Pre-Reading Blog

Paulo Freire was born in Recife, Brazil in 1921. He was born to a middle class family that experienced the poverty and economic issues of the Great Depression during 1929. This experience clearly shaped the way he thought about the poor and helped him to develop his particular educational viewpoint. During 1946, Freire worked among the illiterate poor and started to have a non-orthodox form that can be considered as liberation theology which was first applied in 1961 when 300 sugarcane workers learned how to read and write in only 45 days; this way the Brazilian government approved the cultural circles across the country. In 1967 he published his first book followed by his most popular book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This work was very successful but it wasn’t published in Brazil until 1974 because he was a Christian socialist and the country didn’t allow the work to be published until a political liberalization took place.

Paulo Freire was concerned with a philosophy of education that came from classical thoughts from Plato and also from modern Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers that followed a way of thinking based on educating native populations not with traditional teaching that was just an extension of the culture of the colonizer, but with new, modern, and anti-colonial education. Critical pedagogy was the foundation of Freire’s practices, this is contrary to the “banking concept of education” in which the student is viewed as an empty recipient to be filled by the professor. He thought that there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship but most important he suggests that a deep reciprocity needs to be inserted into the teacher and student notion, this way the teacher can learn and the learner can teach as the main role in the education activity, and the authority the teacher holds must not be allowed to degenerate into authoritarianism. This way the educational method can be a practice of democracy.

"There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
—Jane Thompson, drawing on Paulo Freire