Paulo Freire: Pedagogue

Throughout history, many men and women have made important contributions to the world of education. Amongst these is the Brazilian scholar Paulo Freire, whose influences on the world have been both broad and deep. A true believer in Marxist theory, his central ideas regarding education revolve around the concept that the experience and learning process of education are more important than the “facts” or concepts that are being taught. Consequently, traditional teaching methods (known as “Banking”) train students to be passive, unthinking, and subservient to their superiors; instead, teachers should “free” their students by employing “problem-posing” techniques, where teachers not only present concepts for students to analyse, but actually become “students” themselves (“Oppressed”).

Paulo Freire’s radical theories are best understood in the context of his upbringing amongst the Brazilian poor. Although his family was not a member of the absolute lowest classes, they were forced to live in a poor laborers’ community due to the impact of the Great Depression. He realized that many “of his day-to-day companions…ate less [than him] and some…hardly ever ate”, causing him to realize that “‘…a lot of things in the world were not going well’” (Lownd). These experiences would prove to be amongst the most influential of his life, as he obtained a unique familiarity with their lives and status, and how this status affected their education. As an adult, his work at SESI further demonstrated the gaps between the education that the schools offered and the real needs of the working-class people (Bentley). These experiences with the impoverished peoples of Brazil led him to the Socialist doctrine of Carl Marx and his contemporaries.

His educational theories are much more than a rehashing of Marxist ideology, however, but instead adapted its concepts of oppression and humanism to fit with his education-oriented goals. He saw education (specifically, literacy) not merely as a means of transferring information as if one were filling a box, but instead as a means of liberation and revolution, that instruction should teach students how to think, not what to think, and give them the power to call into question the facts of everyday life (Gibson). In Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he suggests that the common people are constantly oppressed and forced to become submissive, and that in turn, they will oppress others in a similar fashion. Traditional education is one of the first vehicles for this cycle of oppression and submission, and therefore Freire insists that educators must stimulate students to think through acceptance and equality; that a teacher “is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach…authority