Paulo Freire – Brief History and Selected Quotes.

Soon after the 2010 general election, the Office for Civil Society procured Locality as its national partner to further develop, implement and manage the community organiser programme.

The criteria included:

Developing an accredited core training framework and courses that target communities, especially in more disadvantaged areas, ensuring that the approaches are based on Alinsky and Freire.

Not many of us knew much about Alinsky and Freire at the time.

If Alinsky is the Che Guevara of community activism, then Paulo Freire is community activism’s Karl Marx - and where would Guevara have been without Marx?

Paulo Freire, one of history’s most noteworthy educators, dedicated himself to the study of education, oriented to the world’s oppressed classes. He was born in Brazil in 1921, experienced severe hardship resulting from the 1929 great depression and lost his father in 1933. He entered university in 1943 and became a Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the State of Pernambuco in 1946. He was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension of Recife University in 1961 and applied his theories by teaching 300 sugarcane workers to read and write in just 45 days. As a result, the Brazilian government approved the use of his methods across the country.

In 1964, a coup against President João Goulart (a moderate nationalist whose reforms were interpreted as socialist and against the interests of the military and right wing sectors of society) established a military dictatorship lasting until 1985. The coup is now widely understood as being a Cold War response to a perceived threat of communism. The consequences were catastrophic for most Brazilians.

Freire, a perceived socialist reformer, was arrested, imprisoned as a traitor and exiled from the country. Resistance to the Military Dictatorship was dangerous and nurtured via the Catholic Liberation Theology adherents and their Christian Base Communities.

‘The Brazilian military regime from 1964 to 1985 was responsible for systematic human rights violations, including extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, torture, arbitrary detention, and the curtailment of free expression. According to official estimates, around 50,000 persons were detained just in the first months of the dictatorship and roughly 10,000 went into exile at some point during that period. Brazil: Never Again (Brasil: Nunca Mais), an authoritative report secretly researched using the archives of Brazil's military justice system and released by the São Paulo Archdiocese in 1985, described 1,918 accounts of torture from 1964 to 1979 and noted that its source material excluded an "incalculable" number of other cases’ (Human Rights Watch 2009).

The 1979 Amnesty Law allowed Freire to return to Brazil in 1980 where he became a founding member of the Brazilian Workers Party (Partido Trabalhadores, PT), formed that year by former trade unionists, returning left wing intellectuals, artists and Catholics associated to Liberation Theology. It was recognised as a political party in 1982 and its first successes were at municipal level.

The dictatorship lost power in 1985 and was followed by the presidencies of José Sarney 1985 – 90), Fernando Collor de Mello (1990 – 92), Itamar Franco (1992 – 94) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995 – 2003).

The PT won the presidency in 2003 and retains the presidency as of this writing.

Freire’s thinking is the theoretical cultural underpinning of the PT’s commitment to participatory democracy.

‘When the PT first won elected office in municipal councils, it almost instinctively committed itself 'to share power with the movements from which it came,' in the words of one its first mayors, Celso Daniel. Since power lay with finance, the first participatory experiment began with the setting of the budget, specifically the allocation of new investment (participatory budgeting, PB).

Two features of the PT's origins shape or underpin PB. First, the PT was born out of the struggle against a dictatorship and as a result recognised the value of liberal democratic institutions. At the same time it had roots in popular mass movements of the factories, cities and countryside who had experienced the need for stronger more participatory forms of democracy. Second, it was strongly influenced by liberation theology and the educational theory and practice of Paulo Freire. This meant that fundamental to PT culture was a belief not simply in 'the masses' but in the capacities of each individual and the possibilities of people fulfilling that potential through collective social change’ (Hilary Wainwright 2005).

Participatory Budgeting is mentioned here to underline the influence of Paulo Freire. It is by no means his only influence.

The Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra - MST) is the largest and probably the most important social movement in South America, with over 1.5 million members in Brazil. It was formed in 1980 with support from the Catholic Church and Liberation Theology.

‘MST was further influenced to be a movement of anti-hierarchical stance through the teachings of Paulo Freire… After working with poor communities in the rural Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Freire observed that aspects of traditional classroom structures, such as teachers being more powerful than the students, were hindering the potential for success in adults participating in adult literacy programs. His teachings were used to encourage the activists to break passive dependence on oppressive social conditions and become engaged in active modes of behaviour and condition. In the mid-1980s the MST created a new infrastructure for the movement that was directly guided by liberation theology and Freirian pedagogy’ (Wikipedia).

Consider these words taken from the MST website (italics mine for emphasis).

The two week march was a massive school of learning, of sharing experiences, of debate and study, of building and deepening national and international solidarity, and a valorisation of Brazils’ rich and diverse cultures. The march was a demonstration of the organizational capacity of the MST. And, in taking their demands and proposals for change into the citadels of power, the 12 thousand women and men from all corners of rural Brazil demonstrated that they are not passive victims, but active shapers of their own history. They are making history in a world where some had already declared the end of history

The Sem Terra (Landless) march posed key questions to the Brazilian people: Why should government support an agricultural model that uses slave labour and violence and expels tens of thousands of families who will end up swelling already overcrowded urban slums? Why despite the massive increase in agro-exports are children still dying of malnutrition? Should Brazilians follow a neoliberal economic model that generates surpluses of billions of dollars just to service debt while there is a shortage of housing and underinvestment in public education and healthcare?

(Below words taken from an interview with Gilmar Mauro, a MST national coordinator – again italics mine for emphasis).

Adital: Doesn't this pressure that the MST has been exerting help to destabilize Lula's government?

Gilmar Mauro: No, no, I don't think so. We don't believe in change from the top down. Neither from Lula, nor from anyone in the MST who happens to be president on paper. That is not how to change the structures of this country, from above. It is a process that needs to be built.And how can it be built? By dialogue and the participation of the people. The struggle is for the people to be the historic actor in these changes and to put pressure, even in contraposition to the oligarchy of this country that is not dead and will come out with a counter reform of its own. Either we have the strength to push Lula's government to make the reforms, or the right will have the strength to impose a rhythm of continuism in Brazil (

The role that Brazil plays on the world stage nowadays isn’t to be taken lightly and neither is the part that Paulo Freire played in Brazil attaining that role, nor his influence on the lives of just about everyone who lives in that country – and beyond.

The quotes below are taken mostly from Freire’s ‘Pedagogy Of The Oppressed,’ and Pedagogy Of Freedom. They demonstrate that his educational method is aimed at getting people to become conscious of their reality so as to change that reality for the better, rather than having myths indispensible to the preservation of the status quo being ‘deposited,’ into them, by manipulation or in the guise of false generosity, by people with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. He contends that reality is a process undergoing constant transformation - those that deny people an opportunity to take part in that transformation are oppressors and those being denied are oppressed.

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It is not through resignation but rebellion in the face of injustice that we affirm ourselves as human beings.

I cannot avoid a permanently critical attitude to what I consider to be the scourge of neoliberalism, with its cynical fatalism and its inflexible negation of the right to dream differently, to dream of utopia. My abhorrence of neolibralism helps to explain my legitimate anger when I speak of the injustices to which the ragpickers among humanity are condemned.

What can be said of the teacher who, until recently, as a member of a leftist party, defended the necessity of education for the working classes and who now, resigned fatalistically to neoliberal pragmatism, is satisfied with the simple professional training of the unemployed, while considering that he is still ‘progressive’ pedagogically and politically?

There is no right thinking that can be separated from a kind of coherent, lived practice that is capable of reformulating contents and paradigms instead of simply negating what is no longer regarded as relevant. It is absurd for teachers to imagine that they are engaged in right thinking and at the same time relate to the students in a patronising way.

It is equally part of right thinking to reject decidedly any and every form of discrimination. Preconceptions of race, class, or sex offend the essence of human dignity and constitute a radical negation of democracy. How far from these values we are when we tolerate the impunity of those who kill a street chid; those who murder peasants who struggle for a minimum of justice; those who discriminate on the basis of colour, burning churches where blacks pray because prayer is only white; those who treat women as inferior beings; and so on. I feel more pity than rage at the absurd arrogance of this kind of white supremacy, passing itself off to the world as democracy. In fact, this from of thinking and doing is far removed from the humility demanded by ‘right’ thinking. Nor has it anything to do with the good sense that keeps our exaggerations in check and helps us avoid falling into the ridiculous and the senseless.

The socio-political solidarity that we need today to build a less ugly and less intolerant human community where we can be really what we are cannot neglect the importance of democratic practice.

I cannot, therefore, fold my arms fatalistically in the face of misery, thus evading my responsibility, hiding behind lukewarm, cynical shibboleths that justify my inaction because "there is nothing that can be done."

I can still see her blue eyes full of tears, tears of suffering and self-blame for having been a personal failure. People like her are part of a legion of wounded and marginalised who have not yet understood that the cause of their suffering is the perversity of the socio-political and economic system under which they live.

Mass hunger and unemployment, side by side with opulence, are not the result of destiny, as certain reactionary circles would have us believe, claiming that people suffer because they can do nothing about the situation. The question here is not ‘destiny.’ It is immorality. Here I want to repeat-forcefully-that nothing can justify the degradation of human beings. Nothing. The advance of science or technology cannot legitimise ‘class’ and call it ‘order’ so that a minority who holds power may use and squander the fruits of the earth while the vast majority are hard pressed even to survive and often justify their own misery as the will of God. I refuse to add my voice to the ‘peacemakers’ who call upon the wretched of the earth to be resigned to their fate. My voice is in tune with a different language, another kind of music. It speaks too, of the right to rebel against the ethical transgressions of which they are the long-suffering victims.

To the degree that the historical past is not ‘problematised’ so as to be critically understood, tomorrow becomes simply the perpetuation of today. Something that will always be because it will be, inevitably. To that degree, there is no room for choice. There is only room for well-behaved submission to fate. Today. Tomorrow. Always.

For example, globalisation is inevitable. Nothing can be done about it. It must happen because, mysteriously, that is how destiny has arranged things. So, we must accept what in essence only strengthens the control by powerful elites and fragments and pulverises the power of the marginalised, making them even more impotent. Prisoners of fate. There is nothing left to do except bow our heads humbly and thank God that we are still alive. Thank God. And perhaps globalisation too.

Globalisation theory, which speaks of ethics, hides the fact that its ethics are those of the marketplace and not the universal ethics of the human person. It is for these matters that we ought to struggle courageously if we have, in truth, made a choice for a humanised world. A world of real people. Globalisation theory cleverly hides, or seeks to cloud over, an intensified new edition of that fearful evil that is historical capitalism, even if the new edition is somewhat modified in relation to past versions. Its fundamental ideology seeks to mask that what is really up for discussion is the increasing wealth of the few and the rapid increase of poverty and misery for the vast majority of humanity.

I do not believe that the women and men of the world, independent of their political positions yet conscious of their dignity as men and women, will not want to reflect on the sense of foreboding that is now universal in this perverse era of neoliberal philosophy. A foreboding that will one day lead to a new rebellion where the critical word, the humanist philosophy, the commitment to solidarity, the prophetic denunciation of the negation of men and women, and the proclamation of a world worthy of human habitation will be the instruments of change and transformation.

Any attempt to ‘soften’ the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed will almost always manifest itself on the form of false generosity; indeed the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their ‘generosity’, the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well…that is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.

Who are better prepared than the oppressed to understand the terrible significance of an oppressed society? Who suffer the effects of oppression more than the oppressed? Who can better understand the necessity for liberation? They will not gain this liberation by chance but through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to fight for it.

Although the situation of oppression is dehumanised and dehumanising, totally affecting both the oppressors and those whom they oppress, it is the latter who must, from their stifled humanity, wage for both the struggle for a fuller humanity; the oppressor, who is himself dehumanised because he dehumanises others, is unable to lead this struggle.

To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.

Herein lies one of the reasons for the prohibitions and the difficulties designed to dissuade the people from critical intervention in reality. The oppressor knows full well that this intervention would not be to his interests. What is to his interests is for the people to continue in a state of submersion, impotent in the face of oppressive reality.

For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed (who they obviously never call ‘the oppressed’ but – depending on whether they are fellow countrymen or not – ‘those people’ or ‘the blind and envious masses’ or ‘savages’ or ‘natives’ or ‘subversives’) who are disaffected, who are ‘violent,’ ‘barbaric,’ ‘wicked,’ or ‘ferocious’ when they react to the violence of the oppressors.

Acts, which prevent the restoration of the repressive regime, cannot be compared to those that create and maintain it, cannot be compared to those by which a few men and woman deny the majority their right to be human.

For the oppressors ‘human beings’ refers only to themselves; other people are ‘things.’ For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over and against the right, not always even recognised, but simply conceded, of the oppressed to survival. And they make this concession only because the existence of the oppressed is necessary to their own existence.