Paulo Freire

The organization with which I am working for my practice experience, School of Unity and Liberation, located in Oakland, aims to train community organizers, equip them with fundamental organizing skills, sharpen their political knowledge and systemic change analysis skills, and allow them to grow into strong facilitators and leaders of their respective movements.  When helping to organize training materials for my organization this week, I came across a poster and accompanying lesson plan that featured the ideas of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.  This caught my attention, as just last week in class, we discussed Freire’s ideas in relation to our discussion on the levels of participation in poverty action work.  No one in the class was familiar with his work, but as he has come up in both class and in my practice organization, I decided that he must be someone worth knowing.  I became intrigued by this figure and wanted to learn more about his ideas and how they relate to both my organization’s work and what we are learning in class. 

                After doing some research, I found that Freire is an incredibly accomplished intellectual with a fascinating life and many extremely relevant ideas to the issues that we have been discussing.  In class last week, we discussed his quotation from one of his most prominent works, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that goes, “No pedagogy that is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors.  The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.”  Another stirring and related quotation that I found from him reads that, when oppressors join in the struggle for liberation with the oppressed, they “they almost always bring with them the marks of their origin. . . which include a lack of confidence in the people's ability to think, to want, and to know…. They believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. They talk about the people, but they do not trust them. . . A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust." Freire also says that, "Revolutionary leaders cannot think about the people, or for the people, but only with the people."  These ideas make me not only consider our discussion of participation, but of the whole idea of poverty action in general.  Regarding the levels of participation, it seems that Freire would not condone a program with any level of participation that was less than a “self-mobilization/active participation” or perhaps a “partnership,” but even that may be a stretch.  It almost criticizes the whole idea of poverty action involving the “participation” of those it aims to help, making it seem as though the liberation of the oppressed and those in poverty is not something that should be formulated apart from them that they then “participate in,” but rather something that completely originates from them and functions within them.  As people who want to be involved in poverty action work, we discuss how we must always be critical of the work that we are involved in and the organizations that we are involved in.  I then think it is essential then that we consider ideas of those like Freire when examining the effectiveness and even the ethics of our work. 

After learning more about Freire’s ideas, it is clear to me why my organization teaches his ideas during their trainings.  On my first day at my organization, I was given a sheet that described the main beliefs of the organization, the first being that oppressed people must join together to fight for and demand their liberation.  My organization aims to empower the leaders of movements of oppressed people in order to not only to gain rights and solve injustices, but to completely change the whole system that continually recreates and reinforces oppression.  I will get to be involved in one of my organization’s training sessions later this fall, and I am excited to see their teaching in action and to see how they communicate these ideas, and hopefully also learn how the people who participate in their trainings will take these ideas and use them in building and strengthening their movements.

                Something else that I found when researching Freire was how his ideas are being applied to education reform efforts.  The Paulo Freire institute at UCLA aims to maintain and expand his teachings by implementing teacher training programs around the world that “augment the social justice themes,” “spreading the Freirian message” and through programs that encourage the next generation to “seriously consider the ramifications of standardized testing, standardized curricula, loss of teacher autonomy, and the corporate colonization of our classrooms.”  I interned at an organization that advocated for education reform last summer, and these were issues that were heavily discussed, and it was interesting to find their relation to this thinker that we are now learning about.  Anyone interested in education reform might be interested in reading more about this at http://www.paulofreireinstitute.org/.

I am glad that I have been exposed to Freire’s ideas, as I find them provoking and fascinating.  As students in this course and as people who are interested in this kind of work, I think it is necessary to explore the ideas of as many thinkers in this subject as possible to make sure that we are always learning as much as we can so that we can be as effective as we can.