The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire is among most the influential educational thinkers of the late 20th century. … Freire quickly gained international recognition for his experiences in literacy training in Northeastern Brazil. …. 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”.

from

http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/contemporaryed/Paulo_Freire/paulo_ freire.html

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… the text below by Denis Collins, adapted from his book, Paulo Freire: His Life, Works and Thought.

Freire’s life and work as an educator is optimistic in spite of poverty, imprisonment, and exile. He is a world leader in the struggle for the liberation of the poorest of the poor: the marginalized classes who constitute the “cultures of silence” in many lands. On a planet where more than half the people go hungry every day because nations are incapable of feeding all their citizens, where we cannot yet agree that every human being has a right to eat and to be housed, Paulo Freire toils to help men and women overcome their sense of powerlessness to act in their own behalf.

… He has said of his parents that it was they who taught him at an early age to prize dialogue and to respect the choices of others-key elements in his understanding of adult education. … he was reading the works of Marx and also Catholic intellectuals-Maritain, Bernanos, and Mounier-all of whom strongly influenced his educational philosophy.

…. His experiences during those years of public service brought him into direct contact with the urban poor. The educational and organizational assignments he undertook there led him to begin to formulate a means of communicating with the dispossessed that would later develop into his dialogical method for adult education. ….

The secret of this success is found in the resistance of Freire and his co-workers to merely teaching the instrumental and decontextualized skills of reading and writing, but rather by presenting participation in the political process through knowledge of reading and writing as a desirable and attainable goal for all Brazilians. Freire won the attention of the poor and awakened their hope that they could start to have a say in the day-to-day decisions that affected their lives in the Brazilian countryside. Peasant passivity and fatalism waned as literacy became attainable and valued. Freire’s methods were incontestably politicizing and, in the eyes of the Brazilian military and land-owners anxious to stave off land reform, outrageously radical. …

Racial unrest had, since 1965, flared into violence on the streets of American cities. Minority spokespersons and war protesters were publishing and teaching, and they influenced Freire profoundly. His reading of the American scene was an awakening to him because he found that repression and exclusion of the powerless from economic and political life was not limited to third world countries and cultures of dependence. He extended his definition of the third world from a geographical concern to a political concept, and the theme of violence became a greater preoccupation in his writings from that time on.

It is during this period that Freire wrote his more famous work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Education is to be the path to permanent liberation and admits of two stages. The first stage is that by which people become aware (conscientized) of their oppression and through praxis transform that state. The second stage builds upon the first and is a permanent process of liberating cultural action. …

He leaves behind a legacy of commitment, love, and hope for oppressed peoples throughout the world.

from http://www3.nl.edu/academics/cas/ace/resources/paulofreire.cfm