Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire was an educator and theorist whose work is important to the field of education studies. Born in 1921, Freire grew up in the northeast of Brazil, where he often came in contact with the poverty that plagued Latin America during the Great Depression. After studying law, he began his career teaching Portuguese in secondary schools. In 1944 he married Elza Oliveira, a primary school teacher who encouraged him to develop his theories on education, and the two had five children together. Freire spent much of the 1950s and 60s implementing literacy programs for poor people in Brazil, often with the support of the Brazilian government, and this work directly informs Freire’s writings. These programs often experimented with their methods, and they saw success in raising Brazil’s literacy rates. In 1964, Brazil’s president was ousted in a coup d’état and replaced by a military government, which found Freire’s programs too subversive. Friere was imprisoned for more than two months as a traitor and exiled soon after. After a short stay in Bolivia, he worked in Chile for five years, where he published Education as the Practice of Freedom (1967) and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968). Both books were well received in the academic community, and Freire spent much of the late 1960s and 1970s as a Harvard lecturer and a consultant for the United Nations. After more than a decade in exile, Freire returned to Brazil in 1980 and joined the Worker’s Party. He continued his educational practice late in life, and was eventually appointed Secretary of Education in Sao Paolo. He died in 1997.