Paulo Freire 1921 – 1997

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher and one of the founders of critical pedagogy. After early work with adult literacy programs among the poor of northeastern Brazil, he developed a method of teaching reading and writing that took the lived experience of the learners as its starting point. Driven into exile by the 1964 military coup, he wrote his Pedagogy of the Oppressed during long years in Chile and elsewhere, articulating a philosophy in which education is either an instrument of domestication or of liberation. He returned to Brazil after the end of military rule and served as Secretary of Education for the city of Sao Paulo.

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was born at Recife in north-eastern Brazil in September 1921, the son of a military police officer; the family was reduced to genuine hunger by the Depression, an experience that shaped his commitment to literacy and the poor. He read law at the University of Recife but never practised, taught Portuguese in secondary school, and from 1946 directed the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service of Industry in Pernambuco. His method was tested with three hundred sugarcane workers at Angicos in 1962–1963, who learned to read and write in forty-five days; the military coup of 1964 brought him seventy days of prison and fifteen years of exile in Bolivia, Chile, the United States, and Geneva, where he advised the World Council of Churches.

His major books are Education as the Practice of Freedom (1967), the world-circulated Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Cultural Action for Freedom (1970), Pedagogy in Process (1978), Pedagogy of Hope (1992), Letters to Cristina (1994), Pedagogy of Freedom (1996), and the posthumous Pedagogy of Indignation (2000). He returned to Brazil in 1980, helped found the Workers' Party, and served as Secretary of Education in São Paulo from 1989 to 1991.

Freire diagnosed dominant pedagogy as a 'banking model' that deposits prefabricated knowledge into passive students and proposed instead a dialogical, problem-posing education through which learners come to read both word and world and to take their place as subjects of history. The process he called conscientização — critical consciousness — became the foundation of the worldwide field of critical pedagogy. He died of a heart attack in São Paulo in May 1997.