Paulo Freire

 Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was one of the greatest and most significant educators of the 20th century. With the beginning of his dialogue, he taught a new path for the relationship between teachers and students. His ideas influenced and continue to influence democratic processes throughout the world. He was the pedagogue of the oppressed and in his work he transmitted the pedagogy of hope. He influenced the new liberation ideas in Latin America and in the theology of liberation, in the European and African pedagogical renewals, and his figure is a constant reference in liberation politics and in education. He was an emigrant and exiled for political reasons due to dictatorships. For a long time his domicile was the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland

Biography of Paulo Freire

He was born in Recife, Brazil, in 1921. In 1947, he was director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service of Industry. He studied literature and received his doctorate in 1959 in Philosophy and History of Education with the thesis « Education and Brazilian news » , which lays the foundations of his method, according to which all educational processes must start from the reality that surrounds each individual.

In the 1950s, he belonged to the first Pernambuco State Council of Education. In 1961, he was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension of the University of Recife. In 1963 he put into practice his first group educational experience, within the National Literacy Campaign, achieving the literacy of 300 rural workers in a month and a half. He was accused by the oligarchy and by certain sectors of the Church of being a political agitator.

As a consequence of the military coup of 1964, he had to abandon his activity, described as subversive, and sought refuge in Chile, where he participated in various plans of the Christian-democratic government of Eduardo Frei, such as the adult education program of the Chilean Institute for Agrarian Reform ( ICIRA). In Chile she writes Pedagogy of the Oppressed , the content of which displeased the government of Santiago.

Professor at Harvard University, collaborated with groups dedicated to educational reform in rural and urban areas. In 1970 he moved to Geneva (Switzerland), where he worked on the education programs of the World Council of Churches.

After sixteen years of exile, in 1980 he returned to Brazil, teaching at the State University of Campinas and at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, the latter city of which he was Secretary of Education. In 1986, he received the international prize « Peace and Education » from UNESCO. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by about twenty universities around the world.

The context in which Paulo Freire began

As a child, Pablo Freire knew the reality of northeastern Brazil, where until recently people lived in slavery and that at that time the rural classes lived in oppressive labor relations, marginalized from the social, political and economic process and without any participation in the important decisions for the country.

It is there that Paulo Freire enters, trying to get his countrymen to break their passivity and silence, to recognize the strength of their transformative unity, to acquire the critical capacity to relate to society and to free themselves from their ties, the only possibility of society change. He inserts himself into the new revolutionary ideas that existed in Latin America in the 1960s , imbued with the language of liberation that emerged from the most advanced currents of Catholicism, which provoked liberation theology , and using eleElements of the Marxist dialectic for the vision and understanding of history.

« The pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and liberating pedagogy, will therefore have two different but interrelated moments. The first, in which the oppressed reveal the world of oppression and commit themselves, in praxis, to its transformation, and the second, in which, once the oppressive reality has been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed. and it becomes the pedagogy of men in the process of permanent liberation »

Freire's most widespread books, traditional pedagogy is characterized in what the author calls banking education ,a paradigm that assumes the educator as the sole holder of knowledge that the student receives passively and uncritically. In this model, the educational act is one-way; a wise educator deposits her knowledge in an ignorant receiver. Banking education is then conceived as the transmission of a reality that does not require re-elaboration and that is presented as the only possible one. As an alternative to this vision, Freire proposes that true education is liberating and is characterized by its reciprocity, presupposes a deep feeling of the value of the other and faith in their ability to forge a destiny.

Among his original methodological proposals for education, Freire develops what he calls the pedagogy of the question . This is based on the creation of knowledge through questions whose exploration ends up reciprocally enriching those involved in the educational act. In this way, the Brazilian author updates Socratic maieutics as a central element of the renewal of contemporary pedagogy.

In the thought of Paulo Freire, the context of Latin American societies and their history necessarily determine a "pedagogy of the oppressed" as the only way for the emancipation of the peoples.

[...] the liberation is a birth. It is a painful birth. The man who is born from it is a new man, a man who is only viable in and by overcoming the oppressor-oppressed contradiction which, ultimately, is the liberation of all.” Fragment of Pedagogy of the oppressed.