Assignment 1b

Paulo Freire was born and raised in Brazil. It is in Brazil where his theories were first developed. He was born to middle class parents just before The Great Depression. Due to the global impact of The Great Depression, his family learned first hand what it was like to be impoverished. His family eventually was able to recover from the depression. Paulo enrolled in law school at the University of Recife. After passing the bar and beginning a short career, he decided to quit. He wanted to be an educator. He taught Portuguese in secondary schools.

In 1961 Paulo was appointed the director of the Department of Cultural Extension of the University of Recife. Soon after, by using Paulo's theories, 300 sugarcane workers were taught to read in 45 days. After this experiment the Brazilian government approved thousands of cultural circles throughout the world. He brought literacy programs to thousands in the northeast. This new found education also brought along with it, liberation. At this time literacy was a requirement for voting in a presidential election. He was briefly exiled to Bolivia. It was during his time in exile that he started on his writings that were soon to be published. He published two books, Education as the Practice of Freedom, and Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Paulo always denied that his familiarity with Marxism distanced him from his religion, which was catholicism. "I never understood how to reconcile fellowship with Christ with the exploitation of other human beings, or to reconcile a love for Christ with racial, gender and class discrimination. By the same token, I could never reconcile the Left's liberating discourse with the Left's discriminatory practice along the lines of race, gender, and class. What a shocking contradiction: to be, at the same time, a leftist and a racist.



http://www3.nl.edu/academics/cas/ace/resources/paulofreire.cfm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/documents/Facundo/section1.html
http://dmnierweber.iweb.bsu.edu/teachingguide/Freire%20bio.html