The Paulo Freire Reader

by Paulo Freire, Ana Maria Araújo Freire, Donaldo P. Macedo (Editor)

With "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" Paulo Freire established his place in the universal history education. Freire's death in 1997 leaves his writings to carry on his revolutionary one of hope. This reader draws from his various works "Pedagogy of the Oppressed", "Pedagogy of the City", "Pedagogy of the Heart", "Learning to Question" and "Pedagogy in Progress", in addition to other works that appear for the first time.

Genres: Education, Philosophy

291 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire is among most the influential educational thinkers of the late 20th century. Born in Recife, Brazil, on September 19, 1921, Freire died of heart failure in Sao Paulo, Brazil on May 2, 1997. After a brief career as a lawyer, he taught Portuguese in secondary schools from 1941-1947. He subsequently became active in adult education and workers' training, and became the first Director of the Department of Cultural Extension of the University of Recife (1961-1964).

Freire quickly gained international recognition for his experiences in literacy training in Northeastern Brazil. Following the military coup d'etat of 1964, he was jailed by the new government and eventually forced into a political exile that lasted fifteen-years.

In 1969 he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University and then moved to Geneva, Switzerland where he assumed the role of special educational adviser to the World Congress of Churches. He returned to Brazil in 1979.

Freire's most well known work is Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Throughout this and subsequent books, he argues for system of education that emphasizes learning as an act of culture and freedom. He is most well known for concepts such as "Banking" Education, in which passive learners have pre-selected knowledge deposited in their minds; "Conscientization", a process by which the learner advances towards critical consciousness; the "Culture of Silence", in which dominated individuals lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture. Other important concepts developed by Freire include: "Dialectic", "Empowerment", "Generative Themes/Words", "Humanization", "Liberatory Education", "Mystification", "Praxis", " Problematization", and "Transformation of the World".

http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/con...

Reviews

[Drick · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a way to start my sabbatical, I decided to read this series of excerpts from the extensive writings of Paulo Freire, complied by his wife Nita, and good friend Donaldo Macedo. As an introduction, the book gives a good introduction to some of the key ideas in his writing. However, the selections also don't draw on his extensive works on pedagogy as much as personal reflections on his exile and its impact on him as a person. Any anthology is difficult to put together, and because I have read most of his works in English, I was baffled by the choices, especially the extended section from Learning to Question, and his discussion about exile. What would have been helpful is a brief overview of each book that was excerpted and where the selected section fit in the whole.

[Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

See my blog note on it:

http://gypsylibrarian.blogspot.com/20...

[Erika Barrington]

"currently-reading" = picking it up in the library when i need a distraction from work.