Assignment 1b

Paulo Freire’s (1927-1997) has been called one of the most influential thinkers about education (Smith, M.K., 1997, 2002.) During his lifetime, Paulo Freire dealt with the experiences of the great depression. Incidentally, these experiences of hunger and poverty shaped his way of thinking and made him a strong thinker. Instead of practicing law, he became a teacher to secondary school and taught Portuguese. In 1946, he was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in Brazil. This is where he began to use liberation theology. In 1962, while the director of the Department of Cultural Extension of Recife University, he taught 300 sugarcane workers to read and write in 45 days. In 1964, he was imprisoned by a military coup. Later he was exiled and began working for the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United, in Chile. In 1967, he published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom, and following that book, he wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968. This ended up being his most famous book. He was then offered a visiting professorship at Harvard the following year. After a year, Freire then moved to Switzerland and worked as a special education adviser to the World Council of Churches. In 1980, he moved back to Brazil and in 1988 was appointed Secretary of Education for Sao Paulo.

Freire did some amazing work with his campaign “Bare feet can also learn to read” this is where he taught the sugarcane workers to read and write. This program indented to teach five million adults to be literate. This was during a time where only literate adults were able to vote. This scared the landowners that the peasants would soon begin to vote against them. This was when Freire was imprisoned and then later exiled.

Freire goals were to bring education to the poor and illiterate. He had such an impact that in Africa they were willing to adapt Freire’s methods to teach at a national level non-formal adult education. The way Latin American and Africa took, Freire’s methods to break away from political and economical oppression many industrial societies have taken his methods as a tool for political empowerment. Freire felt that dialog was an existential necessity because some much of human contact is done with language and speaking.

Work Cited

Freire, Paulo. "Chapter 3." Foreword. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. By Freire. 8 Sept. 2008 http://www.marxists.org/subject/education/freire/pedagogy/ch03.htm.

Paulo Freire. 29 Aug. 2008. Wikipedia. 8 Sept. 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Paulo_Freire.

"Paulo Freire's Work." Paulo Freire Institute. UCLA. 8 Sept. 2008 http://www.paulofreireinstitute.org/.

Smith, Mark K. "Paulo Freire and informal education." Paulo Freire . 2 July 2008. The Encyclopedia of Informal Education. 8 Sept. 2008 http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm.