18 Paulo Freire

Prof. R. Indira

Paulo Freire

The future isn’t something hidden in a corner. The future is something we build in the present.

Paulo Freire

Introduction

Paulo Freire (1921-1997) is a prominent educational theorist whose work lies entirely in the 20th century. In this module you will learn about the views of this eminent theorist and activist on education. The first part of the module contains an inspirational biographical sketch of Paulo Freire. As you read you will realise that knowing about the life of a theorist helps one appreciate the theoretical perspective with greater sensitivity and insight. The next section of this module provides an overview of Freire’s thoughts on education as presented in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, his path breaking work.

Paulo Freire: A Brief Biography

Paulo Freire was born in Recife in Brazil in 1921. He belonged to a middle-class family. However, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Freire’s family like many others at the time began to experience poverty and hardship. In 1931 his family moved to the less expensive city of Jaboatão dos Guararapes to make ends meet. In October 1934 when his father died, Freire had a first-hand brush with the realities of all that impoverishment entails. His education suffered and he started lagging behind in school. He would play with the other poor children. Freire stated later that poverty and hunger severely affected his ability to learn.

“I didn’t understand anything because of my hunger. 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 … So, because of my problems my older brother began to work and to help us, and I began to eat more. At that time I was in the second or third year of high school, and I always had problems. When I began to eat better, I began understanding better what I was reading.” (Quoted in) Gadotti, 1994:

These early experiences shaped a great deal of Freire’s thinking and influenced his decision to dedicate his life to improving the lives of the poor. Even while still in high school, the prodigious Freire, surmounting all his odds, started teaching grammar. At that time itself he was intuitively drawn towards a dialogic system of education wherein one strived to understand the needs of students. After a brief stint as a lawyer, Freire ventured into a career in teaching. From 1941-1947 he was teaching Portuguese in secondary schools. As a teacher Freire got first-hand experience of the teaching methods that were then in practice in Portugal– methods of which he had been at the receiving end as a student. He also had a close view of the operational curricula and attitudes and behaviours of teachers and students alike.

The school, as we all know, is an important agency of socialisation in modern society. It is an institution par excellence that teaches the necessary skills and knowledge that renders children into socially competent individuals. In the process it also teaches children to respect authority and to follow social norms. All this demands the scrupulous exercise of authority through sanctions of various kinds. And school teachers are the manifest symbols of that authority and the executors of the same. Therefore the school by its very nature is not meant to be a democratic institution. It necessarily has a visible authority structure and a rigid regimen of functioning. However, this situation gets problematic when the school exists in a polity that has not yet embraced democracy such was Brazil in the time of Freire. In such a situation the school can become a hegemonic instrument that perpetuates the tyranny of the military dictatorship. It is against this backdrop that the revolutionising ideas of Paulo Freire must be understood.

The Emergence of a New Educational Paradigm

As a teacher, observing the state of educational practices Freire started devising a new paradigm of education – one that he thought would be sensitive to the needs of students. He subsequently became actively involved in adult education and workers’ training. Freire was selected the first Director of the Department of Cultural Extension of the University of Recife. Freire was also appointed director of Education at SESI (Serviço Social da Indústria), a non-profit employers’ institution meant for promoting the welfare of workers and their families and improving their quality of life. Once again in close association with the members of the working class, this time as an adult with the ability and the opportunity to contribute, Freire realised how difficult it was for them to relate to the educational concepts that were taught to them. The educational practices that had been formulated by the elite were disconnected from the real lives of the working class. As a result working class students could not relate to the education provided to them and therefore would not participate wholeheartedly in the educational process appreciating its full merits and usefulness.

According to Gadotti (Reading Paulo Freire), this tenure led Freire to truly understand the needs of people and it became the starting point in the development of Freire’s educational thought. During this time Freire also participated in the ‘Movement for Popular Culture’, and argued for democracy through his lectures. His Ph.D. thesis, “Present-day Education in Brazil,” which was written in 1959 also presented a case for democracy and the democratization of education.

Paulo Freire soon gained international recognition for his novel practices in literacy training in Brazil. In 1962 a large number of illiterate farmworkers were taught to read and write in a short span of only 45 days using Freire’s innovative techniques.

The government approved thousands of such “cultural circles” to be set up all over Brazil. However in 1964 the then government was overthrown in a coup and a military dictatorship was established. The military regime was not to take kindly to dissentions and interventions of any kind.

Military Dictatorship and Exile

The coup of 1964, as it were, changed the course of Freire’s life. Freire was penalised for his convictions. He was jailed by the new government for his anti-establishment and pro-democracy activities. In June 1964, Freire was imprisoned in Brazil for 70 days as a traitor. He was subsequently forced into a political exile that lasted fifteen years. After a brief stay in exile in Bolivia, he lived in Chile for five years working in the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement.

In 1967 Freire published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom. In 1968 he wrote his famous Pedagogy of the Oppressed. These works brought Freire’s scholarship to the gaze of international academia. He earned critical acclaim and was offered a position as visiting professor at Harvard. In 1969 Freire became visiting scholar at Harvard University and then moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where he was special educational adviser to the World Congress of Churches. During this time, Freire travelled worldwide helping various governments to implement his popular educational and literacy reforms. Some of the most significant achievements of his educational techniques were in Guinea-Bissau, a West African country, where he advised the national literacy programme. Freire’s Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau scripts the pedagogic journey therewith.

The Homecoming and Laurels

In 1979, after 15 years of exile, Freire was allowed to return to Brazil. Back home he joined the Workers’ Party in São Paulo and from 1980 to 1986 supervised its adult literacy project. When the party came to power in 1988, Freire was appointed Minister of Education for the City of São Paulo. His policy interventions and innovations in literacy training as Minister were commendable. In 1991 the Paulo Freire Institute was established in São Paulo as a centre for the development of new educational theories and practices.

Freire has been recognised worldwide for the profound impact of his ideas on educational practice. He was conferred with numerous awards including honorary doctorates. Some of these are the King Balduin Prize for International Development, the prize for Outstanding Christian Educators in 1985 with Elza, his wife, and the UNESCO Prize for Education for Peace for 1986.

In Freire, we see a scholar who also engages in political and social reform. His work illustrates the coming together of theorising and activism. Therefore even those who hold a disdain for armchair scholars also appreciate Paulo Freire. This is probably also one of the reasons for his immense popularity.

Freire breathed his last in Sao Paulo, Brazil on May 2, 1997 but he lives through all his work and myriad admirers.

Freire’s Pedagogy: An Overview

Freire’s work was mainly to do with literacy and was driven by the desire to help individuals overcome their sense of powerlessness by being able to act on their own behalf. Freire’s most well-known book is Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It was first published in Portuguese in 1968, and was translated into English by Myra Ramos and published in 1970. The book stirred popular imagination and rightfully earned its place in the discourse on education and pedagogic practices. The book is considered one of the foundational texts on critical pedagogy. It has been translated into several languages and has sold nearly a million copies worldwide. Anyone interested in the field of education would benefit from reading this work.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed Paulo Freire, proposes a pedagogic paradigm with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society. Dedicated to the underprivileged or the oppressed, and based on his own experiences while helping Brazilian adults to read and write, the work encloses a detailed Marxist class analysis in its exploration of the relationship between the teacher and the taught. Freire critics the traditional educational paradigm that domesticates people and calls instead for a liberating education. Education for domestication tames and conditions people into resigning to their lot in life. Libertarian education on the other hand gives people self-confidence and a sense of being able to choose their own destiny.

According to Freire, the pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and libertarian pedagogy, has two distinct stages. In the first stage the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in which the reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong only to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation.

Throughout this and successive books, Freire has argued for a system of education that emphasises learning as an act of culture and freedom. Freire’s concept of literacy is not just literateness – of being able to read and write – but it is also to do with enabling a person to think for oneself. Literacy is also political literacy. It enables a person to recognise the hidden valuations in operation in any social context and to develop the strength to align with others to surmount these oppressive situations. Freire calls for “Conscientization” to counter any oppressive state of affairs. Conscientization is a process by which the learner moves towards a critical awareness of his state of being, and the dissonance between what things are and how they should be. Freire urges for moving away from what he calls the “Culture of Silence”, a pattern of living in which dominated individuals are so overwhelmed by their dominators that they lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by the dominant culture. Freire’s pedagogy of literacy education involves the development of this critical consciousness (Portuguese conscientização). The formation of critical consciousness allows people to question the nature of their historical and social situation with a view to acting as subjects in the creation of a democratic society. It must be kept in mind that Brazil was for the main not a democratic state at the time. However even today when we live in a largely democratic and ‘free’ world closer scrutiny reveals varying degrees of oppression that renders the continuing validity of Freire’s work.

Being poor and in Brazil, contributed in significant measure to the turn that the ideas of Paulo Freire took. His fight for democracy and for representation of people is reflected in his ideas on education. This is something that the sociology of knowledge teaches us to appreciate. Growing up in the heart of a country of the third world in the midst of hunger and poverty, Freire understood early in life what deprivation meant. Because Freire’s own life world was constituted of poor rural families and labourers, he had a deep understanding of their lives and of the adverse impact of socio-economic deprivation on access to and availing of educational opportunity, and the successful attainment of academic milestones.

For education, Freire calls for a dialogic exchange between teachers and students, where both learn, both question, both reflect and both participate in the creation of meaning. In conventional patterns of schooling teachers engage in a monologue which is inflicted upon the students. There is an essential asymmetry and one-sidedness in the teacher-taught relationship where the teacher doles out knowledge to the student who is to be appropriately grateful for this beneficence. Freire questions this paradigm and suggests a relationship of mutual give and take between the teacher and the taught. Concretely, this pedagogy begins with the teacher mingling among the community, asking questions of the people and learning about their day-to-day lives. The teacher can do so also by compiling a list of words that are most used in their daily lives. These frequently used words are symbolic of the principal preoccupations around which the lives of those people are centred. Through an understanding of these conceptions the teacher can begin to appreciate the social reality of the people, and can reformulate the classroom interaction through a set of ideas that the students can actually relate to. In other words, for Freire, the teacher should develop a list of “generative” words and themes which could lead to discussion in classes or cultural circles (Gadotti, 1994: 20). By making words relevant to the lives of people, the process of conscientization could begin, in which the social construction of reality can emerge.

People exteriorise their view of the world, their ways of thinking about and facing the world. It is through this that generative themes develop. Generative themes are not characteristics found per se in human individuals, but are derived through the relationship between the human and the world. The more actively people engage with investigating their themes, the more they open up to critical awareness of their reality. Themes exist in people and their relationships with the world: themes take on much more meaning than any object or thing. It is very important that the emotions expressed by these themes are ultimately human aspirations, feelings and objectives. In order to understand these themes, one must understand the mindsets of the individuals and the make-up of their social reality. This interest in generative themes becomes a starting point to the investigation of them and through those to the search for a common reality, common self-awareness, common educational practices.

The investigation of these themes is thus not an exercise in psychoanalysis; rather it is a means to develop a basis for an educational programme, looking to examine relations between students and educators. A beginning basis for this investigation should look into links between themes, concentrating on areas of conflict and placing it in the historical context. Both education and investigation of themes must comprise communication and the shared experience of reality. Education and thematic investigation come to play at different moments of the same process in the continuing hunt for the perfect educational practice.

Freire offers a systematic analysis of the relationship between oppressed people and their oppressors. For Freire, being oppressed is a dehumanising experience. Overall, Freire is concerned with the liberation of any oppressed people and the transformation of all humans – oppressed and their oppressors alike into self-actualised, creative, empowered beings. Freire believes that in order to be able to transcend their oppression, the oppressed must first become fully aware of their condition. Further, they must come to the understanding that oppression is not a natural or inevitable condition, but an injustice that they are capable of overcoming through struggle. Through their ignorance about the nature of their condition the oppressed tend to take on the values of the oppressors – accepting their prescriptions, and often times participate in the process of transmitting the oppressive order. They have to strive to recognise and acknowledge their condition and creatively visualise another world free of that oppression. It is here that the notion of praxis comes into play as a liberating process. Freire exhorts the oppressed to liberate themselves through praxis or informed, concerted, revolutionary action. Those who are oppressed have a duty towards themselves to strive to redeem themselves from their oppression. The oppressed have to free themselves and their oppressors alike. Invoking the ideas of dialectics postulated by Marx and Engels, Freire observes, “This then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. … Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both” (2005: 44). When praxis comes forward as action, it becomes a means by which the oppressed can apply their latent creativity to the labour of liberation.

Freire explains how oppression gets justified in society. He points out that in any society the balance of power between the oppressor and the oppressed remains relatively stable. By virtue of habit and conditioning the powerless in society start accepting their servitude to the point that they can in fact become afraid of freedom or asking for it. Consequently Freire likens the oppressor to the coloniser, and the oppressed to the colonised. The oppressed have to learn to fight for their freedom. According to Freire, “Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion” (2005: 47).

This oppression has to be overcome through a mutual process between the oppressor and the oppressed. As a Marxian theorist, Freire sets forth this relationship between the oppressors and the oppressed as a dialectic exemplifying a dynamic contradiction between two states of being that can and must be resolved through a disruptive struggle toward synthesis. According to Freire, freedom comes as a result of praxis – informed action – when a balance between theory and practice is reached.

Furthermore, according to Freire, traditional pedagogy follows what he calls the banking model, a metaphor used by Freire that suggests students are considered empty bank accounts that should remain open to deposits made by the teacher. The analogy of a child’s piggy bank is useful to illustrate the nature of prevalent educational practices. According to Freire, the student in the conventional model of education is treated like a piggy bank – an inert receptacle to be filled with knowledge. He coined the phrase “Banking Education”, alluding to an educational system where learners are passive recipients of knowledge that is pre-selected for them to be ‘deposited’ into their minds as if the mind were to be a bank for information. Freire launches a tirade against this banking approach to education. Freire rejects this banking approach, asserting that it results in the dehumanization of both the students and the teachers. Further, he argues that the banking approach entrenches oppressive attitudes and social practices. “Education becomes an act of depositing, the students as the depositories the teachers as depositors. This type of education is “suffering from narration sickness” (2005: 71). The banking concept of education reinforces the power of the oppressor. Oppressors consider knowledge as a gift to be bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those who are considered ignorant. The consequence of this is an experience of education where students are socialised to accept the passive role the teachers impose on them and thereby also their ascribed social statuses. Students are taught to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited by the teacher who is a de facto oppressor. According to Freire in this manner, we prevent the rise of free thinking individuals who would strive to enhance and surpass the aspirations of those great leaders who have fought for equality and the end of oppression.

For Freire, the student has to be accorded the status of an aware co-participant in the process of knowledge acquisition. The learner has to be treated as a co-creator of knowledge. Knowledge is to be attained through a dialogic relationship between the teacher and the taught. This attempt to use education as a means of consciously shaping the person and society is called conscientization, a term first coined by Freire in this work.

In contrast to this banking method, the concept of education that Freire introduces is called problem posing education. This introduces liberating education for students. “Problem posing education breaks the vertical hierarchical patterns characteristic of banking education and the teacher and the student become “jointly responsible for a process in which both can grow” (2005: 80). This is a reciprocal approach to education. According to Freire, this “authentic” approach to education must allow people to be aware of their own incompleteness and strive to be more fully human in their quest for perfection. This concept of education does not subdivide activity of teacher from student, but on the contrary, the educators constantly reformulate their reflections based on the reflections of the students. They create a level of knowledge together allowing the “students to feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to the challenge” (ibid. 81). The techniques of the banking method are a way of teacher instruction to an alienated student. Through the problem posing method, the oppressed have a chance to become people who are willing to fight for a just world where all live in harmony, share ideals and decisions to create a united purposeful world. Freire concludes that “any situation in which some individuals, (the oppressors) prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. To alienate human beings from their own decision making is to change them into objects” (2005: 85). He questions how oppressors can even consider themselves human while simultaneously trying to prevent others from being human. For Freire, domination and dictatorship should soon cease to exist through progressive steps forward taken by the people for themselves through the guidance of a revolutionary nucleus. That then is the essence of praxis or ideology translated into purposeful action.

Freire elucidates how dialogue can be used as an instrument to free the oppressed, through the use of cooperation, unity, organisation and cultural synthesis. This to Freire is in contrast to “antidialogics” which uses conquest, manipulation, cultural invasion, and the strategy of divide and rule. Freire argues that dialogue is a necessity for revolution. When dialogue is thwarted it results in dehumanisation and perpetuates the status quo. The oppressed have different relationships with the oppressors and the revolutionaries. Freire believes that it is necessary to obtain communion in order to achieve transformation. He refers to the oppressors as dominators, because they dominate the oppressed instead of helping them to achieve transformation as they are bound to conserve the existing order. The ways that the oppressors keep the oppressed in their state of oppression are through conquest, dividing, manipulation and cultural invasion. For Freire these are all mechanisms of antidialogical action. Conquest is a way of controlling the lives of others. Oppressive regimes divide people and deny unification. They manipulate them through myths and accomplish control through pacts between the dominant and dominated classes. And finally they maintain domination through cultural invasion wherein the beliefs of the leader are imposed on the subjects. In order to become liberated the oppressed group must form a unity despite resistance from dominators. As Freire points out, “To dominate, the dominator has no choice but to deny true praxis to the people, deny them the right to say their own word and think their own thoughts” (2005: 126). Revolutionaries on the other the hand use dialogue to bring about transformation. They need cooperation, unity for liberation, organization and cultural synthesis in order to achieve transformation. In the true pattern of Marx’s discourse this transformation has to take the following steps: People must show cooperation towards the revolutionary in order for a change. They need to unify in order to reach liberation through a communion. They must be organised and have common goals and values in sight. And, finally they must allow cultural synthesis, which is different from cultural invasion as it is achieved through persuasion and for their own emancipation. “In order to carry out the revolution, revolutionary leaders undoubtedly require the adherence of the people” (ibid. 165).

Dialogue also denotes the refusal to passively accept one’s existence. It is a creative process implying reciprocity and mutuality. It is a creative encounter between people. This means further that it must not serve for the purpose of domination or application of force. All humans have to accept the mortality of their existence and realise that the privileged among them have no special attributes or powers as such other than those conferred by their social positions. This knowledge of the universality of the human situation becomes the common ground for dialogue. Education is thus to be viewed as a dialogue between people trying to learn together in their pursuit of perfection. It leads both the teacher and the taught to learn more than they already know. True dialogue has to be based upon critical thinking and this critical thinking should evolve by the interaction between the various participants in the dialogue. Through dialogue people communicate mutually and this communication is therefore an absolute imperative. According to Freire, numerous political and educational policies and plans have failed because of over reliance on one sided views and lack of reciprocal communication.

Humans exist in a world that is constantly changing and altering. It is a world that we are aware of. People have an awareness of themselves as of their surroundings. For the reason that humans are conscious beings, a relationship derives between their own freedom of action and the constraints that limit it. Freire calls these “limit situations.” We have seen all through that Freire has developed some terms utilising them as concepts that are uniquely his. The use of the term limit situation with regard to the dimensions of human praxis is one such terminological usage. Limit situations are not necessarily hopeless or insurmountable but act as fetters that need to be broken. It is important to recognise one’s potential as a human being. Only humans have the power to create knowledge; humans not only produce material goods, tangible objects and commodities but also social ideas, themes and concepts. As humans separate themselves from their own activities, execute their own decisions and test their relationships with others and the world, humans start overcoming the situations which seem to limit them. In this way with through a radical pedagogic paradigm Freire charts the course of transformation from an exploitative social order to an egalitarian one.

Paulo Freire: An Evaluation

Freire has used dichotomies that represent opposite characteristics and yet together constitute a unity. Some of Freire’s dichotomies include the student-teacher, oppressed-oppressor, colonised-coloniser, and the dialogics-antidialogics dichotomy. This is by far one of the best illustrations of Marx’s dialectic method in application. While for Marx and Engels the dialectic operates in the infra-structure, Freire’s pedagogic discourse shows how the same configuration can be seen in the domain of the superstructure and indeed, the emergence of revolutionary consciousness within the superstructure can also effect far reaching social transformations. The entire work is a brilliant rendering and carrying forward of the methodological teachings of Karl Marx.

The notion of Praxis as a dynamic workable construct has been truly energised by Freire. It is through praxis that when the oppressed unveil the world of oppression they commit themselves to conquering it in their quest for an egalitarian social order. As long as there is the struggle for more humane educational practices, for deeper insights into dynamics of power and oppression, and the desire of people to construct their own realities exists, the praxis espoused by Freire justly shows a way towards liberation, both in thought and deed.

Conclusion

Paulo Freire’s life is an inspiring illustration of how great people often turn adversity into opportunity. We saw that as an educationist, Freire has espoused the cause of a learner-centred educational paradigm. It is true that even in present times the models of schooling that are followed as well as the curricula, have little relevance to the mass of the people. And those who successfully delve through this crucible are acknowledged in society. Freire’s ideas of replacing a regressive pedagogy marked by the oppressive authority of the pedagogue with a more egalitarian liberating system of education are therefore necessitated even today. The progressive educational ventures that Freire spearheaded still remain worthy of emulating. Living in a democracy as we do, if we look at Freire, momentarily setting aside his revolutionary agenda, we can appreciate the full worth of Freire’s pedagogic thought.

Even divested of their revolutionary underpinnings Freire’s pedagogic exercises are relevant for bringing the marginalised into the fold of mainstream educational systems and practices.

REFERENCES

• v Freire, Paulo. 2005. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Ed. New York: Continuum Books.
• v Gadotti, Moacir. 1994. Reading Paulo Freire: His Life and Work. SUNY Series, Teacher Empowerment & School Reform Paperback, New York: SUNY Press.
• v Pathak, Avijit. 2002. Social Implications of Schooling: Knowledge, Pedagogy and Consciousness. Delhi: Rainbow Publishers Ltd.
• v Ross, E. Wayne and Rich Gibson (Editors). 2007. “The Frozen Dialectics of Paulo Freire”, in Neoliberalism and Education Reform: Critical Education & Ethics. New York: Hampton Press.
• v Shotton, J. R. 1998. Learning and Freedom: Policy, Pedagogy and Paradigms in Indian Education and Schooling. New Delhi: Sage Publications.