Educational philosophy of Paulo Freire

1. Educational Philosophy of Paulo Freire
1922-1977

2. Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator who has made a profound impact not
only in the of education but also in the overall struggle for national
development, in the third world countries. The methodology he developed
for the education was considered to be a threat for the established order for
quite sometimes and he was jailed for seventy days and later on forced to
leave Brazil for 20 years.
Born in 1922 in Recife, the centre of one of the most extreme situations of
poverty and under development in the third world, he experienced the
situation directly. The ‘Economic Depression of the 1930’s hit Freire’s
middle class family, and his studies got disturbed and he fell behind in
school. He was so disturbed about it, he vowed to himself at the age of
eleven that he would dedicate his life to the struggle against hunger so that
other children would not have to face agony he was then experiencing.

3. • He got his Ph.D in 1959 from the university of Recife
and later worked as professor of History and Philosophy
of Education in the same university. At the university he
conducted his experiments with the teaching of the
illiterates. This methodology became very popular and
began to use it widely.
•Freire spent five years working with UNESCO and the
Children Institute for Agrarian reform in the progrmmes
of adult education. He also worked at various other
institutions and received honorary degrees from 29
universities in Europe and North America.

4. Publications
•Freire wrote all together 20 books which were
translated in more than 18 languages, out of which
‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the most famous written
in 1970.

5. Education as an Instrument of Liberating the Oppressed
• Paulo Freire is considered as a representative of the response of
a creative mind and sensitive conscience to the enormous
misery and suffering of the oppressed. He argues that the
ignorance and lethargy of the poor are the direct result of the
entire situation created by the economic, social and political
domination of a few. By being kept in such a situation, the
disadvantaged are kept ‘submerged’.
• According to Freire, “A humanizing education is the path
through which men and women can become conscious about
their presence in the world”.

6. Goals of Education
• Power Awareness
• Critical Literacy
• Desocialization
• Self Education

7. Banking Concept of Education
•Freire has introduced the new terminology of ‘banking’
concept in education. In other words the teacher turns
the students into ‘containers’, into ‘receptacles’ to be
filled. Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in
which the students are the depositories and the teacher
is the depositor.

8. Characteristics of Banking Education
•The teacher teaches and the students are taught
•The teacher knows everything and the student know
nothing
•The teacher thinks and the students are thought about
•The teacher talks and the students listen
•The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined

9. • The teacher chooses and he enforces his choice, and the students
comply
• The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting
through the action of the teacher.
• The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own
professional authority which he sets in opposition to the freedom
of the students.
• The teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the pupils
are mere objects.
• The banking system reduces the creative power of the students.

10. Limitations of Freire’s Educational Ideas
•Frier’s ideas are of rebel and as such they are too
revolutionary to be translated into practice in a democratic
set up.
•Theoretically they appear to be quite sound but
functionally they are ‘Utopian’ in nature.
•He has not provided any frame work of a workable formal
system of education.

11. •His ideas do not take into account in to the finance and
the organisational aspects of the formal system of
education.
• The kind of education Freire tried to propagate was not
taken into account in financial and organisational
aspects of the formal system of education