Paulo Freire, the people’s educator and political education

By Lays Furtado and Solange Engelmann
From the MST website

The educator and intellectual Paulo Freire was born on 19 September 1921 in Recife, Pernambuco. He dedicated his life and work to the construction of a liberating education for oppressed peoples.

The Paulo Freire Centenary Day, which will be celebrated throughout the year 2021 by the MST, is an invitation to think about and influence an educational practice that considers the learner/educatee as a subject possessing knowledge about his or her reality and life context. And equipping this subject for reflection, understanding and action, that is, to be able to act and interfere in reality, in the search for better living conditions, changes and social transformations.

Thus, the popular educator and Patron of Brazilian Education, Paulo Freire, seeks to break with what he considered the logic of a “banking education”, in which the learner remains in a position of passive being, who only absorbs the content presented by the teacher/educator, without any stimulus to participate or become actively involved in the educational process.

Pronouncing the World and the “Paulo Freire Method

In the 1950s and 1960s, when he began his educational practice in the north-east of Brazil, the Pernambuco-born law graduate saw the need to create a popular literacy method that was close to the context of the learners’ lives and incorporated elements that were part of the experience of the learners themselves.

Thus, between 1961 and 1963 he conducted the first literacy experiments based on this method, teaching literacy to sugar cane cutters in Pernambuco. During this period, Freire was also involved in the founding of the Popular Culture Movement of Recife, became an advisor to the State Council of Pernambuco and was involved in the elaboration of a National Literacy Programme, which was later buried by the 1964-1985 civil-military coup in Brazil.

However, it was in this period, between the 1950s and 1960s, that, for Rubneuza Leandro de Souza, an educator with the MST Education Sector in Pernambuco, Paulo Freire revolutionised Brazilian educational thought by incorporating the political element into education, working with words that were part of the students’ daily life and sufferings.

“He argued that education in a country like ours could not only instrumentalise people in the code of reading and writing, but could be an instrument to be able to read our reality. To do this, it was necessary for the contents to emerge from reality to be problematised and for people to leave common sense for a philosophical conscience, that is, to understand that reality in its complexity, that poverty and misery were not a condition of the person, but the fruit of exploitation. And this was done by starting to generate words, which, by having this debate, became a meaningful word in the students’ vocabulary and were loaded with meaning, with history,” he explains.

In this educational method, which worked with the political element of reality in the literacy process, later called the “Paulo Freire Method”. Rubneuza points out that after listing the generative words, in a process together with the pupils and based on their realities, a process of reflection is made possible, and these words go through a process of decoding and appropriation of writing, which Paulo Freire called “pronouncing the world”. In other words, before reading the word, questions are posed for discussion, and only then do we work with the decomposition of the words.

For Paulo Freire, pronouncing the world brings together the world itself for each person who reads it. In his opinion, no two readings are the same and no one reads the same book in the same way, not even when reading it a second time. In this context, the “Paulo Freire Method” emerged in the 1960s in Freire’s work on the outskirts of Recife and its most significant experience was recorded in 1963, in the educator’s literacy programme in Angicos, Rio Grande do Norte, with about 300 adults, according to Carlos Brandão in the book “What is the Paulo Freire Method”.

An article on the website Reporter Brasil, published in 2019 on how Paulo Freire’s method revolutionised the sertão of Rio Grande do Norte explains that the educator’s literacy methodology, considered subversive by the military of the dictatorship, was developed from the identification of words that were part of the daily life of the learners: related to their life context and their work relationships.

And from the identification of the word, such as hoe for example, the educator would ask questions and enquire about the characteristics, use and context surrounding that object: what is the hoe for, who uses it, who manufactures it, who buys it, who benefits most from the use of the hoe and why?

In other words, a set of questions that led the students to reflect on their living conditions and to identify the oppression in which they found themselves, recalled former student Maria Eneide de Araújo Melo, now a retired teacher, in a report in Repórter Brasil: “the military called this educational method a kind of politicisation.

Due to fear of prison and rumours of repression after the military coup of 1964, many Angicos/RN students burned their memories of literacy classes, such as former student Maria Eneide, who, according to a report in the Folha de São Paulo of 2020, reproduced by the Blog Tribuna do Norte, hid her notebooks under her mattress and then burned them, for fear that her parents would be arrested.

Therefore, in addition to stimulating students in contact with and reflection on their social context, it can be seen that Paulo Freire sought, by means of a differentiated reading and reflection of the world, to promote students’ political awareness of the oppression experienced by them and the possibilities of liberation from this condition, through the actions of the subjects for social change.

Paulo Freire and Brasil’s Popular Organizations

Paulo Freire also left an important legacy in the organisation of the Brazilian working class, with the formation of popular social movements, trade unions and Brazilian political parties, in a context of civil-military dictatorship.

“Paulo Freire’s thought contributed in the late 1970s to the emergence of important organisations, as an instrument of the working class, such as the MST in the resumption of the struggle for land, but also the CUT [Central Única de Trabajadores], as combative trade unionism. And the PT [Workers’ Party], as a mass party, because until then we had a party of cadres, and the PT emerged as a mass party”, argues Rubneuza.

In this context, the MST, created by the country’s landless workers during the last years of the civil-military dictatorship in Brazil, was officially born in 1984. “At the beginning, this education was given in a non-formal way, in basic training, and later, in formal education. From the beginning, Paulo Freire has been present in the formation of the Movement, which takes Paulo Freire’s thought as the basis for the formation of its base. And the courses are aimed at this perspective of popular education,” he says.

Thus, faced with the need for education and political and technical training for landless workers, the MST adopted the “Paulo Freire Method” for the formal and political education of its social base. In this sense, it organised processes of struggle for the implementation and construction of public schools in the countryside, with a pedagogy centred on valuing the reality and culture of the rural workers.

It has created several training centres in the areas of Agrarian Reform throughout the country, based on the “Paulo Freire Method”, the pedagogy of alternation and the conscious discipline of students and educators. Among them, some MST training centres also bear the thinker’s name, in homage to his legacy, such as the Paulo Freire Training Centre, located in the Normandia settlement, in Caruaru, Pernambuco, which has been in operation since 1998.ary coup of 1964, many Angicos/RN students burned their memories of the literacy classes, like former student Maria Eneide, who, according to a report in Folha de São Paulo in 2020, reproduced by the Blog Tribuna do Norte, hid her notebooks under the mattress and then burned them, for fear that her parents would be arrested.

Therefore, in addition to stimulating students in contact with and reflection on their social context, it can be seen that Paulo Freire sought, by means of a differentiated reading and reflection of the world, to promote students’ political awareness of the oppression experienced by them and the possibilities of liberation from this condition, through the actions of the subjects for social change.

Referencias

BRANDÃO, Carlos Rodrigues. O que é Método Paulo Freire. 18ª ed. São Paulo, Brasiliense. 1981

*Editado por Fernanda Alcântara