In Memory: Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire, the radical Brazilian "Vagabond of the Obvious" and the most widely known educator in the world, died on May 2, 1997 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He was 75.

Freire drew on humanist and Marxist ideas to forge a concept of popular literacy education for personal and social liberation. He suggested that the use of his "see-judge-act" student-centered methods could lead to critical consciousness, an awareness of the necessity to constantly unveil appearances designed to protect injustice, and be a foundation for action toward equality and democracy. To Freire, no form of education could be neutral. All pedagogy is a call to action. In a society animated by inequality and authoritarianism, he chose the side of the many, and exposed the partisanship of those who claimed to stand above it all.

Freire became a world figure after he was briefly jailed for using literacy methods developed by Catholic-based communities among poor peasants. He was driven from his native Brazil by a rising dictatorship in 1964. He fled to Chile to work with the democratically elected Allende government which fell to a CIA-manufactured coup. He spent the next 15 years in exile, working at Harvard and for the World Council of Churches in Geneva, organizing and writing books for social justice.

In 1989, shortly after he returned to Brazil as a leader of the social-democratic Workers Party, Freire was named secretary of education in Sao Paulo, a city of 13 million people. He served for two years.

In the early 1970s, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Education for Critical Consciousness swept the globe. The books, and nearly two dozen others that followed, proposed that education, though in inequitable societies predominantly a tool of elite’s, is also a democratic egalitarian weapon. Freire recommended methods recognizing the experience and dignity of students and their culture, techniques calling into question the assumptions which lay at the base of their social systems. Freire’s pedagogy united the curriculum, grasping that the seamless coat of learning is made alien by teaching methods that split it into irrational pieces. Freire’s geographic literacy involved mapping problems, not memorizing borders.

Freire criticized "banking" educational methods that see students as empty accounts to be filled with deposits of knowledge. He practiced a transformational style, the student becoming a subject in gaining and experimenting with knowledge. Truth became an examination of social understandings, not a doctrine determined by testing services. Motivation came from demonstrations that education is linked to power. For the process to work, the educator-leader had to be deeply involved in the daily lives of the students.

In Latin America, for example, a typical Freireian social inquiry method would trace the path of (1) a careful study of students’ surroundings and everyday lives, followed by (2) a "codification session" with students where key factors of life were drawn as pictures. Then (3) students would be urged to look at the pictures not as simply reality, but as problems, first as individual problems, then as collective problems with underlying reasons. As codification led to problem solving, relevant words were linked with the students’ drawings of the world, and reality repositioned as a human creation. Finally, (4) students were called on to use their newly won literacy as a way to make plans for change. Specifically, a picture of a peasant’s hut and a bountiful hacienda would be paired with a drawing of a peasant hoeing and a patron at rest. Why does he rest in a hacienda while we sweat and live in huts? Especially in the developing world, Freire was seen as a leader in a movement which could connect literacy, social insight, revolution, and national economic development.

There are problems with Freire’s work. He became, against his protests, an icon, idolized by dramatically different sectors of education and liberation movements. A little publishing industry evolved from uncritically praising a humble man whose life was social criticism.

But Freire called himself a contradictory person. His politics were never altogether clear. The Marxist Freire urged the analysis of labor and production. Like the entire socialist project, Freire was not able to resolve the incongruity of human liberation and national economic development. The humanist post-modern Freire denied the centrality of class and focused on deconstructing culture and language. In both cases, Freire had to rely on the ethics of the educator-leader to mediate the tensions between middle class teachers and profoundly exploited students. So, with a little effort, his works were simultaneously appropriated by capitalist enterprises like Con Edison, relatively dogmatic Marxist movements in Guinea Bissau and Grenada, and reformist poverty programs in the United States.

Conservative in many ways, Freire supported conventional school grading systems and the use of post-revolution textbooks, routinely coded in the tenets of the party—and beyond critique. His later books were diluted with extraneous transcriptions of his discussions over a glass of wine. He was compelled to apologize to feminists and others who objected to the male-centered language of his early books.

Nevertheless, Freire’s focus on the role of ideology and a utopian vision, the needs for imaging a better future before it can be achieved, and the vital necessity of leadership fully at one with the people, deepened the practices of movements for social change. His grasp of the reciprocal interactions of class, race, sex, and nationality as simultaneously pivotal to conscious action for change pre-dated both feminism and post-modernism. His methods open a process in which students examine both their potential roles as self-liberators, and the history of people who cease to be instruments of their own oppression.

Paulo Freire, presente.

 

Rich Gibson is coordinator of International Social Studies Education at Wayne State University in Detroit. His dissertation "The Promethean Literacy" critiques Freire’s work in theory and practice.