About Paulo Freire Books by Freire Web sites   About Paulo Freire Over the years, the thought and work of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire have spread from the North East of Brazil to an entire continent, and have made a profound impact not only in the field of education but also in the overall struggle for national development. At the precise moment when the disinherited masses in Latin America are awakening from their traditional lethargy and are anxious to participate, as Subject, in the development of their countries, Paulo Freire has perfected a method for teaching illiterates that has contributed to that process. Those who come to a new awareness of selfhood and begin to look critically at the social situation in which they find themselves, often take the initiative in acting to transform the society that has denied them this opportunity of participation. Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in Recife, the center of one of the most extreme situations of poverty and underdevelopment in the Third World, where he was forced to experience that reality directly. Shaull relates how Freire, as a child, experienced the gnawing pangs of hunger and fell behind in school because of the listlessness it produced; it also led him to make a vow, at age eleven, to dedicate his life to the struggle against hunger, so that other children would not have to know the agony he was then experiencing. Freire came to believe that what he describes as the “culture of silence” of the dispossessed was the direct product of the whole situation of economic, social, and political domination - and of the paternalism - of which they were victims. Rather than being encouraged and equipped to know and respond to the concrete realities of their world, they were kept “submerged” in a situation in which such critical awareness and response were practically impossible. He surmised that the entire educational system was one of the major instruments for the maintenance of this culture of silence. Freire, in his search for answers to these situations, reached out to a broad variety of philosophers and educators, including, in his words, “Sartre and Mounier, Erich Fromm and Louis Althusser, Ortega y Gasset and Mao, Martin Luther King and Che Guevara, Unamuno and Marcuse.” He appropriated the insights of these thinkers in his own analyses of the situation of Latin America. Freire developed a method of education, a literacy campaign, in which teams of trained people would go into the villages, and participants of “culture circles” would learn to read and write in just a few days, in the process learning to think critically about their situation and gaining an awareness of, a consciousness of, their oppression and with that, a hope for freedom and a better way of life. Freire’s culture circles, or literacy campaign, was so successful that in 1964 the Brazilian military overthrew civilian rule. Freire was arrested, imprisoned for seventy days, moved from jail to jail, and then forced into exile with his wife and their five children. Conscientizacao refers to learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality. 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. Books by Freire (in English) Cultural action for freedom, Cambridge, 1970 A day with Paulo Freire, Delhi, 1980 Education for critical consciousness, New York, 1973 Education, the practice of freedom, London, 1976 Learning to question: a pedagogy of liberation, New York, 1989 Letters to Cristina: reflections on my life and work, New York, 1996 Literacy: reading the word & the world, South Hadley, 1987 A Pedagogy for liberation: dialogues on transforming education, South Hadley, 1987 Pedagogy in process: the letters to Guinea-Bissau, New York, 1978 Pedagogy of hope: reliving pedagogy of the oppressed, New York, 1994 Pedagogy of the city, New York, 1993 Pedagogy of the oppressed, New York, 1993 The politics of education: culture, power, and liberation, South Hadley, 1985   Web Sites Issues in Freirean Pedagogy  -  http://nlu.nl.edu/ace/Resources/Documents/FreireIssues.html#Glossary Paulo Freire  -   http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm Paulo Freire links at Douglas Kellner's page, Education and Philosophy  -  http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed206a/edphil.htm Who Is Paulo Freire?   -   http://nlu.nl.edu/ace/Resources/Documents/section1.html#1 Critical Views of Paulo Freire's Work    -   http://nlu.nl.edu/ace/Resources/Documents/Ohliger1.html In Memory of Paulo Freire   -   http://www.lesley.edu/journals/jppp/2/jppp_issue_2.toc.html Paulo Freire - A Homage, by Moacir Gadotti  -  http://www.nl.edu/ace/Homage.html Reviews of Paulo Freire's Books  -  http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~daniel_schugurensky/freire/freirebooks.html Dr. Paulo Freire  -  http://www.unomaha.edu/~pto/paulo.htm Paulo Freire Institute for Human Resource and Social Capital Development  -http://paulofreireinstitute.org/ Issues in Freirean Pedagogy http://nlu.nl.edu/ace/Resources/Documents/FreireIssues.html Teacher as Researcher  -  this is a page on a new web site (September 2003) called Discourse on Social Freedom.  This web site has many excellent resources.