Paulo Freire
Interview with Freire
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFWjnkFy
pFA
• “Perhaps the most influential thinker about
education in the late twentieth century,
Paulo Freire has been particularly popular
with informal educators with his emphasis
on dialogue and his concern for the
oppressed.”
Biography
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Born- September 19,1921
Died- May 2, 1997
Nationality- Brazilian
Occupation- Educator, author
Known for- Theories of education
Inspiration came from- Jean-Paul Satre, Louis
Althusser, Frantz Fanon (French philosophers),
Karl Marx (german philosopher), and many more
philosophers of his time.
• Freire was born in 1921 to a middle class family in
Recife, Brazil. Like many other families living
during the 1930s, his suffered from poverty and
hunger during the Great Depression.
• Freire stated that poverty had severely affected
his ability to learn and in grade school he fell two
grades behind his fellow classmates.
• As a result of this, Freire was determined to
dedicate his life to improving the lives of the
poor.
• After his family’s situation improved, Freire
entered the University of Recife where he
enrolled in the Faculty of Law and also studied
philosophy and the psychology of language.
• He worked part-time as an instructor of
Portuguese in a secondary school while
attending classes.
• During this period he read the works of Marx
and also Catholic intellectuals, all of whom
strongly influenced his educational
philosophy.
• In 1944, Freire married a woman named Eliza
Maia Costa, a grade school teacher. Eliza gave
Freire three daughters and two sons.
• As a parent, Paulo's interest in theories began to
grow, leading him to do more extensive reading on
education, philosophy, and the sociology of
education than in law.
• Freire actually passed the bar to become a lawyer,
but quickly abandoned that career to go work as a
welfare official and later as a director of the
Department of Education and Culture of the Social
Service in the State of Pernambuco.
• While working there he made many
connections that got him into direct contact
with the urban poor.
• The assignments he undertook there led him
to begin to communicate with the
dispossessed that would later develop into his
method for adult education.
• He was awarded a doctoral degree at the
University of Recife, because of his great work.
• Freire went on to become the first director of
the university of Recife’s Cultural Extension
Service, which brought literacy programs to
thousands of peasants in the northeast.
• Freire won the attention of the poor and gave
them hope that they could start to have a say
in their homeland.
• The military decided to over through the
reform minded, therefore sending Freire to jail
for seventy days.
• In Jail, Freire began his first educational work,
Education as the Practice of Freedom.
• Once released from jail, Freire worked in Chile
for five years with adult education programs.
• Because of Freire’s work Chile was
acknowledgment as one of the five nations,
which had best succeeded in overcoming
illiteracy.
• Toward the 1969, Freire left Latin America to
come to the United States, where he taught as
a Visiting Professor at Harvard’s center for
Studies in Education and Development and
was also Fellow at the Center for the Study of
Development and Social Change.
• It is during this time that he wrote his famous
work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
• Education is to be the path to permanent
freedom.
• In 1970, Freire left Harvard to serve as a
consultant and eventually as Assistant
Secretary of Education for the World Council
of Churches in Switzerland. He traveled all
over the world assisting educational programs
of the newly independent countries.
• In 1979, Paulo returned from exile under an
amnesty agreement and took a faculty
position at the University of Sao Paulo.
• In 1992, Freire celebrated his 70th birthday in
New York with over two hundred adult
educators, reformers, scholars and activists.
• He was honored for all his work done across
other countries and is still recognized today as
one of the greatest educators of our time.
Conclusion
• Freire believed educators task was to teach the learner
more than just mere content.
• He sought to offer the poor not only the tools of
human agency but the awareness to apply those tools
in a manner that would allow individuals the freedom
to reach their full potential.
• He believed the purpose of education is to better the
human condition.
• His courage enabled him to cope with the daily
challenges of educating Brazils poor.
• And courage led Freire to acknowledge the broader
impact and the realities of their profession.
Sources
• Smith, M. K. (1997, 2002)’Paulo Freire and
informal education’, the encyclopedia of
informal education.
[www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm. Last
update: May 29, 2012]
• Encyclopedia of World Biography. (n.d.). Paulo
freire biography. Retrieved from
http://biography.yourdictionary.com/paulofreire