Paulo Freire (1921–1997) was a Brazilian educator and Marxist philosopher whose work has shaped global thinking about education. He is best known for Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which presents teaching as a political act of liberation rather than the transmission of cultural values. A founder of critical pedagogy, Freire influenced literacy movements, liberation theology, postcolonial education and contemporary theories of social justice. He is widely regarded as one of the most important educational theorists of the twentieth century.
Early life and career
Freire was born in 1921 into a middle-class family in Recife, in Brazil's Northeast. Poverty and hunger shaped his childhood, and he later said that hunger affected his ability to learn. These experiences strengthened his concern for the poor and informed his educational outlook. He studied law and philosophy, but he never practiced law, working instead as a teacher. In the 1940s and 1960s he developed literacy work among illiterate adults, including a 1962 experiment that taught sugarcane harvesters to read and write in a short period.
Exile and influence
The 1964 coup ended his literacy programme, and Freire was imprisoned before going into exile. While abroad he worked in Chile and for United Nations agencies, and he published Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968. The book reached a wide international audience after its translation, although it was not published in Brazil until 1974. He later held a visiting professorship at Harvard and advised education reform in several former Portuguese colonies in Africa.
Return to Brazil
Freire returned to Brazil in 1980 and joined the Workers' Party, supervising its adult literacy project. After the party won the São Paulo mayoral election in 1988, he became municipal Secretary of Education. He died of heart failure in São Paulo in 1997.