Paulo Freire and the path of a liberating pedagogy

Joo shut up. Wring out your hat. Long silence, and finally said:

– I couldn’t sleep. All night long without rolling my eyes.

No more words come out of his mouth, until he whispers:

“Yesterday I wrote my name for the first time.”

Text by Eduardo Galeano – included in his book Children of the day– synthesizes the feelings of an adult who embarks on the path of writing. A path that had been refused to him.

Adult literacy and working with workers and peasants were vital marks in Paulo Freire’s story. VSIt was a hundred years ago on September 19 the birth of this educator from Recife who promoted and conceptualized another educational, dialogical link, far from this “banking education” that he criticized..

Thinker, politician and teacher, he cared and cared for the education of the oppressed for their liberation. He dedicates to them Pedagogy of the Oppressed, perhaps his most cited and most read book: “To the ragged peoples of the world and to those who, discovering themselves in them, suffer with them and fight with them. He died in May 1997.

In a special edition, the Education supplement of The capital interviewed Brazilian professor Leonardo Boff, one of the founders of liberation theology. “Freire was a person who lived with deep humility, the ability to listen to others and with a love», Says Boff, in a dialogue where he reviews the freireen heritage, the collective character of his pedagogical action and, recovering the ideology of Freire, he maintains that« to educate is an act of love ».

Legacy of a revolutionary

Frei Betto — Dominican brother and disciple of Freire— He also spoke with this newspaper and recalled his meetings with the popular educator of the Brazilian Northeast.. “He was a revolutionary Christian concerned with strengthening the political and civic consciousness of the people,” Betto says of his teacher and friend. And of his words, he remembers one in particular with more affection: when he said that in education you have to print boniteza (beauty).

Adriana Puiggrós, one of the most remarkable pedagogues in Argentina and Latin America, claims that Freire produced a change in modern education by giving the student a greater importance in the pedagogical connection. And to teachers and future educators, he recommends reading Freire, above all, Pedagogy of the oppressed, Education as a practice of freedom and Pedagogy of Hope.

The traces of his heritage are found in an infinity of popular education proposals and that is why the experiences of the popular high school of the Tablada district and that developed by the TAU Node are also saved. Two traces of a legacy from this educator who dreamed of “a society reinventing itself from the bottom up, where the popular masses really have the right to have a voice and not just the duty to listen”.

Notes for the centenary

1.- Paulo Freire and the path towards a liberating pedagogy

2.- Frei Betto: “Freire led the oppressed to conquer their political self-esteem and their leadership”

3.- Leonardo Boff: “For Freire, everyone is the bearer of knowledge and must be listened to”

4.- Adriana Puiggrós: clues to read Paulo Freire

5.- The teacher’s footprints in working-class neighborhoods

6.- Paulo Freire: between dreams, knowledge and empathy

7.- “Paulo Freire proposes approaches to enter the conflict on how education will be in the post-pandemic”