suspended animation for a while, as far as your debt-troubles are concerned. I’m going to have to wait till next week to see my client and tell him I’m dropping the case. It’ll take him another week or so to get another down-and-outer like me to be his attorney. This will give you a little breathing space, even if it is just suspended animation. I’d also like to tell you that, like you, I’m closing down my career before it’s even gotten started. Thanks.”

The young man, of my own generation, may for all I know have left my office without much of a grasp of what had been said and heard. I squeezed his cold hand warmly with mine. Once he was home again and had thought over what had been said, who knows, he might have begun to understand some of the reasons that had led me to say what I had said.

That evening, relaying to Elza what had been said, I could never have imagined that, one day, so many years later, I would write Pedagogy of the Oppressed, whose discourse, whose proposal, has something to do with the experience of that afternoon, in terms of what it, too, meant, and especially in terms of the decision to accept Cid Sampaio’s invitation, conveyed to me by Paulo Rangel. I abandoned the practice of law for good that afternoon, once I had heard Elza say, “I was hoping for that. You’re an educator.” Not many months after, as the night that had arrived in such haste began, I said yes to SESI’s summons to its Division of Education and Culture, whose field of experience, study, reflection, and practice was to become an indispensable moment in the gestation of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Never does an event, a fact, a deed, a gesture of rage or love, a poem, a painting, a song, a book, have only one reason behind it. In fact, a deed, a gesture, a poem, a painting, a song, a book are always wrapped in thick wrappers. They have been touched by manifold whys. Only some of these are close enough to the event or the creation to be visible as whys. And so I have always been more interested in understanding the process in and by which things come about than in the product in itself.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed could not have gestated within me solely by reason of my stint with SESI. But my stint with SESI was fundamental to its development. Even before Pedagogy of the Oppressed, my time with SESI wove a tapestry of which Pedagogy was a kind of inevitable extension. I refer to the dissertation I defended in what was then the University of Recife, and later the Federal University of Pernambuco: “Educação e atualidade brasileira.” I later reworked my dissertation and published it as Educação como prática da liberdade, and that book basically became the forerunner of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Again, in interviews, in dialogues with intellectuals, including non-Brazilians, I have made references to more remote tapestries that enveloped me, by bits and pieces, from my childhood and adolescence onward, antedating my time with SESI, which was without any doubt a “founding time,” a foundational time.

These bits and pieces of time actually lived in me—for I had lived them—awaiting another time, which might not even have come as it came, but into which, if it did come, earlier bits and pieces of time were destined to extend, in the composition of the larger fabric.

At times, it happens to us not to perceive the “kinship” among the times we have experienced, and thus to let slip the opportunity to “solder together” disconnected cognitions, and in so doing to allow the second to shed light on the doubtful brilliance of the first.

There was my experience of infancy and adolescence with youngsters who were the children of rural and urban workers, my life as a child with children whose opportunities for life were so utterly minimal, the way in which most of their parents treated us—Temístocles, my immediately elder brother, and me—their “fear of freedom,” which I never understood, nor called it this at the time, their subservient attitude toward their employers, the boss, the owner, which later, much later, I read in Sartre was one of the expressions of the “connivance” of the oppressed with the oppressors.^* There were their oppressed bodies, the unconsulted hosts of the oppressors’ parasitism.

It is interesting, in a context of childhood and adolescence, in the connivance maintained with the wickedness of the powerful—with the weakness that needed to turn into the strength of the dominated—that the time of SESI’s foundation, that time of “solderings” and “splicings” of old, pure “guesses,” to which my new knowledge with its critical emergence gave meaning, was the moment at which I read the why, or some of the whys—the tapestries and fabrics that were books already written and not yet read by me, and of books yet to be written that would come to enlighten the vivid memory that was forming me: Marx, Lukács, Fromm, Gramsci, Fanon, Memmi, Sartre, Kosik, Agnes Heller, M. Ponty, Simon Weil, Arendt, Marcuse, and so many others.

Years later, the putting into practice of some of the “solderings” and “splicings” of the inaugural years of SESI sent me into exile⁶—a kind of “golden spike” that enabled me to connect recollections, recognize facts, deeds, and gestures, fuse pieces of knowledge, solder moments, re-cognize in order to cognize, to know, better.

In this effort to recall moments of my experience—which necessarily, regardless of when they were, became sources of my theoretical reflections for the writing of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as they would continue to be today, as I rethink Pedagogy—I feel that it will be appropriate to refer to an excellent example of such a moment, which I experienced in the 1950s. The experience resulted in a learning process of real importance for me—for my theoretical understanding of the practice of political education, which, if it is to be progressive, must, as I have always asserted, take careful account of the reading of the world being made by popular groups and expressed in their discourse, their syntax, their semantics, their dreams and desires.

I was now working in SESI, and specifically on relations between schools and families. I had begun to experiment with various avenues to an improvement of the meeting of minds: to an understanding of the educational practice being carried out in the schools, on the part of families; to an understanding of the difficulties that families from popular areas would have in confronting problems in the implementation of their own educational activity. At bottom, I was looking for a dialogue between them from which might result the necessary mutual assistance that, at the same time—as it would imply more involvement of the families in the school— might enhance the political connotation of that involvement in the sense of opening channels of democratic participation to fathers and mothers in the actual educational policy being implemented in the schools.

I had carried out, by that time, a research project covering some one thousand families of students, throughout the urban area of Recife, the Zona da Mata, the countryside, and what might be called the “doorway” to the desert hinterland of Pernambuco,⁷ where SESI had nuclei or social centers in which it offered its members and their families medical and dental assistance, scholastic help, sports and recreation projects, cultural projects, and so on.

My research, which had nothing of the sophisticated about it, asked the parents questions about their relationship with their daughters and sons. I asked about punishments, rewards, the most frequent punishments, the most frequent reasons for it, their children’s reaction to the punishment, any change in their behavior, or want thereof, in the direction desired by the person doing the punishing, and so on.

I recall that, when I had sifted through the results, I was astonished, even more than I had expected to be, at the emphasis on corporal punishment, really violent punishment, in the Recife inner city, the Zona da Mata, in the rural areas, and hinterland, by contrast with the almost complete absence, not only of violent corporal punishment, but of any punishment of children, along the fishing coast. It seemed that, along the coast, under the maritime sky, the legends of individual freedom with which the culture is drenched, the fishers’ confrontation, in their precarious jangadas or rafts,⁸ with the forces of the sea, the independent jobber’s work done by persons free and proud, the imagination that lends such color to the fishers’ fantastic stories—it seemed that all of this had some connection with the taste for a liberty diametrically opposed to the use of violent punishment.

I do not know myself to what extent we might consider the fishers’ lifestyle too permissive, wanting boundaries, or whether, on the contrary, with their emphasis on freedom, and conditioned by their own cultural context, the fishers are simply relying on nature itself, on the world, on the sea, in and with which their children win an experience of themselves, to be the source of freedom’s necessary limits. It was as if, softening or trimming down their duty as their children’s educators, fathers and mothers shared them with the sea, with the world itself, to which it would fall, through their children’s practice, to delineate their responsibilities. In this fashion, the children would be expected to learn naturally what they might and might not do.

Indeed, the fishers lived a life of enormous contradiction. On one side, they felt free and bold, confr...