Paulo Freire
AKA: Freire · Paulo Reglus Neves Freire
The Record
Freire taught literacy to peasants and slum dwellers in north-eastern Brazil, where only the literate could vote. Teaching reading was a transfer of political power. The military took power in 1964, jailed him and then expelled him, and he wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed during a sixteen-year exile.
His indictment of ordinary teaching is the banking model: education as an act of depositing, in which the teacher issues communiqués and the students receive, memorise and repeat. He sets out its logic as a list. The teacher teaches and the students are taught. The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing. The teacher chooses the programme content, and the students, who were not consulted, adapt to it.
Against the banking model he sets conscientização, conscientization. The oppressed come to read their own situation as made rather than given, and therefore as changeable. Education is never neutral. It either domesticates or it liberates.
Critical pedagogy is the road that won, and it won by structure, not by rhetoric. Nobody has to join anything. A theory that locates the revolution in the relationship between a teacher and a class needs only teachers. Teacher education produces them at scale.
Relationship Ledger
Veterans of the New Left's revolutionary factions moved into the education faculties through the 1970s, where Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed became the foundation of a new field. Source: The Critical Turn in Education: From Marxist Critique to Poststructuralist Feminism to Critical Theories of Race
Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in English by Herder and Herder in 1970.
Giroux carried Freire into American teacher education.
Documents
What Paulo Freire wrote, oldest first. The archive argues from these rather than about them, so they are listed with the standpoint and the class of each, and a reader is free to check any of it.
- Pedagogy of the OppressedHerder and Herder, New York
Referenced in
Records whose text names Paulo Freire. The list is rebuilt from the published prose and checked for drift.
- Critical pedagogy and the schoolsis mentioned in
- Henry Girouxis mentioned in