Paulo Freire and education for freedom

He was a man who inspired; who left a left a legacy long beyond his 75 years. A man who empowered, and continues to empower others, even though he passed nearly three decades ago. A man of hope. Of belief in the power of every individual. Every human being. And that we could learn through each other—with each other—together.

This man was Paulo Freire.

His life was dedicated to helping others to unlock their every potential, to help others break the chains that tie them down. His words and his teachings, his pedagogy, has been taught the world over, and changed lives. It still does.

Paulo Freire was born in Recife, Brazil, on September 19, 1921. He faced poverty and hunger early. It would impact him throughout his life. 

“I didn’t understand anything because of my hunger,” he said. “I wasn’t dumb. It wasn’t lack of interest. My social condition didn’t allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge.”

He studied law and philosophy. He worked as a Portuguese teacher. Above all, he was an educator. See, he believed that true learning, transformative learning, didn’t come through rote memorization and repetition. It came through creative critical thinking. Through personalizing lessons.

He believed that education could truly be a means of liberation. Of empowerment. And he put this into practice in Northeastern Brazil.

In the early 1960s, working through the University of Recife, he and a team of youth educators helped to teach 300 farmworkers in the town of Angicos, Rio Grande do Norte, to read and write in just 40 hours. 

It was a huge success and it had profound significance. It meant they could now vote. See, at the time, only people who could read or write could vote in Brazil. The Brazilian government brought Freire on to replicate the program around the country. 

But plans were cut short by the 1964 military coup. Paulo Freire was imprisoned and then exiled to Bolivia and then Chile. 

“The right to ask questions,” he would say later, “is the reason I was jailed and the reason I was exiled.”

He published books: “Education as a Practice of Freedom,” and then, in 1968, his infamous “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.”

The book is so profound it is still used and taught around the world today. And it was banned in Brazil under the dictatorship.

In it, he attacks what he calls the “Banking Model” of education, where students are empty cups to be filled up by their teachers. This, he writes, is an instrument for oppression, while a “problem-posing concept of education is an instrument for liberation.”

“Education,” he writes, should be “a mutual process” where teachers work with the students, not teach at them.

Freire writes in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed that “In their political activity, the dominant elites utilize the banking concept to encourage passivity in the oppressed… and take advantage of that passivity to ‘fill’ that consciousness with slogans which create even more fear of freedom. This practice is incompatible with a truly liberating course of action, which, by presenting the oppressors slogans as a problem, helps the oppressed to ‘eject’ those slogans from within themselves.”

Simple words, yet so profound. And so, so different from most of the teaching and education around us. Paulo Freire was truly ahead of his time. 

He inspired. And he resisted. Literacy and learning can be a tool to empower. It can be a tool to change the world. But, as he wrote, “Education doesn’t transform the world. Education changes people. People transform the world.”

Paulo Freire would teach at Harvard University and work as an education advisor with the World Council of Churches. He would act as an advisor on education reform in numerous former Portuguese colonies in Africa. He finally returned home to Brazil in 1980, after 16 years in exile.

His message is still carried across the country and the globe. From land occupations by Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement to university classrooms. His pedagogy and praxis continues to be a roadmap for liberation and freedom. A roadmap for lifting us all up. A roadmap for democracy 

He writes in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “For the truly humanist educator and the authentic revolutionary, the object of action is the reality to be transformed by them together with other people—not other men and women themselves. The oppressors are the ones who act upon the people to indoctrinate them and adjust them to a reality which must remain untouched.

“But the more I think of what I did, what I proposed, the more I understand myself much more as a thinker and a kind of epistemologist, proposing a critical way of thinking and a critical way of teaching, of knowing to the teachers in order for them to work differently with the students.”

Paulo Freire died on May 2, 1997, at the age of 75. His words and his teachings are just as important today as ever. And, in fact, in Brazil, while in office then-President Jair Bolsonaro pushed to ban his work and his books from university classrooms.

Creative and critical discussions in classrooms and in the public are prohibited for only one reason—to control the message on behalf of the powerful and the elite, and ensure that long-standing systems of oppression continue unchallenged and untouched. Something, sadly, that we are seeing more and more of, today, in the United States and elsewhere around the world.

Hi folks, thanks for listening. I’m your host Michael Fox. Paulo Freire was born today, More than a century ago. 

My dear friend Catherine Murphy has just finished a documentary on Paulo Freire’s life and in particular his work in Angicos, Rio Grande do Norte. It’s called “Reading the World.” You must check it out. It debuted in Brazil recently. It’s still making the rounds on the festival circuit. I’ll add a link in the show notes to the trailer and the website.

The clip I used of Paulo Freire speaking in English comes from an interview he did with the International Literacy Institute in 1996. It’s on YouTube. I’ll add a link to that too in the show notes. 

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This is the latest episode of Stories of Resistance, a podcast series produced by The Real News. Each week, I bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.

“My philosophical conviction is that we did not come to keep the world as it is. We came to the world in order to remake the world. We have to change reality.”