PAULO FREIRE
Paulo Regulus Neves Friere was born in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil on September 19, 1921. He died on May 2, 1997.
Due to the 1929 world depression, the Freire family was forced to leave Recife, settling in nearby Jaboatao. In Jaboatao, Freire began to be aware of the world around him and that all was not well, since many of his friends lived in extreme poverty. He describes himself as a "connective boy" because, among his day to day companions, were some who ate less and some who hardly ever ate. "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."
Freire returned to Recife to attend high school. His mother managed to convince the director of the Oswaldo Cruz private high school, Aluizio Pessoa de Araujo, to accept Paulo as a scholarship student.
Paulo's father died in 1934, when Paulo was thirteen. As an awkward if intelligent adolescent from the outskirts of the city, making his way in a traditional upper class boy's highschool was not easy. It took him a while to adapt to his new surroundings but 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."
He began Law School at the University of Recife in 1943. In 1944 he married Elza Maia Costa Oliveira, a primary school teacher. He begins to practice law but stops before defending his first client, a young dentist: "I said to Elza: "You know what, I'm not going to be a lawyer."
"From the time I got married I began to be interested in the problems of education in a systematic way". "From 1940 to 1950, he spent much of his free time reading widely, cataloguing and taking voluminous notes. He began to read in Spanish in 1943, in French in 1944 and in English in 1947."
In 1946, he takes over as Director of the Pernambuco Department of Education and Culture of SESI (the Social Service of Industry), a government agency decreed by then President Eurico Gaspar Dutra, to use funds from a national confederation of factory owners to create programs for the betterment of the standard of living of their workers.
In Pedagogy of Hope, Freire details the significance of his ten years at SESI, an experience which provided the experiential basis for his doctoral dissertation (1959) and his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom, a work he finished and published in the early years of his Chilean exile (1965): "One of our tasks as progressive educators, today and yesterday, is to use the past that influences the present. The past was not only a time of authoritarianism and imposed silence, but also a time that generated a culture of resistance as an answer to the violence of power.
In 1957, Paulo was appointed Director of SESI's Pernambuco Regional Chapter's Division of Research and Planning and began to travel widely throughout the Northeast as a consultant to other SESI programs. In 1959, his thesis was accepted and he was appointed Professor of the History and Philosophy of Education at the School of Fine Arts. In 1961, he was made Director of the Division of Culture and Recreation of the City of Recife's Department of Archives and Culture. In 1963, he became one of fifteen "Pioneer Council Members" chosen by Governor Miguel Arraes to preside over matters of education and culture in the state of Pernambuco.
Freire's reputation as a progressive educator was enhanced by the publication of his report titled, "Education of Adults and Marginal Populations: the Mocambos Problem," the paper proposed that adult education in the Pernambuco mocambos had to have its foundation in the consciousness of the day-to-day situations lived by the learners; educational work toward democracy would only be achieved if the literacy process was not about or for man, but with man. This attitude heralded that a more progressive segment of Brazilian society was ready to break with the archaic, authoritarian, discriminatory, elitist traditions which had for centuries enslaved the Brazilian poor.
In almost sixteen years of exile, Freire established residence in only three places: Santiago (1964-69) where he worked as an adult educator for two organizations having to do with agricultural improvement and land reform, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1969-70) where he taught for ten months at Harvard and Geneva, Switzerland (1970-79) where he worked and traveled under the auspices of the World Council of Churches as a kind of roving ambassador of literacy to the Third World. In this capacity, he traveled the world, dialoguing and lecturing about his ideas and experiences and taking part in seminars, conferences, congresses and advising revolutionary governments in Africa, Central America and the Caribbean.
Freire returned to Brazil in 1980 with the dream of "relearning it" after an absence of sixteen years.
In 1988, the Workers' Party (PT), which Freire had helped found, won the Municipal elections in Sao Paulo. He was invited to take over the position of Municipal Secretary of Education in the administration of Mayor Luiza Erundina, a Pernambucan native and long-time acquaintance of Freire's. After two exhausting years implementing of a new educational model for the city's rundown k-12 schools which served almost a million children and instituting MOVA, a new program for adult literacy which was 'farmed out' to grassroots organizations and NGOs but based on his methodological concepts, Freire decided it was time to transfer his leadership role to a team of colleagues and go back to full time teaching and writing. He died, as he had lived, engaged in unceasing intellectual labor and inspired by the struggle of the Brazilian people for an equitable and democratic government.
Paulo Freire is not easy to read. He uses unfamiliar terms and terms, which he has, created:
Freirian Concepts
1. Those who are under the power of others in virtually any way, Freire calls the oppressed.
2. Those who dominate others in virtually any way, Freire calls the oppressors.
3. In Freire's view, the oppressed often even internalize the oppressor's view even though we suffer oppression from that very view.
4. When things get too oppressive, the oppressed often rise up and overthrow the oppressors. However, when they do this it is almost always so that they themselves can now become the oppressors.
5. The true destiny of the oppressed is not to rise up and not overthrow the oppressors, but to liberate the world from oppressors, to create a world in which no one oppresses the other, but each lives in his or her own authentic humanity.
6. In Freire's writings, this goal is both asserted without argument, and is, of course, highly utopian.
7. The path to this goal is "the pedagogy of the oppressed." A guide for how to achieve this goal
8. The pedagogy of the oppressed is a process wherein the oppressed develop critical awareness that they are oppressed, and that oppression is dehumanization. Then, and only then, after this consciousness is achieved, can they move toward liberation of both themselves and the oppressors.
9. Praxis is the interrelationship between theory (or insight) and action. Action that does not follow from theory is weak and untrustworthy. Theory which doesn't lead to action is mere game playing.
10. Dialectical: This is an Hegelian concept, which Marx also used. The notion is this. A way to be in the world (call it A) develops in history. It embodies a view of the world. However, the view has in it directions which ensure its own end. For example: using limited fuels as a source of energy carries with it the logic of its own end, since it uses up what it needs to have for energy. When the contradiction comes (this moment when the logic of the dialectic is fulfilled), history goes on, and a new concept will develop which overcomes the previous contradiction, but, given the imperfection of our ideas and of history itself, will again be fraught with contradictions. This process is called the dialectical process of history.
11. The oppressor-oppressed dialectic is, according to at least Hegel, Marx and Freire (and many many others) one such historical dialectic.False generosity and paternalism: The point Freire is making with these terms is that when a system is structured so that there are oppressors and oppressed, some of the oppressor class feel genuine compassion toward the suffering of the oppressed. They move to isolate that suffering and to aid it, not to address the structures of society which are the root causes. Thus, to the extent that they relieve any suffering they do so by hiding from themselves the genuine causes, their own privilege as oppressor class members.
NOTE: Fanon-ian and Freire-ian thought are complimentary to one another and in many ways similar. Although they use different terms, one theory, or set of observances, takes into account/and expands upon the other. Another main distinction both writers share is that their philosophies are praxis driven. They were never meant to serve as mere philosophy, rather they both serve dual-roles of 1. A psychological treatment/liberation of the oppressed & 2. A blueprint and call for action