Paulo Freire Research Paper

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Recife, Brazil’s prodigal pedagogue son, Paulo Freire was born into, lived and died during critical times not just in his native country but around the world where harsh economic times, political instability and globalization were, and still are, causing severe dehumanization, injustice and incessant marginalization of its inhabitants particularly minorities. Freire’s lifetime revered work, with his plethora of pedagogies, have transcended borders and changed, not just educational systems but triggered social change as well. His ethical philosophies range in colors but all forming part of the same spectrum of enlightenment for Brazilians and the world; being more.

Paulo Freire was one of the most admired Latin American educators, thinkers, philosophers, linguists of Portuguese and dreamers, as he would state, of the 20th century. Born September 19, 1921 in the Casa Amarela neighborhood of Recife, he says about his upbringing:
Joaquin Temistocles Freire, from Rio Grande of the North, officer of the military Police of Pernambuco, spiritualist, though not member of religious groups, good, intelligent, capable of loving: my father. Edeltruvis Neves Freire, from Pernambuco, Catholic, sweet, good, just: my mother…With them I learned that dialogue that I have procured to continue with the world, with men, with God, with my wife, with my kids. The respect of my father for my mother’s beliefs taught me, from infancy, to respect the opinions of others…The economic crisis of 1929 obligated my family to move to Jaboatao, where it seemed less difficult to live…In Jaboatao I lost my father. In Jaboatao I experienced what hunger is and understood what hunger for the rest is. In Jaboatao, still a child, I became a man thanks to pain and ...

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...is writings are imbued with the language of liberation that came from the waves of progressives of Catholicism, which emerge the theology of liberation. Its Christian engagement is explicit, combining them with a vision and Marxist comprehension of history.

In summary, Freire, like a man of his times, in contemplating and living the traumas and difficulties that cross the great majority of farmers of Brazil, -fruit of an alienating education that takes its people to live in conditions of misery and exploitation through passiveness and silence, where popular culture was unappreciated and should be substituted by the dominant class-, proposes that man should participate in the transformation of the world through a new education that will help him be more critical of his reality and take him to value his experience like something filled with real worth; being more.

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