Paulo Freire

Nancy Thao4/10/12

What does this picture say to you?

Paulo Freire states, "There is no neutral process of education. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."

Life• Paulo Freire was born in Recife, Pernambuco,

Brazil on September 19, 1921.

In 1929, due to the economic problems by the Great Depression, the Freire family was forced to leave Recife, settling in nearby Jaboatao where Paulo spent part of his childhood and adolescence.

• Father: Joaquim Temistocles Freire from Rio Grande do Norte, an officer of the Pernambuco military, a spiritist, although

not a member of any religious circle, good, intelligent, capable of loving.• Mother: Edeltrudis Neves Freire of Pernambuco, Catholic, sweet, good, just.

Life

• Freire’s economic hardship resulted in his being two years behind in schooling. Some of his teachers suggested that he might have had serious long-term developmental problems.

• In Jaboatao, he began to be aware of the world around him since many of his friends lived in extreme poverty. "In Jaboatao, when I was ten, I began to think that there were a lot of things in the world that were not going well" (Fundamentos, p. 10).

• As his family’s decline abated and economic turmoil began to dissipate, Paulo and his family’s economic status improved.

• He took his studies seriously: "I spelled rat with two 'rs' until I was fifteen. At twenty, although I was at Law School, I had mastered Portuguese grammar and was just beginning my study of Philosophy and the Sociology of Language”(Fundamentos, p. 10).

Life

• "From the time I got married I began to be interested in the

problems of education in a systematic way” (Fundamentos, p. 11).

• From 1940 to 1950, he spent much of his free time reading widely,

cataloguing and taking voluminous notes. Of the 572 books he has

noted in his own hand, he began to read in Spanish in 1943, in

French in 1944, in English in 1947.

He began Law School at the University of Recife in 1943. In 1944 he married Elza Maia Costa Oliveira, a primary school teacher. He began to practice law but stops before defending his first client, a young dentist (Pedagogy of Hope, p. 17):

• I said to Elza: "You know what, I'm not going to be a lawyer." • Elza said: "I was hoping for that. You're an educator"

Life

• Freire vehemently maintains that his familiarity with Marxism never distanced him from Christ: "I never understood how to reconcile fellowship with Christ with the exploitation of other human beings, or to reconcile a love for Christ with racial, gender and class discrimination. By the same token, I could never reconcile the Left's liberating discourse with the Left's discriminatory practice along the lines of race, gender, and class. What a shocking contradiction: to be, at the same time, a leftist and a racist.”

• During the 1970s, in an interview in Australia, Freire told some greatly surprised reporters that “it was in the woods of Recife, refuge of slaves, and the ravines where the oppressed of Brazil live, coupled with my love for Christ and hope that He is the light, that led me to Marx. My relationship with Marx never suggested that I abandon Christ" (Letters to Cristina, 86-7).

Socio-cultural Context

• Recife, which is located in the northeastern part of Brazil was located in a nation ravaged by great disparities.

• Because Brazil ended the institution of slavery only in increments, the effect of the slave economy perpetuated the economic injustice evidenced by pandemic poverty.

• It was in this setting of working with the illiterate poor in the slums of Recife that Freire became politicized.

Socio-cultural Context• Freire believed that the process of making an

individual literate was somehow contributing to the reproduction of poverty.

• For Freire, literacy is a quality of consciousness, not simply mastery of a morally neutral technique. He believed that there was embedded in the curriculum being taught to the poor a message that would ultimately reinforce and perpetuate their poverty.

Socio-cultural context • Apart from his academic and institutional life,

Freire participated in movements for popular education in the early 1960s. • The most important of these were the Movement

for Popular Culture (MCP) in Recife, the Cultural Extension Service (SEC) and the "Bare feet can also learn to read" campaign where Freire got his first chance to try out his method with three hundred sugarcane sharecroppers.

• When that experiment proved successful, he was invited by President Joao Belchior Goulart to implement a national literacy campaign. The program intended to make five million adults literate and politically progressive within the first year.

Contributions • Five aspects of Paulo Freire’s work:

1. Dialogue: Freire was able to take the discussion on several steps with his insistence that dialogue involves respect. It should not involve one person acting on another, but rather people working with each other.

2. Praxis: action that is informed and linked to certain values. Dialogue wasn't just about deepening understanding but was part of making a difference in the world. Dialogue in itself is a co-operative activity involving respect. The process is important and can be seen as enhancing community and building social capital and to leading us to act in ways that make for justice and human flourishing.

3. The idea of building a “pedagogy of the oppressed” or a “pedagogy of hope”: an important element of concern was conscientization which is developing consciousness, but consciousness that is understood to have the power to transform reality.

Contributions

4. Use of metaphors drawn from Christian sources: the division between teachers and learners can be transcended. Ex: The educator for liberation has to die as the unilateral educator of the educatees, in order to be born again as the educator-educatee of the educatees-educators. An educator is a person who has to live in the deep significance of Easter.

5. Paulo Freire's insistence on situating educational activity in the lived experience of participants: lead to a series of possibilities for the way informal educators can approach practice.

Needs of the learner

• It was in this process of interaction between technique, curriculum, and human development that Freire based his philosophy which intertwined a mix of pedagogic, economic and social issues.

• He linked the task of ending oppression and perpetuating poverty as part of the process where the learner is liberated though education. A liberation which frees the learner to reach their full potential.

• What he sought to identify was what he believed to be the poor’s loss of a sense of individuality, and with it a sense of agency.

Freire’s Impact• He sought to revolutionize not only

the curriculum, but the student-teacher relationship. – He believed that teachers approached

their students from a position of power which was ultimately demeaning.

– This position of authority was used as a medium to condition the student to the existence of power relationships.

– In Freire’s model, the teacher was not just a aloof expert, but more of a colleague embarking with the learner on a journey.

Freire’s Impact

• Freire’s major contribution to the field of peace education is the insight that education is, necessarily, a form of politics.

• He averred that schooling is never neutral; instead, it always serves some interests and impedes others.

• Freire’s magnetism lies in his insistence that schooling can be used for liberation, just as it has been used for oppression.

• He argued that through liberatory education, people come to understand social systems of oppression and equip themselves to act to change those situations.

How does this relate to Adult Education?

• 6 characteristic of the Adult Learner:

The self-concept of the learner: adults have a self-concept of being responsible for their own lives and their own decisions.

Prior Experience of the learner: the richest resource for learning resides in the learner.

Lastly, Freire saw the educator as someone whose task it was to teach the learner about more than mere context.