Freire, Paulo

A native of a middle-income family from Recife ( Pernambuco ), Freire experienced hunger and poverty in the years of the economic crisis of the 1930s , when the difficult economic situation did not allow him to get a full education. In 1931, the family moved to Zhaboatan dos Guararapis .

In 1943, Freire entered the University of Recife. Although he studied law, he devoted a lot of time to studying philosophy (especially phenomenology ) and the psychology of language. After graduation, he decided not to work in his specialty, but became a teacher of the Portuguese language in high school. In 1944, he married Elsa Maya Costa de Oliveira, with whom he worked together at school and raised five children.

In 1946, Freire was appointed director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Services of Pernambuco.

He set forth his ideas about the philosophy of education in his doctoral dissertation, defended at the University of Recife in 1959. There he teaches the history and philosophy of pedagogy. In 1961, Freire was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Development at the University of Recife.

In 1962, he was given the opportunity to put his theory into practice and taught 300 illiterate sugar plantation workers to read and write in 45 days. After that, the Brazilian government of the center-left president, Juan Goulart, approves the creation of thousands of such cultural circles throughout the country.

In 1964 , after a rightful military coup , a dictatorship prohibited their activities. Freire, a Christian socialist who sympathized with the Cuban revolution and leftist movements in the country, was arrested and imprisoned as a “traitor”, where he spent 70 days. After his exile and short stay in Bolivia , Freire has been working in Chile for 5 years for the local Christian Democratic government and the FAO at the UN , including the Chilean Institute of Agrarian Reforms on an adult education program.

In 1967, Freire published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom . This is followed by his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed ( Port Pedagogia do Oprimido , Pedagogy of the Oppressed ), first published in Portugal in 1968 . In 1970, the book was translated into Spanish and English. In Brazil itself, the book was published only in 1974 in the face of a weakening authoritarian regime.

After spending a year in Cambridge (Massachusetts) , where he taught at a Harvard University teacher's school, Freire moved to Geneva ( Switzerland ), where he was a special adviser to the World Council of Churches on education. He also advised left-wing movements that came to power in the former Portuguese colonies (including Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau ) in the field of educational systems and the fight against illiteracy.

Freire was able to return to his homeland only in 1980. Freire joined the Workers' Party and was responsible for the São Paulo adult literacy program from 1980 to 1986. When PT won the 1988 municipal elections, Freire was appointed Secretary of Education for the State of São Paulo.

Paulo Freire worked in the field of public education and was engaged in the philosophy of education, which allowed combining not only the classical approaches of Plato , but also modern Marxist criticism and the theory of the struggle against colonialism . “The pedagogy of the oppressed” can be seen as a development or response to Franz Fanon 's book “The branded curse” ( French Les Damnés de la Terre ), which emphasizes the need to provide the indigenous population with such an education that will be both modern (instead of traditional , patriarchal) and anti-colonial (and not just planting a culture of colonialists).

Among the representatives of various philosophical positions that influenced his worldview, he named the following names: " Sartre and Mounier , Erich Fromm and Louis Altüsser , Ortega y Gasset and Mao , Martin Luther King and Che Guevara , Unamuno and Marcuse ."

• Paulo Freire “Education as a practice of liberation.” (PDF fragment)
• Freire P. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed = Pedagogia do Oprimido (1970) / Per. N. Demyanova. - M.: Radical theory and practice, 2019 .-- 176 p. - 500 copies.

• Libertarian pedagogy
• Raya Dunaevskaya
• Theology of Liberation
• Anton Makarenko
• Ivan Illich
• Peter McLaren

• The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy
• The Paulo Freire Institute at UCLA
• The Paulo Freire Institute of South Africa
• Instituto Paulo Freire of Spain
• Instituto Paulo Freire , Brazil
• Paulo Freire Institute , Malta
• Paulo Freire Research Center , Finland
• Paulo Freire Freedom School , Arizona
• Freire Charter School in Philadelphia
• The Center of Critical Pedagogy (inaccessible link) , Tel Aviv
• Impossible Fatima Freire policy in dialogue with Contra File