4to
Educador Social.
Damian
Torino, Jéssica Ibáñez, Gabriela Cachés.
IFD
Juan Amós Comenio.
Obituary:
Paulo Freire
Paulo
Freire, the Brazilian educationist, was one of the most influential
philosophers of his generation.
He was
born into a middle-class Catholic family in Recife in north-eastern
Brazil in 1921. Despite the relative wealth of his family, he
experienced poverty during the Depression of the 1930s, but unlike
most children was able to complete secondary school and go on to
study law at Recife University. There he met Elza, a teacher, whom he
married in 1944.
He
became a teacher of Portuguese and under the influence of his mother,
got involved in church organisations as a means of addressing the
injustices he saw around him. However, he rapidly became aware of the
limits of charitable work and the need to move from working "for
the people" to working "with the people".
In
1959 Freire wrote a doctoral thesis on his experiences of teaching
literacy which was so well received that he was appointed Chair of
the Philosophy of Education in Recife University. In 1962 he became
coordinator of a large literacy programme in Recife and the next year
was appointed head of the Brazilian National Literacy Programme.
However,
following a military coup in 1964, the Brazilian Literacy programme
was terminated. Freire was imprisoned, accused of subversion, and
subsequently exiled to Bolivia and then Chile.
In the
following years, whilst working on adult education with the Institute
of Agrarian Reform in Chile, Freire's ideas matured and he started
writing what would become his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(1970). Through this radical pedagogy, he hoped, adults would learn
to perceive social, political and economic contradictions and would
take action against the opressive elements of reality (a process that
Freire called "conscientisation").
In the
book, Freire condemned traditional education systems, which he called
"banking systems", where students are passive recipients of
deposits from an "all-knowing" teacher. In contrast he
proposed an education based on dialogue, generating a permanent
process of reflection and action.
If
learning to read and write is to constitute an act of knowing, the
learners must assume from the beginning the role of creative
subjects. It is not a matter of memorising and repeating given
syllables, words and phrases, but rather, of reflecting critically on
the process of reading and writing itself and the profound
significance of language.
By the
time Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in English in 1972,
Freire was already being acclaimed internationally as "the
authentic voice of the Third World". He became a visiting
professor at Harvard University.
He
first visited London in 1973, returning to Britain in 1987 when he
helped review the Edinburgh Adult Learning Programme.
As
democracy returned to Brazil in the 1980s, Freire was able to return
to his homeland, where he became closely involved in the Workers'
Party, which won control of the state of Sao Paulo and nearly won
presidential elections in 1989. He became Secretary for Education in
Sao Paulo for a short period before retiring in order to dedicate
himself to writing.
Freire
was as charismatic, absorbing and radical as ever. He succeeded in
reaching a new generation of educationists who, with his inspiration,
continue to work for an empowering and liberating approach to
education around the world.
Paulo
Freire died Sao Paulo 2 May 1997.
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