The Pedagogy of Paulo Freire

Viktoriia Dudar
Professor Barbara Gleason
Adult Language and Literacy
6 April 2010

The Pedagogy of Paulo Freire

A philosophical position of Paulo Freire, an internationally recognized scholar who viewed education as a crucial power behind social and economic transformation, is often described as “an amalgam of Marxism and Christian and humanist schools of Existentialism” (Thampi 92). His multidimensional approach to education, his views on inter-class relationships, oppression and liberation, history and culture are widely popular among educators, theologians, and researches in different professional fields for the last forty years; his critical pedagogy is continuously reinvented in the new sociopolitical contexts around the world. To better understand Freire’s contribution to the theory of education, it is important to analyze Freire’s life and professional experience, his key concepts of praxis, transformation of the world, problem-posing education, dialogical classroom, and the examples of implementation of his pedagogy.

Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in Recife, the northeast region of Brazil that was the poorest and underdeveloped area of the whole country. The social formation of the northeast remained strongly hierarchical: the small class of wealthy landowners marginalized starving population in the search for profit from the cultivation of sugarcane. The forests as well as wildlife were entirely destroyed on the coastal areas in order to free the soil for sugar production. As a result, the population of the northeastern Brazil suffered from a severe hunger, poverty, and a whole range of different diseases. Mies describes the situation as being critical: about 60 percent of population did not eat meat or drink milk; 80 percent did not eat any eggs; about 500 out of 1,000 babies were dying from gastric diseases; 70 percent of population was illiterate; life expectancy was 30 -33 years. Besides, in Recife the unemployment rate was about 70 percent; thus, prostitution (even among children) was in many cases the only way to survive and to support a family (1765). Freire, growing up in Recife, experienced hunger and poverty and that caused him to fall behind in school. Although he belonged to a middle class family, a German piano and his father’s necktie were the only symbols of their class affiliation. “Lourdes’s piano and my father‘s neckties made our hunger appear accidental,” writes Freire in Letters to Cristina (22).

After completing his secondary education, Freire went to Recife University where he studied philosophy and psycho-linguistic, working in parallel as a teacher of Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza, a school teacher, and his interest in education grew stronger. He was involved in the “catholic action” movement trying to explain Christian faith to bourgeoisie and later to the lower-class population. In 1959, he submitted his doctoral thesis to Recife University on teaching adult illiterates and soon became a coordinator of a literacy program for adults in Recife. In 1963, he accepted an invitation of the Brazilian government and became the Director of the National Literacy Program which was a part of a bigger mass education movement – Movimento de Cultura Popular. The main goal of the movement was not only to teach people how to read and write but also to educate them about their basic democratic rights and encourage them to vote (the illiterate population did not have the right to vote).

Freire started his battle with illiteracy in a small village of Angicos in the state Rio Grande do Norte. During a short period of 45 days, 300 workers were taught to read and to write, which was a great success of his program. It was planned to apply Freire’s method to educate the whole country, but the fast growing numbers of voters (90,000 new voters were added to former 80,000 in the state of Sergipe) who were organizing and trying to shift the political power and to change the well established social structure brought fear among political leaders. As a result, Freire was accused of “international subversion” and jailed for seventy-five days. He could not stay in Brazil anymore and was exiled to Chile where he accepted a position at the University of Chile and implemented his literacy method. At that time he wrote about his Brazilian experience in Education: the Practice of Freedom, described his Chilean work in Education for Critical Consciousness, and completed Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In 1969, he was a visiting professor at Harvard University, and a year later Freire became a special consultant to the Office of Education at the World Council of Churches in Geneva. He was involved in education programs in Peru, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Guinea-Bissau and received the UNESCO Prize for Education. After fifteen years in exile, Freire was able to return to Brazil where he died in May of 1997 (Mackie 3-8; Mies 1764-1766). Through his life, his books, and his teaching, Freire left a precious legacy to the world.

Freire developed his concept of education as a practice of freedom from a critical reflection on various adult education projects that he undertook in Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s and in Chile in the late 1960s. He believes that illiteracy is a result of dehumanization of the world through oppression of workers and peasants by the ruling elites. Freire regards dehumanization as a historical fact that can be changed because it is “not a given destiny but a result of an unjust order” (Freire, Pedagogy 44). Consequently, illiteracy can be overcome by liberation of the masses through education that has transformational character. First of all, through learning to read and write, the oppressed develop critical awareness of the unjust social order, of themselves, and of their own place within the class society. Secondly, they begin to transform the society that regards them as mere objects of manipulation (Freire, Pedagogy 54). Transformation is achieved through praxis – “the process of action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it” (Freire, Pedagogy 79) – that is central to the humanization and liberation of the world. Freire compares liberation with childbirth because it is painful when people often experience fear of freedom as a result of continuous oppression and their identification with the oppressor (Pedagogy 49). This fear can be overcome through a collective struggle stimulated by education against the existing social relations.

Freire maintains that education is never neutral, and it serves either for domestication or liberation of people. The former can be reached through the banking concept of education, and the latter – through the problem-posing education. The banking concept of education is a process in which the teacher is the subject and the students are objects to be acted upon (Pedagogy 73). Freire believes that “[e]ducation is suffering from narration sickness” (Pedagogy 71) because knowledge is considered to be a commodity that belongs only to the chosen ones who have a power to teach it to ignorant masses. People are taught to accept what is handed down to them by the elite (oppressors) and are kept in ignorance and silence. Thus, the teacher is the depositor, and the students are the depositories that can only passively receive and store information. As a result, this education helps the oppressors to maintain the existing social order through mythicizing of reality and by imposing the passive role on the students who adapt to the world without even a though about its transformation - “the individual is spectator, not re-creator” (Freire, Pedagogy 75). As an alternative, Freire introduces the problem-posing education that is the practice of freedom, not the practice of domination. This method embodies a two-ways communication which leads to the true knowledge through the critical perception of reality. It is based on creativity and “stimulates reflection and action upon reality” that leads to awareness about “the unfinished character of human beings” (Freire, Pedagogy 84). The problem-posing education cannot serve the needs of the oppressor because it is “a humanist and liberating praxis” (Freire, Pedagogy 86) that enables the teacher and the students to become the subjects of an education that demythicizes the world and frees from oppression.

The main way through which the problem-posing education is carried out is dialogue. Freire believes that the word that consists of two elements such as reflection and action is the essence of dialogue. If one of the elements is underrepresented, the other one suffers immediately. For example, if the word lacks action, it is changed into “idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating ‘blah’” (Freire, Pedagogy 87). On the other hand, the word without reflection becomes activism that leads to the reduction and absence of dialogue. Freire states that “to speak a true word is to transform the world” (Pedagogy 87) through naming the reality (reflection) and changing it (action). Furthermore, dialogue is nourished by love for the world and for people, by humility that helps to acknowledge equality with everybody else but not superiority, by faith in humanization of the world through its transformation, by hope that inspires the battle for transformation of the world, and by critical thinking that views reality as a process but not as a static phenomenon (Freire, Pedagogy 89-92). Freire believes that only dialogue is capable of generating critical thinking and opposes naïve and magical thinking as the means of dehumanization of the world. For example, in Education for Critical Consciousness, Freire states that “[c]ritical consciousness is integrated with reality; naïve consciousness superimposes itself on reality; and fanatical consciousness, whose pathological naiveté leads to the irrational, adapts to reality” (44). He suggests that people can be helped to move from naïve or magical thinking to critical consciousness only through dialogical education that is implemented at the “point of emergence”. He refers to critical consciousness as conscientização which is the process of learning “to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Pedagogy 35). Thus, dialogue is seen as horizontal relationships between people that help them to reflect critically on the world in order to transform it. On the other hand, anti-dialogue involves vertical relationships that are loveless, mistrustful, hopeless, arrogant, and non-critical, and it does not communicate but creates communiqués, a one-way communication. Consequently, “[a]uthentic education is not carried on by ‘A’ for ‘B’ or by ‘A’ about ‘B,’ but rather by ‘A’ with ‘B,’ mediated by the world” (Freire, Pedagogy 93). Furthermore, authentic education does not involve memorizing unconnected words and sentences, but stimulates critical thinking, self-transformation and social and political intervention into the surrounding world.

Teaching in Angicos is an example of an authentic problem-posing literacy program. Freire describes five phases that he and a team of educators undertook in Brazil in the early 1960s. A first phase consists of researching the words and phrases of the group with which a teacher is working during informal conversations. Freire emphasizes the necessity of the close emotional and direct contact with the people of the particular area in order to understand their habits, conflicts, hopes, and believes (Education 49). During a second phase, an educator chooses the most “generative” words that have phonemic richness, correspond to the phonetic difficulties of the language, and carry pragmatic tone that connect them to the social reality of the people, and thus generate the greatest amount of critical thinking. Freire’s team selected seventeen key words such as favela (slum), rain, plow, land, food, salary, government, sugar mill, etc (Education 82-84). In a third phase, a teacher creates coded situational problems in the form of drawings, slides, posters and cards. Then, people decode the situations through discussing particular illustrations, expressing their feelings, hopes, and disappointments, and connecting drawings to the situations from their own life. It helps them to identify their own problems and realize that there is a way to solve them. For example, when discussing the first situation Man in the World and with the World, people learn the difference between nature and culture, and discover that they can transform the world through their work (Education 63). Then, in a fourth phase, the agenda of a program can be easily modified according to the needs of the students (Education 52). A final fifth phase includes the preparation of the cards with the generative words that are broken down into phonemic families. For example, the word tijolo (brick) which is chosen after a discussion of situation of construction work is broken into syllables ti-jo-lo. Then, the initial consonant of each syllable is combined with other vowels: te-te-ti-to-tu, ja-je-ji-jo-ju, la-le-li-lo-lu, which is an example of a phonemic family for the word tijolo. From these syllable people were able to create words in the first night of the program (Freire, Education 54). Freire believes that the most difficult part of teaching a literacy program is maintaining the horizontal relationship of dialogue and viewing students as the subjects but not depositories that need to be filled with knowledge. Nevertheless, his approach was implemented in a number of different classrooms all around the world.

The remedial English program at the College of the Bahamas is a successful example of applying the Freirean approach to education. Nan Elsasser taught an experimental writing course to the group of the first generation working Bahamian women who went to college. Her curriculum was a result of collaboration between a team of educators who find traditional writing programs based on memorizing rules and filling in blank spaces to be ineffective for the future success in college and isolating because it excludes students’ experiences and knowledge from classroom activities. The combination of Freire’s pedagogy of developing critical consciousness through working on generative themes and Vygotsky’s theory of inner speech were implemented for teaching advanced literacy skills (Fiore and Elsasser 89). At the beginning of her teaching that corresponds to Freire’s first phase of problem-posing education, Elsasser learned about the Bahamas and her students through discussing their lives and schooling, investigated students’ habits of organizing their thoughts through the word association exercises, and asked students to give her advice about staying on the Bahamas through writing What You Need to Know to Live in the Bahamas essay. Although the students had difficulties with analyzing and incorporating broader information about their surrounding world, they started realizing similarities between their lives and responded to one another’s comments (Fiore and Elsasser 91). Her next step that corresponds to Freire’s second phase was selecting a generative theme through listing conflicting situations that the students suggested on the board and choosing the most important issue through voting. They selected marriage for their generative theme. Then, Elsasser and the students discussed marriage problems in the Bahamas and different readings on this topic that helped them to realize that their personal problems are influenced by the society that they live in. As a result, they could examine, make connections, critique the world around them, generate their own theories about writing mechanics, and rely in their writing on class discussions and readings (Fiore and Elsasser 93-95). During a next phase that corresponds to Freire’s idea about transforming the world, the students wrote an open letter to Bahamian men that was published in order to solve marriage issues that persist in their society. Furthermore, all of them passed the English exam, and that represented a big difference compare to the previous results – forty- five to sixty percent would usually fail this exam (Fiore and Elsasser 100-103). The success of this program shows that Freire’s approach to education can be easily adjusted to different contexts and needs of students and bring outstanding results.

Many attempts were made to implement Freire’s pedagogy in the third world countries by Freire himself and the educators who claim to practice his methods. His pedagogy became very popular during the Green Revolution when UNESCO and other international organizations were trying to increase food production by educating rural population through literacy programs that combined basic skills education with vocational training in agricultural field (Kidd and Kumar 26). However, some educators believe that Freirean pedagogy is very often distorted and his terminology and methods are used “without its substance as a smokescreen for the continued domestication of Third World peasants and workers in the interests of foreign capital” (Kidd and Kumar 28). For example, the pseudo-Freirean approach avoids the word “oppression” and focuses on “poverty” instead that is believed to be caused by poor and prevents them from better life; the actions of the dominant regime such as low wages, unequal rights and limited access to land and water are ignored. Kidd and Kumar name this concept a “culture of poverty” that can be cured only by changing the poor and educating them, but not by changing the social structure (28). They can be changed through awaking their critical consciousness that is defined as awareness of their needs and different resources that are available for fulfilling these needs. In other words, the poor are taught to see themselves through the eyes of their oppressors and accept their current state of being as natural and unchangeable which is the opposite of Freire’s idea about critical thinking. If the poor could increase food production which is very low because of their ignorance and inability to cultivate plants, then they would be able to end their poverty and starvation. La Belle describes this scenario as deprivation-development strategy that is used to change the behavior of the poor in the existing conditions as a solution to their problems which opposes Freire’s idea about liberation through breaking the social structure of domination (Kidd and Kumar 28).

The pseudo-Freirean method of education can be illustrated through the examples of some literacy programs designed by World Education organization in India and Thailand. The literacy program launched in Thailand in the early 1970s emphasized hygiene, birth control, and obedience to the authorities, ignoring any political or economic intervention by the poor. The main goal of this program was to improve living conditions of rural population by “attempting to correct misconceptions and to change the outmoded behaviors” (Kidd and Kumar 33) through informing masses. This approach opposes Freire’s dialogical nature of problem-posing education that treats students as equal partners in the educational process. “Liberating education consists of acts of cognition, not transferrals of information” (Freire 79). Likewise, a literacy program in India disregarded the economic and political causes of poverty and emphasized the ignorance of the poor as a source of their problems. For example, a Hindi literacy primer stated that “[e]ating rice has a bad effect on health” (Kidd and Kumar 33) without any explanation on why people cannot afford to eat anything else. Freire opposes this “prescription” character of education that implies “the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another” that is the form of oppression (47). These examples show how Freire’s name can be used to disguise the education that domesticates the lower-class population in some third world countries.

In conclusion, Freire’s belief in humanization of the world through liberation of oppressed constantly reminds us about the unjust social structure that domesticates through banking education and vertical relationships between people. However, his concept of problem-posing education is an effective tool in order to liberate ourselves and our students through recognizing our own position in the world, critically examining our conflicts and problems, and finally, transforming the world around us. In the modern world, where the global wealth increased six-fold, but the poverty gap between the poor and rich countries has also tripled over the last decades, Freire’s philosophy can become a powerful vehicle in the battle of humanity for its right to live as valuable members of the society who have their own opinion and are not just mere puppets on the invisible strings manipulated by the ruling elites.


Works Cited
Fiore, Kyle, and Nan Elsasser. “‘Strangers No More’: A Liberatory Literacy Curriculum.” Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. Ed. Ira Shor. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987. 87-104. Print.
Freire, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum, 1986. Print.
---. Letters to Cristina: Reflections on My Life and Work. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.
---. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Continuum, 2008. Print.
Kidd, Ross, and Krishna Kumar. “Co-opting Freire: A Critical Analysis of Pseudo-Freirean Adult Education.” Economic and Political Weekly 16.1/2 (1981): 27-36. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.
Mackie, Robert. Introduction. Literacy and Revolution, the Pedagogy of Paulo Freire. Ed. Mackie. New York: Continuum, 1981. Print.
Mies, Maria. “Paulo Freire's Method of Education: Conscientisation in Latin America.” Economic and Political Weekly 8.39 (1973): 1764-1767. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.
Thampi, Mohan. “The Educational Thought of Paulo Freire.” Social Scientist 2.1 (1973): 91-95. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.