Paulo Freire, born in 1921 in Recife, Brazil, grew up experiencing poverty and hunger during the Great Depression of 1929. As a child, he struggled in school and spent much of his time playing football with other children from lower-income families. These early experiences with hardship and social inequality shaped his deep concern for the poor and influenced his unique perspective on education.
Freire enrolled in Law School at the University of Recife in 1943, where he also studied philosophy and the psychology of language, with a focus on phenomenology. Though he completed his legal studies, Freire never practiced law, instead choosing to teach secondary school Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, who was also a teacher.
In 1946, Freire was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in Pernambuco, the state where Recife is located. There, he focused on working with the illiterate poor and began to adopt a non-traditional form of liberation theology. During this period, literacy became a requirement for voting in Brazil’s presidential elections, which further motivated Freire’s educational initiatives.
In 1961, Freire became director of the Department of Cultural Extension at Recife University. In 1962, he had the opportunity to apply his educational theories when he taught 300 sugarcane workers to read and write in just 45 days. This success led to the Brazilian government approving the creation of thousands of cultural circles across the country. However, in 1964, a military coup interrupted this progress, and Freire was imprisoned for 70 days on charges of being a traitor. After his release, he spent a brief time in Bolivia before moving to Chile, where he worked for five years with the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
In 1967, Freire published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom, followed by his most famous work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1968 in Portuguese. The book gained international acclaim and was later translated into Spanish and English in 1970, broadening its influence. However, due to political tensions between Freire and Brazil’s authoritarian military government, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was not published in Brazil until 1974.
In 1969, Freire was invited to be a visiting professor at Harvard University. He then moved to Switzerland, where he worked as a special education advisor to the World Council of Churches. During this period, Freire also served as an education advisor in former Portuguese colonies in Africa, notably Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique.
Returning to Brazil in 1980, Freire joined the Workers’ Party in São Paulo, where he supervised the Party’s adult literacy project until 1986. After the Workers’ Party’s victory in the 1988 municipal elections, Freire was appointed Secretary of Education for São Paulo. In 1986, Freire’s wife, Elza, passed away, and he later married Ana Maria Araújo Freire, who continues to contribute to the field of education.
Throughout his life, Paulo Freire remained a passionate advocate for education as a tool for liberation, equality, and social change. His revolutionary ideas about teaching and learning have had a profound and lasting impact on educational theory worldwide.