The Paulo Freire Institute’s purpose is, according to the wishes of the person who inspired its creation, to give continuity to Paulo Freire’s legacy, gathering people and institutions that base their work on his ideas. In order to carry out its institutional mission, the PFI develops research whose results contribute to interventions, including the formulation and implementation of plans, programs, and projects in the fields of education, culture, and communication. The goal of this work is the construction of the work that Freire dreamed of and struggled for: "less ugly, less mean, less authoritarian, more democratic, more human."

Summarizing, the objectives of the Paulo Freire Institute include:

I. developing surveys, studies, and research

II. establishing programs and projects about education, science, culture, and communication

III. offering courses

IV. consulting with groups to develop and implement plans, programs, and projects outlined in II above

V. producing, editing, and publishing works that refer to Freirean thought

VI. promoting events

The Institute’s theoretical orientation and actions are guided by its patron and founder - the point of view of the "condemned of the earth," of the excluded - and always try to diminish the "objective reasons that destroy dreams" and cause hopelessness and immobilization.

The PFI aims to construct a large, fertile, and generous encounter between institutions, projects, dreams, and people who fertilize the unknown and position themselves as subjects of history, therefore conditioned but not determined beings, and thus capable of accomplishing social transformations.

Nevertheless, the objectives of the PFI are not static or predetermined. Instead, they are dynamic, guided by two principle parameters of Freirean thought that aim toward social transformation or social revolution:

1. We work toward social transformation guided by our principled commitments

2. However, it is not possible to transform society with only ideas and principles. We also need fortuitous and adequate strategies. Only by "reading" the world is it possible to create these strategies. Paulo Freire never tired of repeating that "before learning anything, a person must first read his/her world." And what does it mean to read the world? It means to evaluate the limits and the potentialities, the historical and political forces of your world, in order to take the necessary and possible next step.

Brazilian adult educator, Paulo Freire, died Friday, May 2, 1997, of a heart attack. He was 75 years old. His legacy of commitment, love and hope to American educators can be found in the critical pedagogy which infuses hundreds of "grass roots" organizations, college classrooms, and most recently school reform efforts in major urban areas.

Exiled from his native Brazil during a military coup in 1964 for his educational work among the rural poor, he continued his "pedagogy of the oppressed" in Chile, and later--under the auspices of the World Council of Churches in Geneva--throughout the world. In 1969, he taught at Harvard University and ten years later returned to his own country under a political amnesty. In 1988 he was also appointed Minister of Education for the City of Sao Paulo--a position which made him responsible for guiding school reform within two-thirds of the nation's schools.

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He was born on September 19, 1921 in Recife, a port city of northeastern Brazil. He has said of his parents that it was they who taught him at an early age to prize dialogue and to respect the choices of others-key elements in his understanding of adult education. His parents were middle class but suffered financial reverses so severe during the Great Depression that Freire learned what it is to go hungry. It was in childhood that he determined to dedicate his life to the struggle against hunger.

After his family situation improved a bit, he was able to enter the University of Recife where he enrolled in the Faculty of Law and also studied philosophy and the psychology of language while working part-time as an instructor of Portuguese in a secondary school. During this same period he was reading the works of Marx and also Catholic intellectuals-Maritain, Bernanos, and Mounier-all of whom strongly influenced his educational philosophy.

In 1944, Freire married Elza Maia Costa Oliveira of Recife, a grade school teacher who eventually bore three daughters and twosons. As a parent, Paulo's interest in theories of education began to grow, leading him to do more extensive reading in education, philosophy, and the sociology of education than in law. In fact after passing the bar he quickly abandoned law as a means of earning a living in order to go to work as a welfare official and later as director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the State of Pernambuco.

His experiences during those years of public service brought him into direct contact with the urban poor. The educational and organizational assignments he undertook there led him to begin to formulate a means of communicating with the dispossessed that would later develop into his dialogical method for adult education. His involvement in adult education also included directing seminars and teaching courses in the history and philosophy of education at the University of Recife, where he was awarded a doctoral degree in 1959.

In the early 1960's Brazil was a restless nation. Numerous reform movements flourished simultaneously as socialists, communists,students, labor leaders, populists, and Christian militants all sought their own socio-political goals. It was in the midst of this ferment and heightened expectations that Freire became the first director of the University of Recife's Cultural Extension Service which brought literacy programs to thousands of peasants in the northeast. Later, from June 1963 up to March 1964, Freire's literacy teams worked throughout the entire nation. They claimed success in interesting adult illiterates to read and write in as short a time as thirty hours!

The secret of this success is found in the resistance of Freire and his co-workers to merely teaching the instrumental and decontextualized skills of reading and writing, but rather by presenting participation in the political process through knowledge of reading and writing as a desirable and attainable goal for all Brazilians. Freire won the attention of the poor and awakened their hope that they could start to have a say in the day-to-day decisions that affected their lives in the Brazilian countryside. Peasant passivity and fatalism waned as literacy became attainable and valued. Freire's methods were incontestably politicizing and, in theeyes of the Brazilian military and land-owners anxious to stave off land reform, outrageously radical.

Eventually, the military overthrew the reform-minded Goulart regime in Brazil in April of 1964. All progressive movements were suppressed and Freire was thrown into jail for his "subversive" activities. He spent a total of seventy days there where he was repeatedly questioned and accused. In prison he began his first major educational work, Education as the Practice of Freedom. This book, an analysis of Paulo's failure to effect change in Brazil, had to be completed in Chile, because Freire was sent into exile.

After his expulsion from Brazil, Freire worked in Chile for five years with the adult education programs of the Eduardo Frei government headed by Waldemar Cortes who attracted international attention and UNESCO acknowledgment that Chile was one of the five nations of the world which had best succeeded in overcoming illiteracy.

Toward the end of the 1960's, Freire's work brought him into contact with a new culture that changed his thought significantly. Atthe invitation of Harvard University he left Latin America to come to the United States where he taught as Visiting Professor at Harvard's Center for Studies in Education and Development and was also Fellow at the Center for the Study of Development and Social Change.

Those years were, of course, a period of violent unrest in the United States when opposition to the country's involvement in Southeast Asia brought police and militias onto university campuses. Racial unrest had, since 1965, flared into violence on the streets of American cities. Minority spokespersons and war protesters were publishing and teaching, and they influenced Freire profoundly. His reading of the American scene was an awakening to him because he found that repression and exclusion of the powerless from economic and political life was not limited to third world countries and cultures of dependence. He extended his definition of the third world from a geographical concern to a political concept, and the theme of violence became a greater preoccupation in his writings from that time on.

After leaving Harvard in the early 1970's, Freire served as consultant and eventually as Assistant Secretary of Education for the World Council of Churches in Switzerland and traveled all over the world lecturing and devoting his efforts to assisting educational programs of newly independent countries in Asia and Africa, such as Tanzania and Guinea Bissau. He also served as chair of the executive committee of the Institute for Cultural Action (IDAC) which is headquartered in Geneva.

In 1979, Paulo was invited by the Brazilian government to return from exile where he assumed a faculty position at the University of Sao Paulo. In 1988 he was also appointed Minister of Education for the City of Sao Paulo-a position which made him responsible for guiding school reform within two-thirds of the nation's schools.

In 1992, Paulo Freire celebrated his 70th birthday in New York with over two hundred friends-adult educators, educational reformers, scholars and "grass-roots" activists. Three days of festivity and workshops, sponsored by the New School for Social Research, marked the ongoing, vital impact of the life and work of Paulo Freire.

Paulo Freire died in Rio de Janeiro on May 2, 1997, at the age of 75. He leaves behind a legacy of commitment, love, and hope for oppressed peoples throughout the world.

Paulo Freire

Perhaps the most influential thinker about education in the late twentieth century, Freire has been  particularly popular with informal educators with his emphasis on dialogue and his concern for the oppressed.

First Paulo Freire's emphasis on dialogue - and all that flows from it has struck a very strong chord. Given that informal education is a dialogical (or conversational) rather than a curriculum form this is hardly surprising. However, Paulo Freire is able to take the discussion on several steps with his insistence that dialogue involves respect. It should not involve one person acting on another, but rather people working with each other. Too much education, Paulo Freire argues, involves 'banking' - the educator making 'deposits' in the educatee.

Second, Paulo Freire was concerned with praxis - action that is informed (and linked to certain values). Dialogue wasn't just to deepen understanding - but was part of making a difference in the world. As we have seen, dialogue in itself is a co-operative activity involving respect. The process is important - but it can also lead to us acting in ways that make for justice and human flourishing. Informal educators have had a long-standing orientation to action - so the emphasis on change in the world was welcome. But there was a sting in the tail. Paulo Freire argued for informed action and as such provided a useful counter-balance to those who want to diminish theory.

Third, Paulo Freire's attention to naming the world has been of great significance to those educators who have traditionally worked with those who do not have a voice, and who are oppressed. The idea of building a 'pedagogy of the oppressed' or a 'pedagogy of hope' and how this may be carried forward has formed a significant impetus to work.

Fourth, Paulo Freire's insistence on situating educational activity in the lived experience of participants has opened up a series of possibilities for the way informal educators can approach practice. His concern to look for words that have the possibility of generating new ways of naming and acting in the world when working with people around literacies is a good example of this.

Fifth, a number of informal educators have connected with Paulo Freire's use of metaphors drawn from Christian sources. An example of this is the way in which the divide between teachers and learners can be transcended. In part this is to occur as learners develop their consciousness, but mainly it comes through the 'class suicide' or 'Easter experience' of the teacher.

The educator for liberation has to die as the unilateral educator of the educatees, in order to be born again as the educator-educatee of the educatees-educators. An educator is a person who has to live in the deep significance of Easter.

Quoted by Paul Taylor (1993: 53) - see below

Inevitably, there are various points of criticism from the point of view of informal educators. First, many are put off by Paulo Freire's language and his appeal to mystical concerns. Second, Paulo Freire argues in an either/or way. We are either with the oppressed or against them. This may be an interesting starting point for teaching, but taken too literally it can make for rather simplistic (political) analysis. Third, there is an tendency in Freire to overturn everyday situations so that they become pedagogical. It is right that informal educators should look for 'teachable moments' - but when we concentrate on this we can easily overlook simple power of being in conversation with others. Fourth, what is claimed as liberatory practice may, on close inspection, be rather closer to banking than we would wish. In other words, the practice of Freirian education can involve smuggling in all sorts of ideas and values.

Key texts: Paulo Freire's central work remains:

Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Important exploration of dialogue and the possibilities for liberatory practice. Freire provides a rationale for a pedagogy of the oppressed; introduces the highly influential notion of banking education; highlights the the contrasts between education forms that treat people as objects rather than subjects; and explores education as cultural action. See, also:

Freire, P. (1995) Pedagogy of Hope. Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum. This book began as a new preface to his classic work, but grew into a book. It's importance lies in Freire's reflection on the text and how it was received, and on the development of policy and practice subsequently. Written in a direct and engaging way.

Biographical material: There are two useful English language starting points:

Freire, P. (1996) Letters to Cristina. Reflections on my life and work, London: Routledge. Retrospective on Freire's work and life. in the form of letters to his niece. He looks back at his childhood experiences, to his youth, and his life as an educator and policymaker.

Gadotti, M. (1994) Reading Paulo Freire. His life and work,New York: SUNY Press. Clear presentation of Freire's thinking set in historical context written by a close collaborator.

For my money the best critical exploration of his work is:

Taylor, P. (1993) The Texts of Paulo Freire, Buckingham: Open University Press.

Prepared by Mark K. Smith

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