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Freire's Life and Work : Brief Biography of Paulo Freire by Peter Lownd
Paulo Regulus Neves Friere was born in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil on September 19, 1921 . He died on May 2, 1997 . He described his parents often in his writing: "Joaquim Temistocles Freire from Rio Grande do Norte, an officer of the Pernambuco military police, a spiritist, although not a member of any religious circle, good, intelligent, capable of loving: my father. (...) Edeltrudis Neves Freire of Pernambuco, Catholic, sweet, good, just: my mother." (INODEP, Fundamentos revolucionarios de pedagogia popular, p. 5) Due to economic problems caused by the 1929 world depression, the Freire family was forced to leave Recife, settling in nearby Jaboatao where Paulo spent part of his childhood and adolescence. In Jaboatao, he began to be aware of the world around him and that all was not well, since many of his friends lived in extreme poverty. He describes himself as a "connective boy" because, among his day to day companions, were some who ate less and some who hardly ever ate. "In Jaboatao, when I was ten, I began to think that there were a lot of things in the world that were not going well." (Fundamentos, p. 10) Freire returned to Recife to attend high school. His mother managed to convince the director of the Oswaldo Cruz private high school, Aluizio Pessoa de Araujo, to accept Paulo as a scholarship student. Later, he returned to the school as a teacher of Portuguese. Paulo's father died in 1934, when his son was thirteen. As an awkward if intelligent adolescent from the outskirts of the city, making his way in a traditional upper class boy's highschool was not easy. It took him a while to adapt to his new surroundings but he took his studies seriously: "I spelled rat with two 'rs' until I was fifteen. At twenty, although I was at Law School, I had mastered Portuguese grammar and was just beginning my study of Philosophy and the Sociology of Language." (Fundamentos, p. 10) He began Law School at the University of Recife in 1943. In 1944 he married Elza Maia Costa Oliveira, a primary school teacher. He begins to practice law but stops before defending his first client, a young dentist: "I said to Elza: "You know what, I'm not going to be a lawyer." Elza said: "I was hoping for that. You're an educator" (Pedagogy of Hope, p. 17). "From the time I got married I began to be interested in the problems of education in a systematic way" (Fundamentos, p. 11). "From 1940 to 1950, he spent much of his free time reading widely, cataloguing and taking voluminous notes. Of the 572 books he has noted in his own hand, we know he began to read in Spanish in 1943 , in French in 1944, in English in 1947." (Pedagogy of Hope, Brazilian Ed., notes p. 243) Freire vehemently maintains that his familiarity with Marxism never distanced him from Christ: "I never understood how to reconcile fellowship with Christ with the exploitation of other human beings, or to reconcile a love for Christ with racial, gender and class discrimination. By the same token, I could never reconcile the Left's liberating discourse with the Left's discriminatory practice along the lines of race, gender, and class. What a shocking contradiction: to be, at the same time, a leftist and a racist. During the 1970s, in an interview in Australia, I told some greatly surprised reporters that it was in the woods of Recife, refuge of slaves, and the ravines where the oppressed of Brazil live, coupled with my love for Christ and hope that He is the light, that led me to Marx. My relationship with Marx never suggested that I abandon Christ." (Letters to Cristina, 86-7) In 1946, he takes over as Director of the Pernambuco Department of Education and Culture of SESI (the Social Service of Industry), a government agency decreed by then President Eurico Gaspar Dutra, to use funds from a national confederation of factory owners to create programs for the betterment of the standard of living of their workers. In Pedagogy of Hope, Freire details the significance of his ten years at SESI, an experience which provided the experiential basis for his doctoral dissertation ( 1959) and his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom, a work he finished and published in the early years of his Chilean exile (1965 ): "One of our tasks as progressive educators, today and yesterday, is to use the past that influences the present. The past was not only a time of authoritarianism and imposed silence, but also a time that generated a culture of resistance as an answer to the violence of power. The Brazilian present has been enveloped by these colonial legacies: silence and the resistance to it-the search for a voice-and the rebelliousness that must become more critically revolutionary. This was the theme of my academic thesis, "Education and Present-Day Brazil," which I defended in 1959 at the University of Recife. I incorporated parts of this thesis in my first book . I combined my experiences at SESI with critical reflection and extensive reading from a foundational biography." (Letters to Cristina, p.87) In 1957 , Paulo was appointed Director of SESI's Pernambuco Regional Chapter's Division of Research and Planning and began to travel widely throughout the Northeast as a consultant to other SESI programs. He was also one of the founders of the Capibaribe Institute in Recife which remains a (private) school well known for its commitment to a high-level scientific, ethical and moral education and democratic stance. He also sat on Recife's Educational Consulting Board. In 1959 , his thesis was accepted and he was appointed Professor of the History and Philosophy of Education at the School of Fine Arts. In 1961, he was made Director of the Division of Culture and Recreation of the City of Recife's Department of Archives and Culture. In 1963, he became one of fifteen "Pioneer Council Members" chosen by Governor Miguel Arraes to preside over matters of education and culture in the state of Pernambuco. Freire's reputation as a progressive educator was enhanced when he was presented as the chief writer and creator of the ideas contained in Theme III of the Pernambuco Regional Commission's report to the Second National Conference on Adult Education , in Rio de Janeiro in 1958. Entitled the "Education of Adults and Marginal Populations: the Mocambos Problem," the paper proposed that adult education in the Pernambuco mocambos had to have its foundation in the consciousness of the day-to-day situations lived by the learners; educational work toward democracy would only be achieved if the literacy process was not about or for man, but with man. This attitude heralded that a more progressive segment of Brazilian society was ready to break with the archaic, authoritarian, discriminatory, elitist traditions which had for centuries enslaved the Brazilian poor. Apart from his academic and institutional life, Freire participated in movements for popular education in the early 1960s. The most important of these were the Movement for Popular Culture (MCP) in Recife, the Cultural Extension Service (SEC) at the University of Recife (now the Federal University of Pernambuco: UFPE) and the "Bare feet can also learn to read" campaign in the neighboring state of Rio Grande do Norte where Freire got his first chance to try out his method with three hundred sugarcane sharecroppers in the interior village of Angicos in 1963. When that experiment proved successful, he was invited by President Joao Belchior Goulart to implement a national literacy campaign. The program intended to make five million adults literate and politically progressive within the first year . According to the national law at the time, adults could only vote if they were functionally literate to some degree. For years this limiting of the Brazilian electoral college had worked in favor of the hegemonic oligarchy. Now the landowners were threatened by the possibility that the peasants would organize into leagues, become literate and swell the ranks of the voters. The coup d'etat of March 31, 1964 deposed the Goulart government and imposed military rule which lasted for over twenty years. Freire was arrested twice and imprisoned in Olinda and Recife for over two months before receiving political asylum in the Bolivian embassy in Rio and proceeding to La Paz where he found the altitude and uncertain politics contrary to his health and left for Santiago, Chile within a month. In almost sixteen years of exile, Freire established residence in only three places: Santiago (1964-69) where he worked as an adult educator for two organizations having to do with agricultural improvement and land reform, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1969-70) where he taught for ten months at Harvard and Geneva, Switzerland (1970-79) where he worked and traveled under the auspices of the World Council of Churches as a kind of roving ambassador of literacy to the Third World. In this capacity, he traveled the world, dialoguing and lecturing about his ideas and experiences and taking part in seminars, conferences, congresses and advising revolutionary governments in Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. Freire returned to Brazil in 1980 with the dream of "relearning it" after an absence of sixteen years. After cutting through lots of 'red tape' and political diffidence, he was offered professorial assignments at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo (PUC) and the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). In 1988, the Workers' Party (PT), which Freire had helped found, won the Municipal elections in Sao Paulo. He was invited to take over the position of Municipal Secretary of Education in the administration of Mayor Luiza Erundina, a Pernambucan native and long-time acquaintance of Freire's. After two exhausting years implementing of a new educational model for the city's rundown k-12 schools which served almost a million children and instituting MOVA, a new program for adult literacy which was 'farmed out' to grassroots organizations and NGOs but based on his methodological concepts, Freire decided it was time to transfer his leadership role to a team of colleagues and go back to full time teaching and writing. He died, as he had lived, engaged in unceasing intellectual labor and inspired by the struggle of the Brazilian people for an equitable and democratic government. Text taken from: http://www.paulofreireinstitute.org/Documents/PF-life_and_work_by_Peter.html
Image(s) taken from: http://www.arts.anu.edu.au/sss/pols3017/theorists.htm
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Paulo Freire - Last interview - 1st part
Paulo Freire - Last interview- 2st part
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Excelente texto, me encantó conocer a Paulo Regulus Neves Friere, uno de los "buenos" de esta fuerte batalla que está librando el mundo en el campo de las ideas. Minerva Reyes
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