Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Paulo Freire's Legacy

We have been too inconsiderate to not even mention in this blog to one of the of the most prominent figures in education, to those names that I can recite from memory and that we learned in our Philosophy of Education classes.

Photo by distant_camera

And who better than Henry Giroux to write about the Brazilian. A decade has passed since the death of Paulo Freire (May 2, 1997) and yet his ideology and principles are still alive. You just need to re-read his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Giroux is right when he writes: "Since the 1980s, there has been no intellectual on the North American educational scene who has matched either his theoretical rigor or his moral courage. Most schools and colleges of education are now dominated by conservative ideologies, hooked on methods, slavishly wedded to instrumentalized accountability measures and run by administrators who lack either a broader vision or critical understanding of education as a force for strengthening the imagination and expanding democratic public life."

The legacy of Paulo Freire's work and the Promise of a Critical Pedagogy is very well summarized in this paragraph as to why H. Giroux thinks Freire's ideology caught fire worldwide in education:

Unlike so many intellectuals I have met in academia, Paulo was always so generous, eager to publish the work of younger intellectuals, write letters of support and give as much as possible of himself in the service of others. The early eighties were exciting years in education in the US and Paulo was at the center of it. Together, we started a critical education and culture series at Bergin and Garvey and published over a hundred young authors, many of whom went on to have a significant influence in the university. Jim Bergin became Paulo's patron as his American publisher, Donaldo [Macedo] became his translator and a co-author and we all took our best shots in translating, publishing and distributing Paulo's work, always with the hope of inviting him back to the US so we could meet, talk, drink good wine and recharge the struggles that all marked us in different ways. Of course, it is difficult to write simply about Paulo as a person because who he was and how he entered one's space and the world could never be separated from his politics. Hence, I want to try to provide a broader context for my own understanding of him as well as those ideas that consistently shaped our relationship and his relationship with others.

Education is not neutral.

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