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Paulo Freire
By Peadar Kirby
With the death of Paulo Freire, Latin America has lost one of its greatest
revolutionaries this century. It was a term he willingly applied to himself
when I met him in Sao Paulo in July 1980 for a lengthy interview. But, he
quickly added, he was a revolutionary who saw humility as the ultimate
revolutionary virtue and as a revolutionary he was also a Christian, trying
everyday to transform the reality of the world.
For Freire, education is revolutionary. When speaking to me, he strongly
rejected the notion that first we must work politically for radical social
change and then we can start educating people in a new consciousness for a
new society. "On the contrary," he said. "The revolution itself is an
educational process and because of that I am a teacher."
But, of course, he also emphasised that all education is embedded within a
wider social system; it is, as he put it, "a sub-system of a greater
system". However, this did not mean for Freire that education need
necessarily domesticate people to that wider system as there are
contradictions between the two which can be exploited by the teacher.
Therefore the most fundamental distinction he saw is that between a
domesticating teacher and a liberating one.
It was through pioneering methods for liberating education that Freire has
had an immense influence, not only among the oppressed of Latin America but
among the oppressed through the South and even in many countries of the
North. To experience oppressed people being empowered, finding the
confidence and the means to give voice to their experience and to act out
of that is without doubt the most revolutionary thing I have experienced in
my life. It is an experience I have regularly had among the oppressed in
Latin America and, on occasion, among the oppressed in Ireland. I have yet
to come across a truly liberating educational process that was not, either
in an immediate and conscious way or in a more remote and perhaps
unconscious way, derived from the approach pioneered by Paulo Freire.
Ultimately what mattered to Freire himself was not that people followed
particular theories or methods he had developed. He told me that he had
often come across people who, in the name of conscientisation, were
practising a domesticating form of education. Because of this, in the mid
1980s he ceased to use the term conscientisation and instead emphasised
that what was important was not following particular approaches but rather
ensuring that education was truly liberating.
Born in 1921 in Recife in the north-east of Brazil, Paulo Freire first
developed his approach as Professor of the History and Philosophy of
Education in the University of Recife. Through developing methods to teach
literacy to peasants, he rose to become General Coordinator of the National
Plan of Adult Literacy. Jailed following the military coup in 1964, he went
into exile, working in Chile, Harvard, and then, for ten years, in Geneva
where he worked for the World Council of Churches until his return to
Brazil in 1979. In 1970 he published what is his best known book "Pedagogy
of the Oppressed" which has been translated into many languages.
He thus had a wide experience of trying to implement a liberating education
in the countries of the North. He told me that he found it much harder: "I
learned how difficult it is in the US or in Europe to invite students to
participate directly in the process of their education. They really rejected
that. Before that I had thought naively that it was a problem for the
underdeveloped young. But it is not. It is a question of the ideology of
the people, the domination by an ideology of domestication. Both in Geneva
and Harvard universities I had the same experience in which the students
rejected becoming the subjects of their own education."
Yet, he was more positive about Ireland. "My experience of meeting Irish
people in Europe and the US was always good because we talked together as
oppressed people. But in your case it is worse than mine, it is much more
problematic." This relates to one of the great problems he said he found
among Irish people: "How do you cope when you lose your identity?" Despite
this, he said he was sure it was possible to implement a liberating
education in Ireland. "It is a question of knowing - how to challenge the
oppressed people of Ireland to know, to read their reality." The greatest
tribute we could pay Paulo Freire is to redouble our efforts to challenge
one another to read our own reality in a liberating way.