FREIRE, PAULO (1921–1997)

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator whose revolutionary pedagogical theory influenced educational and social movements throughout the world and whose philosophical writings influenced academic disciplines that include theology, sociology, anthropology, applied linguistics, pedagogy, and cultural studies. He was born to a middle-class family in Recife, in the state of Pernambuco in the northeast of Brazil. His early work in adult literacy–the most famous being his literacy experiments in the town of Angicos in Rio Grande do Norte–was terminated after the military coup in 1964. That year he went into exile, during which time he lived in Bolivia; then Chile where he worked for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Chilean Institute for Agrarian Reform, and where he wrote his most important work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970); Mexico; the United States where he held a brief appointment at Harvard University's Center for Studies in Development and Social Change; and Switzerland where he worked for the World Council of Churches as the director of their education program. He also served as an adviser for various governments, most notably the government of Guinea-Bissau. In 1980 he returned to Brazil to teach and later to serve as secretary of education for Sāo Paulo. He worked as a consultant for revolutionary governments such as the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and the government of Julius K. Nyerere in Tanzania. From 1985 until his death in 1997, Freire served as the honorary president of the International Council for Adult Education. Freire's conception of education as a deeply political project oriented toward the transformation of society has been crucial to the education of revolutionary societies and societies undergoing civil war, as well as established Western democracies. Freire's work has exercised considerable influence among progressive educators in the West, especially in the context of emerging traditions of critical pedagogy, bilingual education, and multicultural education.

Freire's revolutionary pedagogy starts from a deep love for, and humility before, poor and oppressed people and a respect for their "common sense," which constitutes a knowledge no less important than the scientific knowledge of the professional. This humility makes possible a condition of reciprocal trust and communication between the educator, who also learns, and the student, who also teaches. Thus, education becomes a "communion" between participants in a dialogue characterized by a reflexive, reciprocal, and socially relevant exchange, rather than the unilateral action of one individual agent for the benefit of the other. Nevertheless, this does not amount to a celebration of the untrammeled core of consciousness of the oppressed, in which the educator recedes into the background as a mere facilitator. Freire conceived of authentic teaching as enacting a clear authority, rather than being authoritarian. The teacher, in his conception, is not neutral, but intervenes in the educational situation in order to help the student to overcome those aspects of his or her social constructs that are paralyzing, and to learn to think critically. In a similar fashion, Freire validated and affirmed the experiences of the oppressed without automatically legitimizing or validating their content. All experiences–including those of the teacher–had to be interrogated in order to lay bare their ideological assumptions and presuppositions. The benchmark that Freire used for evaluating experiences grew out of a Christianized Marxist humanism. From this position, Freire urged both students and teachers to unlearn their race, class, and gender privileges and to engage in a dialogue with those whose experiences are very different from their own. Thus, he did not uncritically affirm student or teacher experiences but provided the conceptual tools with which to critically interrogate them so as to minimize their politically domesticating influences.

Conceptual Tools

Banking education. Freire criticized prevailing forms of education as reducing students to the status of passive objects to be acted upon by the teacher. In this traditional form of education it is the job of the teacher to deposit in the minds of the students, considered to be empty in an absolute ignorance, the bits of information that constitute knowledge. Freire called this banking education. The goal of banking education is to immobilize the people within existing frameworks of power by conditioning them to accept that meaning and historical agency are the sole property of the oppressor. Educators within the dominant culture and class fractions often characterize the oppressed as marginal, pathological, and helpless. In the banking model, knowledge is taken to be a gift that is bestowed upon the student by the teacher. Freire viewed this false generosity on the part of the oppressor–which ostensibly aims to incorporate and improve the oppressed–as a crucial means of domination by the capitalist class. The indispensable soil of good teaching consists of creating the pedagogical conditions for genuine dialogue, which maintains that teachers should not impose their views on students, but neither should they camouflage them nor drain them of political and ethical import.

Problem-posing method. Against the banking model, Freire proposed a dialogical problem-posing method of education. In this model, the teacher and student become co-investigators of knowledge and of the world. Instead of suggesting to students that their situation in society has been transcendentally fixed by nature or reason, as the banking model does, Freire's problem-posing education invites the oppressed to explore their reality as a "problem" to be transformed. The content of this education cannot be determined necessarily in advance, through the expertise of the educator, but must instead arise from the lived experiences or reality of the students. It is not the task of the educator to provide the answer to the problems that these situations present, but to help students to achieve a form of critical thinking (or conscientization ) that will make possible an awareness of society as mutable and potentially open to transformation. Once they are able to see the world as a transformable situation, rather than an unthinkable and inescapable stasis, it becomes possible for students to imagine a new and different reality.

In order, however, to undertake this process, the oppressed must challenge their own internalization of the oppressor. The oppressed are accustomed to thinking of themselves as "less than." They have been conditioned to view as complete and human only the dominating practices of the oppressor, so that to fully become human means to simulate these practices. Against a "fear of freedom" that protects them from a cataclysmic reorganization of their being, the oppressed in dialogue engage in an existential process of dis-identifying with "the oppressor housed within." This dis-identification allows them to begin the process of imagining a new being and a new life as subjects of their own history.

Culture circle. The concrete basis for Freire's dialogical system of education is the culture circle, in which students and coordinator together discuss generative themes that have significance within the context of students' lives. These themes, which are related to nature, culture, work, and relationships, are discovered through the cooperative research of educators and students. They express, in an open rather than propagandistic fashion, the principle contradictions that confront the students in their world. These themes are then represented in the form of codifications (usually visual representations) that are taken as the basis for dialogue within the circle. As students decode these representations, they recognize them as situations in which they themselves are involved as subjects. The process of critical consciousness formation is initiated when students learn to read the codifications in their situationality, rather than simply experiencing them, and this makes possible the intervention by students in society. As the culture circle comes to recognize the need for print literacy, the visual codifications are accompanied by words to which they correspond. Students learn to read these words in the process of reading the aspects of the world with which they are linked.

Although this system of codifications has been very successful in promoting print literacy among adult students, Freire always emphasized that it should not be approached mechanically, but rather as a process of creation and awakening of consciousness. For Freire, it is a mistake to speak of reading as solely the decoding of text. Rather, reading is a process of apprehending power and causality in society and one's location in it. Awareness of the historicity of social life makes it possible for students to imagine its re-creation. Literacy is thus a "self-transformation producing a stance of intervention" (Freire 1988, p. 404). Literacy programs that appropriate parts of Freire's method while ignoring the essential politicization of the process of reading the world as a limit situation to be overcome distort and subvert the process of literacy education. For Freire, authentic education is always a "practice of freedom" rather than an alienating inculcation of skills.

Philosophy of Education

Freire's philosophy of education is not a simple method but rather an organic political consciousness. The domination of some by others must be overcome, in his view, so that the humanization of all can take place. Authoritarian forms of education, in serving to reinforce the oppressors' view of the world, and their material privilege in it, constitute an obstacle to the liberation of human beings. The means of this liberation is a praxis, or process of action and reflection, which simultaneously names reality and acts to change it. Freire criticized views that emphasized either the objective or subjective aspect of social transformation, and insisted that revolutionary change takes place precisely through the consistency of a critical commitment in both word and deed. This dialectical unity is expressed in his formulation, "To speak a true word is to transform the world" (Freire 1996, p. 68).

Freire's educational project was conceived in solidarity with anticapitalist and anti-imperialist movements throughout the world. It calls upon the more privileged educational and revolutionary leaders to commit "class suicide" and to struggle in partnership with the oppressed. Though this appeal is firmly grounded in a Marxist political analysis, which calls for the reconfiguring of systems of production and distribution, Freire rejected elitist and sectarian versions of socialism in favor of a vision of revolution from "below" based on the work of autonomous popular organizations. Not only does Freire's project involve a material reorganization of society, but a cultural reorganization as well. Given the history of European imperialism, an emancipatory education of the oppressed involves a dismantling of colonial structures and ideologies. The literacy projects he undertook in former Portuguese colonies in Africa included an emphasis on the reaffirmation of the people's indigenous cultures against their negation by the legacy of the metropolitan invaders.

Freire's work constitutes a rejection of voluntarism and idealism as well as determinism and objectivism. The originality of Freire's thought consists in his synthesis of a number of philosophical and political traditions and his application of them to the pedagogical encounter. Thus, the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave informs his vision of liberation from authoritarian forms of education; the existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Buber makes possible his description of the self-transformation of the oppressed into a space of radical intersubjectivity; the historical materialism of Karl Marx influences his conception of the historicity of social relations; his emphasis on love as a necessary precondition of authentic education has an affinity with radical Christian liberation theology; and the anti-imperialist revolutionism of Ernesto Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon undergird his notion of the "oppressor housed within" as well as his commitment to a praxis of militant anticolonialism.

Freire's pedagogy implies an important emphasis on the imagination, though this is not an aspect that has been emphasized enough in writings about him. The transformation of social conditions involves a rethinking of the world as a particular world, capable of being changed. But the reframing proposed here depends upon the power of the imagination to see outside, beyond, and against what is. More than a cognitive or emotional potential, the human imagination, in Freire's view, is capable of a radical and productive envisioning that exceeds the limits of the given. It is in this capacity that everyone's humanity consists, and for this reason it can never be the gift of the teacher to the student. Rather, educator-student and student-educator work together to mobilize the imagination in the service of creating a vision of a new society. It is here that Freire's notion of education as an ontological vocation for bringing about social justice becomes most clear. For Freire, this vocation is an endless struggle because critical awareness itself can only be a necessary precondition for it. Because liberation as a goal is always underburdened of a necessary assurance that critical awareness will propel the subject into the world of concrete praxis, the critical education must constantly be engaged in attempts to undress social structures and formations of oppression within the social universe of capital without a guarantee that such a struggle will bring about the desired results.

Criticism

Since its first enunciation, Freire's educational theory has been criticized from various quarters. Naturally, conservatives who are opposed to the political horizon of what is essentially a revolutionary project of emancipation have been quick to condemn him as demagogic and utopian. Freire has faced criticism from the left as well. Some Marxists have been suspicious of the Christian influences in his work and have accused him of idealism in his view of popular consciousness. Freire has also been criticized by feminists and others for failing to take into account the radical differences between forms of oppression, as well as their complex and contradictory instantiation in subjects. It has been pointed out that Freire's writing suffers from sexism in its language and from a patriarchal notion of revolution and subjecthood, as well as a lack of emphasis on domination based on race and ethnicity. Postmodernists have pointed to the contradiction between Freire's sense of the historicity and contingency of social formations versus his vision of liberation as a universal human vocation.

Freire was always responsive to critics, and in his later work undertook a process of self-criticism in regard to his own sexism. He also sought to develop a more nuanced view of oppression and subjectivity as relational and discursively as well as materially embedded. However, Freire was suspicious of postmodernists who felt that the Marxist legacy of class struggle was obsolete and whose antiracist and antisexist efforts at educational reform did little to alleviate–and often worked to exacerbate–existing divisions of labor based on social relations of capitalist exploitation. Freire's insights continue to be of crucial importance. In the very gesture of his turning from the vaults of official knowledge to the open space of humanity, history, and poetry–the potential space of dialogical problem-posing education–Freire points the way for teachers and others who would refuse their determination by the increasingly enveloping inhuman social order. To believe in that space when it is persistently obscured, erased, or repudiated remains the duty of truly progressive educators. Freire's work continues to be indispensable for liberatory education, and his insights remain of value to all who are committed to the struggle against oppression.

See also: Education Reform.

bibliography

Darder, Antonia. 2002. Reinventing Paulo Freire. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Freire, Paulo. 1973. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Seabury.

Freire, Paulo. 1978. Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bisseau. New York: Seabury.

Freire, Paulo. 1988. "The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom and Education and Conscientizacao." In Perspectives on Literacy, ed. Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose, pp. 398–409. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Freire, Paulo. 1993. Pedagogy of the City. New York: Continuum.

Freire, Paulo. 1994. Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Continuum.

Freire, Paulo. 1996. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). New York: Continuum.

hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress. New York: Routledge.

Mayo, Peter. 1999. Gramsci, Freire, and Adult Education: Possibilities for Transformative Action. London: Zed Books.

McLaren, Peter. 2000. Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.

Peter McLaren

Noah De Lissovoy

Freire, Paulo 1921-1997

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Until his death from a heart attack on May 2, 1997, Paulo Freire devoted his life and work to a philosophy and practice of education committed to the empowerment and social transformation of communities marginalized by poverty, colonialism, and political repression. Freire worked extensively in Brazil, Chile, and West Africa, where he developed a method for teaching literacy to poor, working class, and indigenous people. The development of Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed” cannot be viewed in isolation from his experience of life in Brazil during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in 1921 in Recife, a port town in the northeast province of Pernambuco, Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was raised in a middle class family that experienced severe poverty during the Great Depression. Poverty and hunger during Freire’s youth caused several setbacks in his formal schooling, an experience that shaped the later development of his educational philosophy. Freire studied law at the University of Recife, but gave up his career as a lawyer after his first case to teach Portuguese in secondary schools (Gadotti 1994). Freire married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveria, a primary school teacher, in 1944. Throughout their marriage, Elza encouraged and inspired Freire to devote himself to his work in the field of adult education.

Northeast Brazil in the early 1960s was a region of acute social polarization and economic suffering. It was during this time that Freire began to elaborate a model of politically engaged pedagogy against the prevailing “culture of silence” under which the illiterate poor labored. He emphasized the dialectic relationship between theory and practice, which is expressed through three generative themes in his work: concientization, dialogic learning, and his critique of the banking approach to education. Underpinning these three generative themes is a student-centered system of learning that challenges how knowledge is constructed in the formal education system and in society at large. Freire’s student-centered approach stands in stark contrast to conventional educational practice, which he referred to as the “banking approach” to education. He argued that conventional learning was the tool of the elite because it treated students as objects upon which knowledge is “deposited.” Genuine learning, for Freire, could only be achieved through lived experience, critical reflection, and praxis (Aronowitz 1993, p. 9).

The idea that “experiences are lived and not transplanted” is a central tenet of Freire’s philosophy (Gadotti 1994, p. 46). Concientization is the key process by which students develop a critical awareness of the world based on the concrete experience of their everyday lives. The development of critical awareness through concientization alters power relations between students and teachers, the colonized and the colonizer, thereby transforming objects of knowledge into historical subjects (Freire 1997). Freire proposed that a dialogical theory of action based on communication and cooperation was necessary not only for understanding the mediating role of historical, colonial, and class relations (concientization), but also for the active work of changing them. Dialogic action challenges mediating social realities by posing them as problems that can be analyzed critically by those who have direct experience of them. Dialogue becomes a form of collective praxis directly concerned with unveiling inequitable conditions obscured by the ruling classes.

The success of Freire’s method for teaching literacy to Brazil’s impoverished citizens, coupled with his efforts to affect social and political change among the landless poor, led to his imprisonment after a reactionary military coup in 1964. He spent a total of seventy days in jail. After his imprisonment in Brazil, Freire was exiled to Chile, where he remained for five years before taking up posts at Harvard University and in Switzerland. He did not return to Brazil until 1980. Freire’s most famous book is Pedagogy of the Oppressed, originally published in 1970. Other key works include Cultural Action for Freedom (1972), Education: The Practice of Freedom (1976), and Pedagogy of the Heart (1997). Thirty years on from his most influential work, the commitment to education as a pathway to liberation that Freire helped inspire remains a vibrant part of the social justice campaigns of grassroots activists, social policymakers, educators, and scholars (see McLaren 2000).

SEE ALSO Education, USA; Ideology; Liberation; Liberation Movements; Pedagogy; Schooling; Tracking in Schools

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Cultural Action for Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review.

Freire, Paulo. 1974. Education: The Practice of Freedom. London: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-operative.

Freire, Paulo. 1997. Pedagogy of the Heart. Trans. Donaldo Macedo and Alexandre Oliveira. New York: Continuum.

Freire, Paulo. 1997. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Rev. ed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum. (Orig. pub. 1970).

SECONDARY WORKS

Aronowitz, Stanley. 1993. Paulo Freire’s Radical Democratic Humanism. In Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, eds. Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard, 8–24. London: Routledge.

Gadotti, Moacir. 1994. Reading Paulo Freire: His Life and Work. Trans. John Milton. Albany: State University of New York

Press. McLaren, Peter. 2000. Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Donna Houston

Paulo Freire

The Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire (1921-1997) developed theories that have been used, principally in Third World countries, to bring literacy to the poor and to transform the field of education.

Paulo Freire was born on the northeastern coast of Brazil in the city of Recife in 1921. Raised by his mother who was a devout Catholic and his father who was a middle-class businessman, Freire's early years paralleled those of the Great Depression. Outward symbols, such as his father always wearing a tie and having a German-made piano in their home, pointed to the family's middle-class heritage but stood in contrast to their actual conditions of poverty. Reflecting on their situation, Freire noted, "We shared the hunger, but not the class." After completing secondary school and with gradual improvement in his family's financial situation, he was able to enter Recife University, preparing to become a teacher of Portuguese.

The Direction for his Later Life

The 15 years following World War II proved to be instrumental in giving direction to his later life. He had previously married a fellow teacher, Elza, in 1944. In addition to their shared careers in teaching, they worked together with middle-class friends in the Catholic Action Movement. This work became unsettling as they struggled with the contradictions between the Christian faith and their friends' lifestyles. In particular they faced strong resistance when suggesting that servants should be dealt with as human beings. Later they decided to work solely with "the people," the large population of the poor in Brazil.

A second experience that gave focus to Freire's later life came when he worked as a labor lawyer for the poor and involved a discussion with workers about the theories of Jean Piaget, a prominent psychologist. Evidently Freire's comments were not comprehended by one of the workers, who noted, "You talk from a background of food, comfort, and rest. The reality is that we have one room, no food, and have to make love in front of the children." Through such experiences and further study, Freire began to realize that the poor had a different sense of reality and that to communicate with them he had to use their syntax of meanings. This recognition served as a basis for his doctoral dissertation in 1959 at Recife University, where he was to soon become professor of history and philosophy of education.

Leading the National Literacy Program

In 1962 the mayor of Recife appointed Freire as head of an adult literacy program for the city. In his first experiement, Freire taught 300 adults to read and write in 45 days. This program was so successful that during the following year the President of Brazil appointed him to lead the National Literacy Program. This program was on its way to becoming similarly successful, with expected enrollments to exceed two million students in 1964. Under Brazil's constitution, however, illiterates were not allowed to vote. The O Globe, an influential conservative newspaper, claimed that Freire's method for developing literacy was stirring up the people, causing them to want to change society, and formenting subversion. As a consequence of a military overthrow of the government in 1964, Freire was jailed for 70 days, then exiled briefly to Bolivia and then to Chile for five years.

Providing Literacy in Exile

Freire met with opposition from some Chilian citizens who viewed him as a threat to their society. However, the director of a nationwide program for reducing illiteracy employed him to work in the Chilian Agrarian Reform Corporation. This provided him the opportunity over the next few years to become more involved in research and to write three books, the most noted of which is Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). In 1969 he accepted an invitation to be a visiting professor at Harvard. He quickly found a large audience of growing support in America primarily through the appearance in English of his publications. He left Harvard in 1970 to join the Office of Education at the World Council of Churches in Geneva. In this office his work over the next decade was marked by efforts to increase literacy and liberty in Third World countries through educational programs. Of particular note were his efforts to rethink and apply his theories in the West African country of Guinea-Bissau.

End of Exile

In 1979 Freire's exile status was lifted, allowing him to return home to Brazil where he became secretary of education in Sao Paulo. During the decade of the 1980s he published widely in the areas of education, politics, and literacy. In these writings he developed themes discussed previously and he continued to rethink their practical application to new situations.

Freire believed that poor peoples of the world are dominated and victims of those who possess political power. What the poor need is liberation, an education giving them a critical consciousness, investing them with an agency for changing, and throwing off the oppressive structures of their society. Such an education would not conform and mold people to fit into the roles expected by society, but it would prepare them to realize their own values and reality, reflect and study critically their world, and move into action to transform it. When working with illiterate adults, Freire proposed the selection of words used by the poor in their everyday lives expressing their longings, frustrations, and hopes. From this list of words a shorter list is developed of possibly 16-17 words that contain the basic sounds and syllables of the language. These words are broken down (decoded) into syllables; afterwards, the learners form new words by making different combinations of syllables. In relatively a short period of time (a few days) they are usually writing simple letters to each other. During their studies a second and deeper level of analysis is occurring simultaneously. That is, the teacher using the very same words helps the students also to decode their cultural and social world. This deeper level of activity leads learners to greater awareness of the oppressive forces in their lives and to the realization of their power to transform them.

Freire wrote 25 books which were translated into 35 languages and was an honorary professor of 28 universities around the world. He maintained that he never would have been arrested or criticized had he stuck to teaching ABCs. He fell into disfavor, he said, because of his theory that illiteracy, not any religious reason, made people poor. He said, "Education is freedom." After his death in 1997, there was a three-day mourning in the state of Pernambuco.

Further Reading

There is a biography written by Denis Collins, Paulo Freire: His Life and Thought (1977). An earlier quotational bibliography compiled by Anne Hartung and John Ohliger is in Stanley M. Grabowshi's edited work, Paulo Freire: A Revolutionary Dilemma for the Adult Educator (1972). One of Freire's coauthors, Donaldo Macedo of Boston University, is writing an authorized biography.

The reader will find Freire's books Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau (1978) excellent introductions to his thought. Education for Critical Consciousness (1974) contains concrete and practical examples of his teaching methods. The evolution of his thought and its application to world situation in the last two decades of the 20th century can be found in The Politics of Education: Cultural Power and Liberation (1985) and in Literacy (1987), written jointly with Donaldo Macedo. □

Freire, Paulo (1921–1997)

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was the major educational figure of the cold-war era in Latin America. His writings and activities linking literacy training and consciousness raising had an impact not only in Latin America but throughout the world. The son of an army sergeant and a seamstress, he was born September 19, 1921, in Recife, Pernambuco, in northeastern Brazil. He graduated from the law school there in 1946 and then spent more than a decade working in educational activities with the poor for the local branch of Servico Social da Industria (SESI [Social Service for Industry]). While working with the local Movimento de Cultura Popular (MCP [Popular Culture Movement]), he and his wife Elza began developing techniques to teach newly urban northeasterners how to read and write. His work with the municipal and state governments led by Miguel Arraes and with the federal university in Recife as extension director led him to develop literacy programs throughout the northeast, culminating in a program funded by the Alliance for Progress in Angicos, Rio Grande do Norte.

Convinced that Freire's techniques could bring in new voters to support reform, President João Goulart invited him to create a national campaign. This was still in its planning stages in April 1964 when the coup that ousted Goulart took place and Freire himself was imprisoned. Upon his release from prison and fearing that he would be sent back, he sought refuge in the embassy of Bolivia. On his arrival in the Andean nation, however, he discovered that the government that had promised him employment had been overthrown. He moved to Chile, where friends helped him gain employment planning literacy programs for campesinos with the recently installed Christian Democratic government of Eduardo Frei. The ideas he continued to work on in Chile spread throughout much of the Spanish-speaking world. He influenced, and was influenced by, the ongoing development of liberation theology. Toward the end of his time in Chile he wrote his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1986).

In 1969 he left Chile for a brief stint at Harvard. The following year he went to work for the education department of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland. During his decade with the council he traveled all over the globe, working with activists and educators and influencing the development of critical pedagogy. His most significant activities with the council in Third World countries were in post-independence Portuguese Africa, particularly Guinea Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe, and with the Sandinista government in Nicaragua (although his time there was brief). When with the amnesty law of 1979 allowed Brazilian exiles to return, Freire relocated to São Paulo in 1980 to teach at the Universidade de Campinas and the Pontifíca Universidade Católica de São Paulo. From 1989 to 1991 he was the secretary of education in the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT [Workers Party]) government of mayor Luiza Erundina de Souza. His extensive writings were widely translated and he received many honorary degrees from universities around the world. In 1986 he was awarded UNESCO's Prize for Education for Peace. He died in São Paulo on May 2, 1997.

See alsoEducation: Overview; Liberation Theology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beiseigel, Celso de Rui. Política e educação popular: A teoria e a prá tica de Paulo Freire no Brasil. São Paulo: Editorá Atica, 1982.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1986.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Robert R. Barr. New York: Continuum, 1994.

Freire, Paulo, and Sérgio Guimarães. Aprendendo com a própria história. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1987.

Gadotti, Moacir. Reading Paulo Freire: His Life and Work. Translated by John Milton. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

Kirkendall, Andrew J. "Paulo Freire, Eduardo Frei, Literacy Training, and the Politics of Consciousness Raising in Chile, 1964–1970." Journal of Latin American Studies 36, no. 4 (November 2004): 687-717.

O'Cadiz, Maria del Pilar, Pia Lindquist Wong, and Carlos Alberto Torres. Education and Democracy: Paulo Freire, Social Movements, and Educational Reform in São Paulo. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998.

Paiva, Vanilda P. Paulo Freire e o nacionalismo-desenvolvimentista. São Paulo: Graal, 2000.

                                              John Elias

                                 Andrew J. Kirkendall