Paulo Freire; The Educationalist You Need To Know About
In this essay, I aim to outline the reasons why educationalist Paulo Freire may be considered a radical of his time, and how his approach is needed today.
By analyzing the ideas and concepts about education that he strongly held and the effects that his work has had not only on contemporary education but also on the social revolution of Brazil and South America, I shall show how he challenged popular educational culture to instigate social reform. A radical can be described as an individual whose ideas and views show a departure from tradition, and so the focus of this essay will be of the differences between Paulo Freire’s ideas and traditional ones held in Brazil at the time.
Born 1921 in Recife, Brazil, Freire was from a young age familiar with the poverty of the 1929 great depression. Lagging behind in school, he identified himself with the poorer children, and as a result he concerned himself with the plight of the oppressed, helping to construct his political and educational viewpoints. One example of the application of his theories came in 1962, nineteen years after studying philosophy and the psychology of language when “as director of the department of cultural extension at Recife University, he was able to demonstrate the effectiveness of his approach by teaching 300 sugar cane workers to read and write in just 45 days” (R. Purcell & D. Bec, p. 16). This instance not only shows the effectiveness of his methodologies, but also Freire’s goal of redistributing power in society. At the time, in order to vote in the Brazilian elections, an individual had to be literate. This meant that a vast amount of working class people who had little access to education were unable to politically voice their needs. This scenario can also give an example as to how education could be used to oppress groups and keep a group in power that only serves the minority, even though this was not exactly the case in this instance as after proving the effectiveness of Freire’s theories, the Brazilian government approved the creation of thousands of cultural circles which implemented his ideas on education. At face value, this seems more revolutionary; however the radicalism of his ideas only become apparent when analysed at a deeper level. At one point however, he was viewed as so radical that he was exiled!
Since much of contemporary western philosophy and education comes from the work and ideas of ancient philosophers, Freire actively analysed and disputed popular ideas of education. He states in his book The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation on p.55 “For Plato, the prise de conscience did not refer to what man knew or did not know or knew badly about his dialectical relationship with the world; it was concerned rather with what man once knew and forgot at birth. To know was to remember or recollect forgotten knowledge. For dialogue to be a method of true knowledge, the knowing subjects must approach reality scientifically in order to seek the dialectical connections that explain the form of reality. Thus, to know is not to remember something previously known and now forgotten”.
This is one of the ideas of Freire’s that allows us to refer to him as a radical. Rather than accept a popular definition of education, he critiques it in order to unveil its flaws, breaking from popularly held notions. The concept that knowledge is not recollection-based is further described: “The educators role is to propose problems about the codified existential situations in order to help the learners arrive at a more and more critical view of their reality. The educators responsibility as conceived by this philosophy is thus greater in every way than that of his colleague whose duty is to transmit information that the learners memorize”. This statement relates back to the sugar cane workers mentioned earlier, as Freire’s method of redistributing power through society was based strongly on educating the lower socioeconomic groups. By using this problem-posing schema, Freire was able to make education more tangible and informing for those in poorer groups, rather than learning of a subject supposedly unrelated to their everyday lives. These individuals are then informed about their own reality through the problem-posed dialogical pedagogy.
As Brazil was a country with a history of turmoiled democracy and was often controlled by Oligarchs, many groups with stakes in land ownership and employment were opposed to the work of Freire and the support he had received from the government at the time. In Andrew Kirkendall’s Paulo Freire and the Cold War Politics of Literacy p.54: “By early 1964 the military itself was politically conscious and acting in a more direct way. A conspiracy long in the making was accelerated by Goulart’s call for… giving illiterates the right to vote, in a rally in Rio de Janeiro on 13 March.” This empowerment of the working class conflicted with the views of the higher socioeconomic groups, as many of them depended on poor, uneducated people to man their work force. As Freire’s work was seen as subversive, “the military sought to reinforce old habits of deference by employing repression more extensively in the northeast and targeting peasants and union members in particular, thus making plain the dangers of a heightened consciousness” (Kirkendall, p.59). As the military coup overthrew the government, Freire’s imprisonment was followed by a necessary exile, where his notoriety grew globally.
While a lot of Freire’s political involvement and experiences may not seem radical, there are a number of parallels between his political views and his radical educational views showing how this radical educationalism greatly affected the majority of his other ploys. He questioned authority, and acted in ways so as to disseminate power through society by empowering the impoverished. Where the banking system of education that Freire strongly opposed closely resembles an authoritarian Oligarch, “narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into “containers,” into “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are” (Paulo Freire, Trans. by Myra Bergman Ramos, Pedagogy of the Opressed, pp.71, 72). Students are not empty cups that need to be filled with knowledge, they are humans with wants and needs, and Freire recognized the role of dialogue and narrative in the educational process, rather than a strict, authoritarian approach.
It is this free thinking nature of Freire that makes him a radical, throwing off the oppressive indoctrinatory style of education that was originally practiced and replacing it with his new problem posing one, where individuals are encouraged to consider their own realities and human rights. This departure from what was then a normal style instigated the social reform, involving and empowering the collective masses to think more openly than before.
Does this make you see any parallels with the education styles where you live?
References
Andrew Kirkendall, Paulo Freire and the Cold War Politics of Literacy (North Carolina, United States of America: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)
Paulo Freire, Trans. by Donald Macedo, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation (Connecticut, United States of America: Bervin and Garvey Publishers Ltd, 1985)
Paulo Freire, Trans. by Myra Bergman Ramos, Pedagogy of the Opressed 30th Anniversary Edition (New York, United States of America: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005)
Rod Purcell, Dave Bec, Popular Education Practice for Youth and Community Development Work (Exeter, Great Britain: Learning Matters Ltd, 2010)