Week 2 Paulo Freire Updated

The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire was born September 19, 1921 to a middle class family in Recife, Brazil. Freire died of heart failure in Sao Paulo at the age of 75 on May 2, 1997. Freire contributed his success to his parents who taught him at an early age to prize dialogue and respect others-key elements in his understanding of adult education. Freire has been labeled as one of the most influential educational thinkers of the late 20th century. His contribution to theoretical innovations have had a considerable impact on the development of educational practice and informal education. Living through the Great Depression in 1929 and experimenting hunger as a child helped shape Freire's goals for the poor and education. Freire began his education at the University of Recife in 1943. There he studied law, philosophy, phenomenology and the physcology of language while working as a instructor of Portuguese in a secondary language from 1941-1947. Freire a strong follower of Marx and also Catholic Intellectuals such as Maritain, Bernanos, and Mounier- all of whom were strong influences. Freire married in 1944 to Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira who was a grade school teacher; they had five children.

As a parent, Paulo's interest in theories of education began to grow. In 1961-1964, instead of pursuing law, Freire went to work as a welfare official and then Director of Education and Culture for the Social Service in the State of Pernambuco. There he worked primarily with the illiterate poor. Where he brought literacy programs to thousands of peasants. In Brazil at that time, literacy was a requirement for voting in presidential elections. In 1962 he had his first opportunity to apply his theories, when 300 sugarcane workers were taught to read and write in just 45 days. In response to this experiment, the Brazilian government approved the creation of thousands of cultural circles across the country. In 1964, a military coup put an end to that effort. Freire was sent to prison as a traitor for 70 days. It was in prison where he started to work on his first book”Practice of Freedom”.

After a brief exile in Bolivia, Freire worked in Chile for five years for the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In 1967 Freire published his first book”Practice of Freedom, to follow in 1968 with “Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire's most well known work, he argues for system of education that emphasizes learning as an act of culture and freedom Freire is best-known for his attack on what he called the “Banking” concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. Due to the political feud between Freire, a Christian socialist, and the successive authoritarian military dictatorships, it wasn't published in his own country of Brazil until 1974. As a result of the respect for his work, Freire was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard University in 1969. He then moved to Geneva, Switzerland where he was the advisor to the World Congress of Churches. In this position he traveled all over the world lecturing an devoting to assisting educational programs. In 1979, Paulo was invited by the Brazilian government to return from exile to Brazil in which he did in 1980 and assumed a faculty position a the University of Sao Paulo where he was responsible for school reform in two-thirds of the nation's schools. In 1992 Paulo celebrated his 70th birthday with friends and adult educators to mark the ongoing vital impact of the life of Paulo Freire.
Terrie Karis
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm
http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/contemporaryed/Paulo_Freire/paulo_freire.html
http://www.3.nl.edu/academics/cas/ace/resources/paulofreire.cfm
http://www.youtube.com/