He grew up in the northeastern city of Recife, in the state of Pernambuco, which was Brazil’s poorest region. Paulo Freire, born in 1921, was the son of a police officer. On a visit to Greece, a street vendor once approached Freire holding a copy of the book, asking for his autograph, and telling Freire his work was “very important in my country.” Such scenes were repeated around the world in every country Freire visited. Pedagogy has achieved more global fame than any other book translated from Portuguese. More than a million copies have been sold worldwide since the 1970 English translation. For a book infused with Hegel from cover to cover, and peppered with footnotes invoking Frantz Fanon, Erich Fromm, Karl Marx, and Chairman Mao, it has been surprisingly popular and enduring.
The book that made these insights famous, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was published in Portuguese in 1968, and in English in 1970, fifty years ago. He had not understood that he and his students were co-creators of knowledge in dialogue, they would learn from one another. In that moment, Freire realized that although his intentions in giving his Piaget lecture had been progressive, his pedagogy was not: he had treated his students as empty vessels-or as he would later write, vaults in a bank-waiting to be filled, not as interlocutors or partners in the learning process.
As Raff Carmen, a scholar and practitioner of adult education, would write decades later in an obituary of Freire, the confrontation “stood out as the cathartic moment shaping Freire’s thinking about progressive education: even when one must speak to people, one must convert the ‘to’ into a ‘with’ the people.” The moment captured something vital about knowledge: it comes from lived experience -the teacher cannot just dictate from on high. The teacher was the Brazilian educator and thinker Paulo Freire.
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