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Born to middle class parents in Recife, Brazil, Freire knew poverty and hunger during the Great Depression, an experience that would shape his concern for the poor and his view on education.
Freire entered the University of Recife enrolling in the Faculty of Law, but also studying philosophy and the psychology of language.
After passing the bar, he left law, and worked as a teacher in secondary schools teaching Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira a fellow teacher. The two would work together for the rest of her life while raising four children.
In 1946, Freire was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the State of Pernambuco. In working with the poor, Freire developed his ideas of about education and the needs of the poor.
In 1961, he was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension of the University of Recife, and in 1962 he had the first opportunity for widespread application of his theories, when 300 farmworkers were taught to read and write in just 45 days. In response to this experiment, the Brazilian govenment approved the creation of thousands of cultural circles across the country.
In 1964, a military coup put an end to that effort, and resulted in the imprisonment of Freire as a traitor for 70 days. After a brief exile in Bolivia, Friere worked in Chile for five years for the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement . In 1967, Friere published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom.
The book was well received, and Freire was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard in 1969. The previous year, he wrote his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed which was publised in Spanish and English in 1970. It wasn't published in Brazil until 1974.
After a year in Cambridge, Freire moved to Geneva, Switzerland to work as a special education adviser to the World Congress of Churches .
In 1979, he was able to return to Brazil, and moved back in 1980. Friere joined the Workers' Party (PT) in São Paulo, and acted as a supervisor for its adult literacy project from 1980 to 1986. When the PT prevailed in the municipal elections in 1986, Freire was appoted Secretary of Education for the City of São Paulo.
In 1986, his wife Elza died and Freire remarried Maria Araújo Freire, who continues with her own radical educational work.
In 1991, the Paulo Freire Institute was established in São Paulo to extend and elaborate his theories of popular education. The Institute maintains the Freire achives.
Paulo Freire contributes a philosophy of education that comes not only from the more classical approaches stemming from PlatoFor the computing technology, see PLATO System. Plato ( Greek: Platon (c. 427 BC c. 347 BC) was an immensely influential classical Greek philosopher, student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, writer, and founder of the Academy in Athens. Plato, who is be, but also from modern Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers. In fact, in many ways his Pedagogy of the Oppressed may best be read as an extension of or reply to Frantz FanonFrantz Fanon ( 1925 1961) was perhaps the preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements throughout the world for the past forty two's The Wretched of the EarthThe Wretched of the Earth is often viewed as one of Frantz Fanon's more controversial books, if not his most controversial, since it was written during and regarding the Algerian struggle for independence from colonial rule. The first chapter, "Concerning, which laid strong emphasis on the need to provide native populations with an education which was simultaneously new and modern (rather than traditional) and anti-colonial (that is, that was not simply an extension of the culture of the colonizer).
Freire is best-known for his attack on what he called the banking concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. Of course, this is not really a new move — RousseauJean Jacques Rousseau ( June 28, 1712 July 2, 1778) was a Swiss-French philosopher, writer, political theorist, and self-taught composer. Biography of Rousseau Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and died in Ermenonville (28 miles northeast of Paris's conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from the tabula rasaTabula rasa ( Latin: blank slate) is the notion that individual human beings are born "blank" (with no built-in mental content), and that their identity is defined entirely by events after birth. However, two uses of the term in modern usage are fundament (which is basically the same as the "banking concept"), and thinkers like John DeweyJohn Dewey ( October 20, 1859 June 1, 1952) was a American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, whose thought has been greatly influential in the United States and around the world. He is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophi and Alfred North Whitehead were strongly critical of the transmission of mere "facts" as the goal of education. Freire's work is one of the foundations of critical pedagogy.
More challenging, however, is Freire's strong aversion to the teacher-student dichotomy. This dichotomy is admitted in Rousseau and constrained in Dewey, but Freire comes close to insisting that it should be completely abolished. This is hard to imagine in absolute terms (there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship), but what Freire suggests is that a deep reciprocality be inserted into our notions of teacher and student. Freire wants us to think in terms of teacher-student and student-teacher, that is, a teacher who learns and a learner who teaches, as the basic roles of classroom participation.
This is one of the few attempts anywhere to implement something like democracy as an educational method and not merely a goal of democratic education. Even Dewey, for whom democracy was a touchstone, did not integrate democratic practices fully into his methods. (Though this was in part a function of Dewey's attitudes toward individuality.) However, in its early, strong form this kind of classroom has sometimes been criticized on the grounds that it can mask rather than overcome the teacher's authority.
See also: conscientization
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