Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator who developed theories of critical pedagogy and popular education. He criticized the "banking model" of education, where students are treated as empty vessels to be filled by the teacher. Instead, he advocated for dialogic education that stimulates creativity and critical thinking. Freire believed that education should promote liberation and empowerment, not domination. He saw literacy and learning as political acts and emphasized the importance of dialogue in the student-teacher relationship.

1. Introduction to Paulo Freire
Marco Meneses
Bachelor of Science in Nutrition and Dietetics
Master of Science in Public Health
Master of Science in Training and Development
Based on “Reading Paulo Freire”, by Moacir Gadotti, 1994
State University of New York Press, Albany
ISBN: 0-7914-1923-1
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2. The Popular Public School
• Paulo Freire developed an original approach to the notion of popular public school.
Has been called “militant educator, revolutionary, radical educator, liberator of the
oppressed”.
• Paulo Freire is more than “popular adult literacy”, he presents a much broader and
deeper view of education and cultural politics.
• Freire’s conceptual understanding of how the power of institutionalized schooling
finds its correlative in particular regimes of knowledge that stress technological
reasoning and an introduction to a model of citizenship based on an individualistic
and consumerist ethics.
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3. Always think about the practice
• Paulo Freire thought that many problems in the working families were
related about language, so he dedicated many years to the study the
difference between middle-class language and the popular language of the
workers.
• He understood that creativity in teaching is linked to creativity in politics.
• Authoritarian teaching, or an authoritarian political regimen, doesn’t allow
the freedom necessary for creativity. Creativity is necessary in order to learn.
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4. The act of studying, is the art of creating
• Paulo criticized “banking education”, because it failed to stimulate, killing
curiosity and creativity. Banking education asks to memorize, not to
understand.
• The student must have a “critical vision”, understand the deep meaning,
looking for the relationships between the content and other connected areas
of knowledge. Taking note of the “historic-sociological conditioning of
knowledge”.
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5. Schools as “shops for the sale of knowledge”
• Studying demands a critical position and vision, not to consume and
memorize the statements of the author, but to creating and recreating the
ideas.
• Study cannot be calculated from the number of pages read or by the quantity
of books read in the course of a semester.
• The capitalist ideology, easily converts the schools in shops for the sale of
knowledge, without any critical reflection, questioning or action.
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6. Technical assistance: Cultural invasion
• Cultural invasion, consists of the “penetration of the invaders in the cultural
contexts of individual beings, imposing on them the invaders’ vision of the
world and preventing the creativity of individual beings from finding an
outlet”.
• An economic strategy intended to modernize Latin America and make it
more appropriate for capitalist interests, is a more subtle, modern, scientific
and technological kind of domination.
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7. Pedagogy for Liberation
• Paulo Freire insists on the necessity of dialogue as a teaching strategy
• Dialogue is part of this dialogical and dialectic pedagogy
• The Transitive Critical Conscience, is the conscience articulated with the praxis.
• Education for liberation should result in a transformative praxis.
• To reach this conscience, , critical dialogue, talk and experience living together is
necessary.
• There is a dialectic way of thinking, by no separating practice and theory.
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8. Dialogic Pedagogy
• The first virtue of the dialogue consists in respect for those being educated, not
only as people, but also in the way they are considered examples of social practice.
• The differences between the educator and the pupil are found “in a relationship in
which the freedom of the pupil is allowed to be expressed”. This statement is more
political than pedagogical and makes the educator a politician and an artist and not
someone who is neutral.
• There is another virtue: that of tolerance, which is the “virtue of living with what is
different in order to be able to argue with what is antagonistic”.
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9. Banking Education
• When education becomes an act of depositing (as in banks). Depositing knowledge as a donation from those
who know to those who don’t know anything.
• The educator knows and the pupils who don’t
• The educator who thinks and the pupils who are “thought”
• The educator who speaks and the pupils who quietly listen
• The educator who makes and prescribes his choice and the pupils who follow his prescription
• The educator who chooses the content of the program; the pupils’ ideas on the program are never heard,
and they have to get used to it.
• The educator is the subject of the program, while the pupils are mere objects.
• Banking education has its aim in the maintenance of the division between those who know and those who
don’t know, between the oppressors and the oppressed.
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10. Dialogic theory
• The educator cannot put himself in the position of someone that intends to possess
all knowledge, but should put himself in the position of someone who knows that
he doesn’t know everything and recognize that the illiterate is not “lost”, out of
reality, but someone who has his own experience of life and who therefore has
knowledge.
• Dialogic theory is not just a method, but a strategy to respect the knowledge of the
pupil who arrives at school.
• Remember: you don’t study just at the school but in everyday life solving the
everyday problems.
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11. The directive role of the educator
to read and write is a political act, that must have political meaning
• Paulo Freire distinguishes the liberating directive educator from the domesticating directive educator
• A radically democratic position: the liberating educator, should not manipulate his pupils, but should also not
leave them to their own fate.
• The domesticating teacher dehumanizes rather than humanizes. Never asks the pupil to think and to make a
fresh reading of their reality.
• The domesticating teacher presents the reality as something already complete and finished: no
transformation is experienced.
• The liberating educator will invite the pupils to think.
• Just reading “Eva saw the grape” mechanically is not enough. It is also necessary to understand the position
that Eva occupies in her social context, who works to produce grapes and who makes the profit from his
work
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12. The role of the intellectual and the technician
• The intellectual and the technician must get to know the popular masses to
get to fulfill what is “historically viable”.
• An education that is opposed to taking advantage of the technical ability of
people is as inefficient as that which is reduced to technical competence with
no general humanistic education.
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13. Auto-conscience and the conscience of the
Other
• According to philosopher Eliseu Cintra in his thesis “The sense of the Other
in Paulo Freire”, the other can be seen in three ways:
• Through an ethical choice for the value of the Other as a person, in his individuality
• By considering the Other as someone who gives meaning to me myself, completing me
as a human being
• Through dialogue, in which I open myself to the Other, becoming receptive to him
(This concept of alternity comes from Christianity)
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14. Peace
King Balduim Prize for International Development, Belgium
UNESCO 1986 Prize for Education for Peace
“Peace is created and constituted by overcoming perverse social realities. Peace
is created and is constituted by the never ending construction of social justice.
Because of this, I do not believe in any education for a peace movement which,
instead of revealing the world of injustices, makes it opaque and blinds its
victims”’
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15. Pedagogy of conflict
Moacir gadotti and Sergio Guimaraes (1985)
Knowledge, Power and Education
• Pedagogy of dialogue does not exclude the notion of conflict
• The philosophy of dialogue values conflict and works to overcome it
• It considers conflict legitimate and relies on it as a means of fulkly realizing
authentic dialogue.
• Conflict is the engine of history. The nature of society and knowledge develops as a
result of the unity and opposition of opposing forces
• Dialogue, not consensus, is imperative in dealing with conflict
• Dialogue within conflict works toward overcoming and integrating without
eliminating opposition.
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16. Empowerment as a means of change
• Empowerment as the creative and dynamic possibilities of education as a
means of change
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17. Coherence and Practice
• Paulo Freire cannot accept the position of those who want to “ free others
while they are dominators”; in other words, the position of those who
themselves revolutionaries but continue to use the authoritarian methods of
the dominant class.
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18. Pedagogy of indignation and invasion
• When Paulo Freire returned from exile saw the spectacle of big business
connected with education, which had been the result of a policy of
privatization which had been encouraged by the dictatorship.
• The educator has the right to be indignant. The pedagogy of indignation is
necessary to the educator in this repressive society.
• He thus recommends that popular educators, when they occupy the space
that the apparatus of the school that the state provides for them, occupy it
not as faithful servants but as invaders of the bourgeois state.
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19. The three big contradictions
• The contradiction between theory and practice
• The contradiction between manual and intellectual work
• The dichotomy between previous and new knowledge (in other words, not
dichotomizing, for example, research and teaching).
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20. Carl Rogers and Student-Centered Learning
(1902-1987)
• For both Rogers and Freire, the responsibility for education is in the hands
of the pupil himself. It is the student that has the possibilities of growth and
self-evaluation. Education should be centered on him instead of being
centered in the teacher or in the teaching; the pupil must be the master of his
own learning.
The Rogerian approach, centered on the person, brings the relationship
between patient and therapist closer, instead of maintaining the distance
defended by traditional psychology.
• Carl Rogers: “On Becoming a Person”, “On Personal Power”.
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21. Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire
Illich
• Three main themes in Illich’s thinking:
• The church, which he belonged to as a priest. The
church continues to be inquisitorial.
• The school, the “sacred cow” with it dogmas and
myths. The majority of people acquire a great part of
their knowledge outside school. The school creates
artificial necessities in order for it to be able to attend
them and to continue existing.
• The industrial society, with its myths of unlimited
growth and progress. Industrial of contemporary man.
progress destroys the quality of life
Freire
• Inside the church there is a class struggle and
believes in the prophetic church of the oppressed.
Social revolution should take into account popular
religious feeling
• He is optimistic in relation to school, defending
the popular public school, an institution to which
everyone should have a right.
• He doesn’t reject economic development but does
reject the inequality of access to its benefits. Sees
the school as a social and historical institution
inside which class conflicts take place.
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22. John Dewey and Paulo Freire
Dewey
• Insists in the knowledge of the life of the
local community
• For Dewey, culture is simplified as it
doesn’t involve the social, racial, and ethnic
elements.
• The idea of learning by doing, cooperative
work, the relationship between theory and
practice, the method of beginning work by
talking (in the language) of the pupils.
Freire
• “What is called today surveying the local environment
should also be made by the pupils, with the help of the
teachers. I can’t see how mathematics can fail to be
taught by examining the environment. I can’t see how
biology and natural sciences can fail to be taught by
observing the environment”.
• For Freire, Culture has an anthropological connotation as
the educational action always takes place in the culture of
the pupil.
• For Freire, the goals of education are different: with his
liberating vision, education should be linked to a
structural change in the oppressive society.
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23. Vygotsky and Freire
“Language and Thought”
Vygotsky
• Focuses on the psychological
dynamic
Freire
• Concentrates on educational
strategies and the analysis of
language.
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24. The thinking of Paulo Freire
We have already seen that the thinking of Paulo Freire does not apply only to
the countries of the Third World, not it can be reduced just to a method of
alphabetization. Long before Marx, bourgeois economists like Adam Smith
recognized the existence of the class struggle. We cannot reduce education to
the transmission and assimilation of formal content.
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25. Conclusion
“I believe that Paulo Freire was able to, on the one hand, demystify the dreams
of pedagogism of the sixties, which pretended that the school, at least in Latin
America, could achieve everything, and, on other hand, was able to overcome
the pessimism of the seventies, when it was said that the school was merely an
ideological apparatus of the state, Overcoming ingenuous pedagogism and
negativist pessimism, Freire remained faithful to a utopia of dreaming possible
dreams.
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26. Who is Marco Meneses
Marco Meneses was born in Colombia and graduated at Universidad de Antioquia in Medellin,
1980. Marco worked as rural nutritionist with the Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar
(Colombian Institute of Family Welfare). Marco went to Honduras for 6 years as United Nations
Volunteer for the High Commissioner for Refugees, at the Salvadorean and Guatemalan refugee
camps. After that, Marco went to Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Egypt, Sudan and Somalia with
International Medical Corps, CARE and World Vision International. After suffering a terrorist
attack in Somalia in 1994, Marco returned to USA, where he has been working as community health
worker and educator. Marco specializes in nutrition, healthy living, healthy eating, healthy lifestyles,
and promotes minority health. Marco is an avid and omnivorous reader.
• You can contact marco at marcomeneses@msn.com
• Visit him at http://marcomeneses.com/
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