REFLECTIONS BASED ON THE THOUGHT OF PAULO FREIRE 100 YEARS AFTER HIS BIRTH AND ITS RELEVANCE

Problem-posing questions: 

– What contextual situations influenced Freire's thinking?

– What events in Paulo Freire's life influenced his thinking? 

– What does Freire tell us in the current context?

By Jairo Castillo Cortés

First-semester student of the Specialization in Community Education

University of Cauca

In light of the centenary of Paulo Freire's birth being commemorated this year (2021), and based on Carlos Rodrigues Brandao's book, "PAULO FREIRE, THE CHILD WHO READ THE WORLD" (2018), I would like to offer some reflections on three questions:

1. What contextual situations influenced Freire's thinking? 

In his childhood, Paulo Freire was a boy who had a lot of contact with nature; he lived in a large house surrounded by trees and animals. Reading Rodrigues Brandão's text almost evokes Rousseau's Emile, as it deals with education in direct and close contact with nature, learning through discovery, and meaningful learning insofar as it involves the senses, feelings, and emotions to learn by understanding all beings in nature.

The text allows us to see the importance of contact and meaningful learning as learning by contact: contact with objects, contact with nature, contact with people, contact with culture; surely from all these contacts Paulo Freire, years later, came to the conclusion of the importance of dialogue in education and developed a “dialogical” methodology, based on the fact that human beings like to learn and that we are always learning and therefore dialoguing.  

Through the life of Paulo Freire, we can recognize the experiences of each of us, for we all go through different moments or experience different situations throughout our lives: joys, sorrows, triumphs, failures, losses… all of which shape the person we are. Like any Latin American, Paulo Freire did not have it easy. As a child, he endured hunger during the Great Depression of 29, he started high school as an adult, and when he was only 10 years old, he had to suffer the loss of his father.

So, with Paulo Freire, we can see how context influences us; it undoubtedly leaves its mark, but it doesn't exactly determine the kind of person you will be or who you will become. Probably based on his own experience, Paulo Freire concluded that there are always opportunities to change or improve things, and that's why his proposal is a pedagogy of hope. 

This hope is also reflected in Paulo Freire's profound gratitude and recognition of the work of teachers. In this regard, he emphasizes how, despite difficult situations, children are always eager to learn from their teachers. In Paulo Freire, we recognize the teacher as a sower of hope, not only hope for the future but also hope for the present. Learning is joy, enjoyment, wonder, and also an awareness of difficulties and shortcomings, not to give up or succumb to fatalism or pessimism, but to seek to transform things, based on the premise that education transforms people, and in turn, people can transform the world. 

2. What events in Paulo Freire's life influenced his thinking? 

What is most striking about Paulo Freire's biography is what is now called "resilience," that is, the capacity to recover from problems and overcome crises. As mentioned in the book, Freire had all the necessary conditions to have failed in life: an orphan during a time of global crisis, an "over-age" student, exiled for being a revolutionary, misunderstood for his overly "alternative" or progressive thinking during times of dictatorships. But it is clear that there is no cultural or even familial determinism that prevents a man or woman with the necessary talents, great determination, and an awareness of their own condition from finding a way to redeem themselves. And in Freire, this redemption and emancipation from given conditions or the "status quo" is called POPULAR EDUCATION. That is to say, in the face of the conditions of exclusion or marginalization that he personally experienced, Freire counters, or rather, proposes a method, a path, an alternative solution. In this sense, Freire is not just a theorist; he created and implemented the Paulo Freire Method for learning to read and write. But he understood that transforming people requires helping them interpret the world differently, enabling them to see it with new eyes, with their own eyes, with a creative and proactive perspective on their own reality, so they can find their "unprecedented but viable path" or the path aligned with their own potential. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that people have access to education and recognize that there are better forms of education based on dialogue and understanding of others.

In this sense, what I find most striking about Freire is that the events of his life allowed him to understand the excluded, the marginalized, the poor, the humble, based on his own lived experience, and that he was able to conclude that things can be changed for the better. This is why praxis is fundamental—the correspondence between theory and practice, and how practice can lead to the grounding of a theory. It is also true that behind every practice there is a theory, even if it is not revealed or even consciously understood by those involved. Hence the importance of education as praxis, a practice grounded in theory and reflection, and at the same time, a reflection on one's own practices and on practices with others—in other words, a process of becoming aware.

3. What does Freire tell us in the current context?

Paulo Freire makes us realize that we read the world through the lens of our own culture; that is, culture is a way of reading or interpreting the world. From this perspective, we have come to understand that the so-called "conquerors" or invaders who arrived in the Americas more than 500 years ago were wrong, because cultures already existed here, and today we want to return to them to understand how we can have a better relationship with nature and even how we can improve relationships among human beings. 

So we don't just read books; we can also "read" a garden if we have knowledge about plants, or we can "read" the sun and the moon if we understand their phases and their effects on nature. This also implies that there are diverse and varied ways of reading the world, and that each person sees or reads based on their own knowledge. Learning a skill, acquiring new knowledge, or obtaining a professional degree is probably a way of learning to see and read the world in a particular way.

We can also learn to read emotions; there is a language of emotions, and from that language we can better understand our own way of being and that of others; which is fundamental in a derangedly violent, selfish world where we have been led to believe that our well-being is opposed to the well-being of others or that the unhappiness of others can be our happiness.

The text then shows the importance or centrality of reading in Paulo Freire's thought, but not simply reading as the act of reading books, but as something broader and deeper: reading as the act of interpreting the world and understanding the other in their different dimensions, roles, or states of mind; but fundamentally understanding them as another equal to me, as a fellow human being, or even understanding them in their differences, but with a fundamental essence as a human being, as a living being, or simply as a being that has as much right to exist as I do, which applies to animals and other beings of nature.

In Freire's philosophy, we find reading as an act of "perfectibility," that is, as a means to become better—a better citizen, a better professional, a better person. We also see reading as a process of personal change or transformation, as an act of awareness or consciousness, of who we are and what we can be and do. For in Freire's thinking, reflection and action are inseparable; knowledge cannot be understood without action, and vice versa. Therefore, we read to transform ourselves, and in transforming ourselves in some way or to some degree, we also transform our environment, our world.

That is why Freire speaks of the "world-word," the interpretation of the text based on its context, but also the word as reflection and interpretation, and the world as the stage or sphere for action. Therefore, reading Freire is a call to coherence, to the correspondence between our words and our actions. It is a call to self-reflection, a call to awareness, first and foremost personal awareness, to know if our words correspond to our actions. It is also a principle of responsibility or personal and professional ethics: before changing another person or influencing another, one must first demonstrate it through example, through actions, because our actions "speak," they communicate, they reveal who we are, what we think, and even what we feel. To return to the example of the conquerors or invaders, their actions demonstrated a profound ignorance and even contempt for the culture of the indigenous peoples of America; that is why they denied the aboriginal culture and imposed the laws, beliefs, and rituals of the "white man." They imposed a single “official” or “pure” language; by imposing these words, they almost extinguished the original cultures of America. By creating the so-called “new world,” they tried to end the ancient world of the indigenous Americans.

In Paulo Freire, we find a true "man of the world," a universal man, because of all the hardships he endured, from being exiled from his own country and from several others in Latin America and around the world. But fundamentally, it is his tolerant thinking and his advocacy for the rights of minorities, the excluded, and the marginalized that are so important. In a context like the present, where being a social leader is high-risk, but where we increasingly see belts of poverty, exclusion, racism of all kinds, general impoverishment of the population, humanitarian crises caused by migrants fleeing despair in their own countries, corruption at the highest levels, and a youth rising up in desperation and demanding immediate change, Paulo Freire's thinking is both hopeful and relevant. For Freire, all educational action is political insofar as it aligns itself either with change or with the status quo. Therefore, change is necessary, new directions must be taken, new proposals must be made, so that things do not remain the same. As Freire himself would say, we need more and better education to understand our world, to become aware of where we have arrived and why we have reached this point. But fundamentally, we need to become aware of who we are and what we can do to change ourselves and, in the process, also change the world.

REFERENCES

Rodrigues Brandao, C. (2018). Paulo Freire: The boy who read the world. A story of people, letters, and words. Bogotá DC: Editions from below.